The trailer for The Gorge is a master piece. The movie is not.
December 15, 2024. Updated on February 15, 2025.
[Note: This was originally a commentary on the trailer for Apple TV's feature-length movie The Gorge. After watching the movie I added a review of the movie. The review does not answer all the questions raised in the trailer commentary because I'm not that kind of guy.]
The trailer for The Gorge is a master piece.
The trailer for the new Apple TV movie The Gorge is just about perfect. It sets the table for the plot seemingly without spoiling action scenes or revealing details that are best left to the plot to unveil. It raises interesting questions without inducing a lack of interest in what the answers might be, as too many trailers do.
Among the questions provoked by the trailer are:
- Where is the gorge (this doesn't really matter all that much, it's bit like asking which rouge country is the target of Top Gun: Maverick - ultimately, who cares?).
- The gorge is described as a door to hell. Literal hell, or a figurative hell?
- If it's literal hell, when and how was the door created? How was it guarded before the advent of heavy machine guns and other modern weapons?
- If it's a figurative hell, is it a man-made one caused by ABC weapons testing or accidents? Or was it somehow caused by drilling the world's deepest hole? Or was it created by a massive meteor strike? Or is it some climate-change induced nonsense?
- Why must not the tower guards communicate with each other?
- Are the guards some form of sacrifice to whatever is in the gorge?
- How are the tower guards selected? Are they always snipers, and if so why?
- Are the tower guards always replaced at roughly the same time or is it just coincidental that it happens this time, as implied by the trailer?
In addition to raising interesting questions with potentially intriguing answers the trailer spotlights the two stars of the movie: Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Teller is a favorite of this site for his work in movies like The Spectacular Now, Top Gun: Maverick, Whiplash, and Get A Job. He's sort of a younger version of JK Simmons. Absolutely solid.
The only work of Taylor-Joy I've seen is The Menu where she plays a crafty prostitute who's been unfairly lured into a death trap but figures a way out of it.
She is perhaps better known as the antagonist in the Netflix show The Queen's Gambit, in which she portrays a masterful female chess player back in the days.
In the trailer for The Gorge, Teller and Taylor-Joy are shown playing chess using large cards to communicate their moves. Commenters have understandably made the connection to The Queen's Gambit, but it reminded me of the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead, in which two of the characters while away time in a similar manner, separated not by a gorge but by a horde of zombies occupying a mall parking lot. [March 6, 2025 note: Ryan George made the same observation in his Pitch Meeting review of The Gorge. I'm basically professional grade movie observer. ]
It is a bit concerning that The Gorge is written by Zach Dean, the writer of Amazon movie The Tomorrow War. There's a risk that The Gorge will turn out to be a scaled-downed version of Kong: Skull Island. I am even less familiar with director Scott Derrickson's work. His background seems to be in horror movies so I suspect the movie will include an accelerating pace of jump scares and creepy sounds.
Be that as it may, the trailer hooked me, I'm looking forward to the watching the movie on February 14.
The recently released trailer for 28 Years Later, while by no means bad, is a bit of a hodgepodge of cuts from more or less random parts of the movie and do not present a storyline or firmly establish a situation that must be dealt with by the protagonists, whoever they are.
(I'm still planning on watching 28 because I really liked 28 Days Later)
The Movie The Gorge is a Hodgepodge Bioshock Action Horror Romance Mashup
The movie is inferior to the trailer. It fell prey to the risk I outlined above that it would turn into a spectacle of weird monsters the protagonists have to battle their way past.
And as I also speculated in my reaction to the trailer, it turns out that the horrors in the gorge are in fact the creation of an ABC weapons mishap. Specifically bio-chemistry experimentation gone wrong because of an earthquake, an accident that can be undone only through the deployment of an atomic bomb (so, yes, the whole ABC is in play) that has been set up for the purpose.
The movie is unfortunately light on peeling the onion of the mystery of the gorge in the scenes outside of the gorge. Instead we get a heavy dose of exposition once in the gorge, but by that time the origin story has largely been uncovered anyway, so it just feels gratuitously heavy handed.
Throughout the movie the viewer is likely to recall other movies, for example The Thing, Mission Impossible, Aliens, Sleepy Hollow, Stephen King's The Mist, a bit of John Wick, along with a handful of low-budget horror movies I don't remember the name of. A time-is-passing-montage includes a nod to Teller's breakout performance in Whiplash and of course there's the chess scene shown in the trailer.
I have many other complaints but let's focus on the positive instead: Taylor-Joy is splendid and makes the scenes with her and Teller come alive. Teller is good but he perhaps leans a little too hard into the brooding-sniper role. On the other hand, that does let Taylor-Joy shine, which is good.
It is completely unsurprising that Teller and Taylor-Joy are the movie's bright spots and make it at all worth watching.
Sigourney Weaver (speaking of Aliens!) sleepwalks her role as the movie's villain, but her sleepwalking is perfectly adequate. She's just that good, which is more than I can say for the movie The Gorge.