The Gorge (Apple, 2025)

[shevek]

Took me a while to find it on the waves, but patience pays off.

As most people have probably already heard, this is a movie about two sexy ex-army super-sniper guarding what looks like the gates of hell
but is actually a 1950s atomic age bio-experiment gone horribly wrong.

Don't be fooled by "Sigourney Weaver" being in this, she's more of a controlling background character, and she looks to be about 80.
The attraction for some people will be Anya Taylor-Joy, who is a great actress and has the capacity to be quite sexy.
Especially considering that she's not really super-beautiful (her face looks so weird) and her body is the opposite of voluptuous (she's skinny as a rail and barely even has an ass) she pulls off the romantic lead quite well, although I would severely doubt her ability to fight off a whole horde of monsters. I wouldn't recommend her as an action movie star in general - she's too small and scrawny. But for most of the film, she does wear a nice tight outfit, which is nice, although it's no Black Widow.

Anya (as the Lithuanian sniper Drasa) does get into some nice peril. She's attacked by the scary monster-mutants. One of them drags her by a rope from behind his horse (I think the Mongols had a specific term for that but I forget what it is). Another monster hangs her upside down and tied-up by her feet from his industrial warehouse lair.

It kind of disappoints me sometimes how much modern warfare/action movies are about fighting either robotic drones or CGI monsters rather than real hand-to-hand action combat like in the 80s or the Kung Fu days, but that's the world we live in. Nonetheless, I thought it was a decent enough time, and maybe even deserves a sequel if Drasa and her new beau (played by Miles Teller) get called back into action.

The one thing that did seem hard to believe was that the entire hellmouth situation was guarded by only TWO soldiers. But since it was an operation by the private corporation Darklake (obviously a take on 'Blackwater') maybe it was just a matter of corporate cheapness.

Anyone else check this out yet?

The_Gorge_(film)_poster.jpg (24.32 KiB) Viewed 8634 times

[personnal]

I liked !

[Malice]

Took me a while to find it on the waves, but patience pays off.

As most people have probably already heard, this is a movie about two sexy ex-army super-sniper guarding what looks like the gates of hell
but is actually a 1950s atomic age bio-experiment gone horribly wrong.

Don't be fooled by "Sigourney Weaver" being in this, she's more of a controlling background character, and she looks to be about 80.
The attraction for some people will be Anya Taylor-Joy, who is a great actress and has the capacity to be quite sexy.
Especially considering that she's not really super-beautiful (her face looks so weird) and her body is the opposite of voluptuous (she's skinny as a rail and barely even has an ass) she pulls off the romantic lead quite well, although I would severely doubt her ability to fight off a whole horde of monsters. I wouldn't recommend her as an action movie star in general - she's too small and scrawny. But for most of the film, she does wear a nice tight outfit, which is nice, although it's no Black Widow.

Anya (as the Lithuanian sniper Drasa) does get into some nice peril. She's attacked by the scary monster-mutants. One of them drags her by a rope from behind his horse (I think the Mongols had a specific term for that but I forget what it is). Another monster hangs her upside down and tied-up by her feet from his industrial warehouse lair.

It kind of disappoints me sometimes how much modern warfare/action movies are about fighting either robotic drones or CGI monsters rather than real hand-to-hand action combat like in the 80s or the Kung Fu days, but that's the world we live in. Nonetheless, I thought it was a decent enough time, and maybe even deserves a sequel if Drasa and her new beau (played by Miles Teller) get called back into action.

The one thing that did seem hard to believe was that the entire hellmouth situation was guarded by only TWO soldiers. But since it was an operation by the private corporation Darklake (obviously a take on 'Blackwater') maybe it was just a matter of corporate cheapness.

Anyone else check this out yet?

The_Gorge_(film)_poster.jpg

I’ll proudly stand with those who think Anya Taylor-Joy is genuinely stunning.

My main issue with this film isn’t the cast. I actually admire every actor involved. That’s what makes it so baffling. I can’t quite grasp how any of them signed onto a project like this. Maybe the director had personal connections or was a family friend.

Honestly, these actors deserve far better material than what they were given here.

The film’s not terrible, but for this level of talent, it feels like a waste of potential.

[Femina]

I watched "Elevation" with my family the day after watching 'The Gorge' and it made me realize that the Gorge..... is GREAT.

Spoiler

It gives us two characters, and spends the time it needs to get us to like them and root for them before throwing them into the campy phuphaw... I hazard to say, if the explanation for the horror hadn't been so stupidly lame, and had been something more high fantastically crazy like... idk... the Nazi's opening a portal to another universe because 'occult' than even the horror elements would have been a lot more satisfying.

There's that scene with the skull spiders and for a brief moment I was like 'this is like what must have been happening in the Warhammer 40K universe before people rightly understood anything about 'the warp'....... but nah... it's a biological contamination that somehow affects EVERYTHING... boooooo!

Nevertheless, the two leads were always fun to watch together and I never really stopped rooting for them... despite us ruthlessly making fun of every oddity the film was making at the time...

... And then we watched 'Elevation' a film so soulless and pointless, with characters they make no attempt at all to get you rooting for, that we retroactively realized that as Action Horror films go... the Gorge is actually pretty high effort shit.

[shevek]

I watched "Elevation" with my family the day after watching 'The Gorge' and it made me realize that the Gorge..... is GREAT.

... And then we watched 'Elevation' a film so soulless and pointless, with characters they make no attempt at all to get you rooting for, that we retroactively realized that as Action Horror films go... the Gorge is actually pretty high effort shit.

Agreed. Though the two films have somewhat of a similar premise (male/female tough team vs alien horror whatchamacallits), I think in the earlier Elevation thread we already determined that it was quite bleh. Elevation's acting was stale, the casting and presentation was woke, and the premise (the whole 8000 feet thing + the magnesium bullets) was shot full of scientific holes.

With The Gorge, however, nothing about the horrible trans-mutations doesn't really make sense - 'it is what it is' on its own explanatory level: crazy chemicals create crazy creatures (Toxic Avenger, Cybersix, etc.) and that's it. The part that doesn't make sense is stationing only TWO people in those towers when actually what was needed was a crack elite team (like an Expendables type of lineup).

The romance is fine, but I don't even think it's necessary as a focus. There could have been an entire team where Miles and Anya were just two of the members (like in The Thing or Superdeep) but maybe by the end of the movie all the other members get killed off and only the couple survives to consummate their relationship. Rather than having sex *before* they get into peril, maybe the sex should have been the reward for them living through the peril instead.

But that's just my take. Obviously this movie was popular online and people loved it.

[Dogfish]

I always feel like with a film like The Gorge that if special effects weren't as powerful as they are now you'd have a much better film.

Because the thing now is that if you want special effects shots that simply would not have been possible fifteen years ago, you can just have them, get the computers out, boom it's all there. And as a result you can really get to see the director's vision. And a lot of the time that vision is basically like a refried videogame cutscene, and there's no mystique to it, there's no space for imagination to fill in the gaps where the director has had to work around the limitations of the technology. Just a bunch of indistinct stuff happening and it's entirely missable.

Doesn't help that the plot is nonsense. Why even have soldiers? Have engineers and a few more turrets (because obviously life is Team Fortress).

Such a waste of the cast. Sigourney Weaver deserves better than to be trotted out for this kind of garbage too. The movies she's made, goddamn, don't be asking her to put in work unless it is meaningful.

[sneakly]

I personally think Anya Taylor-Joy is gorgeous. she has an unusual beauty that is sexy as hell. I am looking forward to getting around to this movie pretty much to just see her in it. I do not have a need to see heroines that look believably buffed up to enjoy their performance. I would love to see her her in more action films, she is a solid actor and when she turns it on, sexy as hell. With those big beautiful eyes, she would make an epic Batgirl or Penelope Pitstop (her turn in Furiosa was basically a diesel-punk Penelope Pitstop). A big ass over the mouth gag would look amazing on her.

[Dogfish]

I personally think Anya Taylor-Joy is gorgeous. she has an unusual beauty that is sexy as hell. I am looking forward to getting around to this movie pretty much to just see her in it. I do not have a need to see heroines that look believably buffed up to enjoy their performance. I would love to see her her in more action films, she is a solid actor and when she turns it on, sexy as hell. With those big beautiful eyes, she would make an epic Batgirl or Penelope Pitstop (her turn in Furiosa was basically a diesel-punk Penelope Pitstop). A big ass over the mouth gag would look amazing on her.

I agree with this. Some of the most beautiful people look unusual. A person can be a 10/10 smokeshow by all conventional measures, and that's great and all, but there will always be some people out there (and it goes for men too) who own unconventional looks in such a way that they redefine beauty. Angelina Jolie did it as well for example.