Director: Scott Derrickson
Cast: Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver
Plot: An incredibly gifted sniper with no ties to the world is tasked with spending a year manning a watch-tower above a gorge, which he has been told is full of dangerous creatures. Although he’s not permitted to communicate with the sniper in the opposite tower, they not only make contact but form a romantic bond.
Review: There’s a small number of modern directors whose work we always look forward to. Scott Derrickson is one of those creatives. After Sinister and The Black Phone, plus the stand-out MCU film Doctor Strange, we’ve been keen to see what he’s got cooking. Initial looks at The Gorge more than piqued our interest with a high concept set-up with the potential to have something real interesting under the surface. We wanted to see what was in the gorge. And we love that cast. Always here for a Sigourney Weaver exposition scene.
So here’s the crazy set up. Levi Kane (Teller) and Drasa (Taylor-Joy) are among the worlds deadliest snipers, both having racked up a scarily high number of important kills, working for the US and Russia respectively. Due to his record and his lack of personal connections, Kane is considered perfect for one of the most secret placements in the military world – guarding the gorge. A sniper tower on either side, the solitary soldier in each being responsible for maintaining the sentry guns, mines and barricades and ensuring that nothing gets out. No contact with the outside world and no contact with the other tower – it’s a completely solitary year long post.
It’s not long before Kane and Drasa go against orders and make contact with each other by holding up signs and using their high powered sniper scopes to read them. They form a quick connection, showing off their sniper skills, sharing hobbies and becoming each other’s worlds. The gorge’s mysterious inhabitants also shows themselves, appearing mostly humanoid but partly made up of plants and insects and whatnot. In spite the occasional firefight to keep the ‘hollow men’ at bay, romance blooms between the snipers and Kane rigs up a zipline so they can meet in person. This is what leads to disaster, when a mishap sends Kane plummeting into the gorge with Drasa leaping after him. In the bottom of the pit they discover the true nature and the origins of the creatures.
That, however, is where the movie started to lose our interest. While the early parts of the film presented some potential scenarios, such as a gateway to hell, the truth wasn’t as interesting of the possible outcomes. The Hollow Men are the product of a military experiment that merged the DNA of people with plants, animals and insects before the facility was swallowed by an earthquake, trapping the resulting mutants in the gorge. Now our intrepid heroes have to survive long enough to escape back to the surface and escape their handlers who will want to keep things quiet. What we find down the pit is, in essence, what we saw in the movie Annihilation without the depth of exploration the concept got there.
Not that it wasn’t all interesting. The initial set-up and the skull-spiders (skullders?) were highlights, but the gun-ho run-about shooting at Jungle Cruise villains wasn’t enough to hold our interest once the mystery had been revealed. It never even felt as though their particular skills were put to use, as it was just blasting guns at anything that moved. Once they managed to rig up a jeep to get winched out of the chasm, we expected things to wrap up pretty quickly, but it continued with an action sequence against military types for much longer than necessary while our attention really started to drift. Even the epilogue that reveals who has survived and if they can escape together felt much more drawn out than it should have been.
There is fun to be had here. The leads are both great actors and gel well, and we got a chuckle from the nods to their best known roles during the ‘getting to know you’ montage. From the premise, however, we were hoping for more and it simply didn’t deliver. Maybe next time.
Rating: FOUR out of TEN