I wrote recently about Captain America: Brave New World feeling like half a movie. Well, Apple’s latest streaming push, The Gorge, goes one better – it’s two halves of a movie. You might be thinking that mathematically all movies are made up of two halves, but The Gorge feels like two very separate movies – the first half of which is a pretty solid movie, and the second half of which would make a great video game.
This is not your classic ‘make X movie into a game’ pitch. I’ve written that before about several things, but I’m not actively imploring anyone to make a The Gorge game – it’s also extremely unlikely that a middling direct-to-streaming vehicle will get the franchise treatment (although Rebel Moon might have something to say…). What I’m saying here is that The Gorge already acts like a video game to the point where it’s tough not to imagine yourself pushing through its convoluted story and saying “yeah, but the gameplay is great and I love the actors”.
Spoilers follow for The Gorge
The Gorge Has A Strong Start It Can’t Sustain
The Gorge is a movie with a killer premise and the stars to back it up. There are two towers over a gorge, where a different person mans each tower every year and (unbeknownst to them) are killed on the flight home to keep it secret. The West tower is manned by British or American soldiers (in this case a Yank contractor played by Miles Teller), and the East tower by Eastern Bloc military. I say ‘manned’ but the East tower is actually womanned by a Lithuanian sniper played by Anya Taylor-Joy, which is where the problems start. Bloody women, eh?
Despite being banned from contacting each other, Taylor-Joy’s character initiates communication a few months in on her birthday. The pair get to know each other over the gorge by playing chess and banging drums together (which both actors asked to be cut from the script given the activities are tied to their best known roles), and eventually fall in love.
Throughout this time, strange creatures have attempted to climb out of the gorge, and the pair have killed them, as is their duty. Since shooting across is easier than shooting down, the West Tower spends most of its time protecting East Tower, and vice versa. This sets up the bizarre turn the second half takes, but in the short term, it strengthens their bond. Teller’s character, a traumatised poet, then takes the forbidden step. He asks his fellow sniper out on a ‘date’ and MacGuyver’s a zipline across the gorge, taking flowers with him.
The date goes well, they kiss, and in a thoroughly modern streaming project move, it then cuts to black. The next morning as he ziplines back across, the creatures emerge from the gorge at the most inopportune moment. Though they are stopped by landmines set up along the wall, these also blow up the zipline, sending him into the gorge. His lady love descends after him, but loses her equipment, and they are stuck in the gorge. To paraphrase Scream 5, welcome to act two, baby.
So Many Of The Gorge’s Moments Feel Made By Gamers, For Gamers
To continue paraphrasing: let me be clear. The Gorge’s second half is not good. The intrigue of the first half and the chemistry between the actors is enough to salvage it, but the film nosedives quickly as they descend into the gorge. It becomes sloppy, disjointed, and throws action scenes at you relentlessly with few stakes and no cohesiveness.
I don’t mean to denigrate video games when I say this decline in quality makes me think of them. But the set pieces feel like the sort of relentless action video games must provide because they exist to be played and not watched. Meanwhile, the reveal of what’s in the gorge is both convoluted and not that interesting, while also not standing up to much scrutiny. It reminded me of the plot developments in games like Stellar Blade, wherein the game about the rebuilding of humanity is led by two characters named Adam and Eve.
While some games tell moving, heartbreaking stories, a lot of the time we’ll forgive a weaker plot if everything else is there. The shallow plot of Stellar Blade was way down the list of things that held it back, on top of the full platforming, wonky pacing, over reliance on subpar gunplay, and flat characterisation of Eve herself. The Gorge may not work that effectively as a movie, but a game with machine guns, sniper rifles, throwing knives, and cutlasses and two characters worth caring about would be a GOTY contender.
And it’s not just that it would work as a game – several parts feel like they are a game. There’s an exploding barrels moment. They ride a jeep up a cliff while constantly shooting at attackers a la Uncharted. At one point, there’s a clear ‘you hold off the bad guys for a set amount of time while I do some unspecified mechanics work’ in a section I would fail at three times and then hate forever.
Some moments even feel directly from video games. Not only is there a noticeable (but not particularly narratively sensible) progression of enemy types, but there are clear biomes that might make up chapters, boss battles, and a lot of tropes. At one point they must walk across a bridge covered in mutated moss, and on the way back as they cut through it the tendrils begin to cling to them, while a horrific moss faced creature gives a to-camera jump scare in a scene I’m sure I already experienced in The Medium.
The Gorge is not a great movie. I’m still of a mind to recommend it, because a) it has Anya Taylor-Joy in it and b) I don’t have another reason. But it’s very fun to see a movie crib so obviously from video games when it’s usually the other way around. Somewhere, a developer might be sitting in an office trying to convince their team that this average streaming movie nobody will see should be the foundation of their next game. That developer may be sitting on a gold mine.
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