If, like me, you start off watching Apple TV+’s latest release, The Gorge, without having any idea that Scott Derrickson directed it, you might initially mistake it for a psychological thriller/romance drama until the supernatural elements of the narrative start popping up, turning the movie into a generic survival thriller and somewhat hampering the overall experience. Don’t get me wrong, the prosthetic work, and the phantasmagoria of the set design was top-notch, as can be expected from a prolific horror director like Derrickson, and the overall camera work is lavish to say the least. But when it comes to the spooky bits, the narrative treatment is generic at best. For a character and romance-driven plotline, the dialogue is unironically cheesy and clunky, which I don’t really know if it was intentional or not. All in all, The Gorge had the chance to elevate itself out of the eponymous formation, but bogged down by questionable narrative choices, it fails to live up to its potential.
Spoilers Ahead
Twin Towers of The Gorge
The movie opens with Drasa, a Lithuanian-Russian elite sniper, who is seen spending her days in deep cover, waiting for her target. Upon the target’s arrival, Drasa eliminates him with extreme precision from several kilometers away. Judging from her expressions, Drasa doesn’t seem to like what she has to do for a living. She shares a strong bond with her ex-KGB father, Erikas, with whom she meets while paying her respects to her departed mother—and shares the woes that her job entails. An ailing Erikas is counting his final days and reveals his wish to end his suffering on the upcoming Valentine’s Day next year. Drasa is disheartened, but she is unable to convince her father to change his decision.
The narrative shifts its focus to Levi, a PTSD-afflicted ex-marine elite sniper with an impeccable track record—whose disillusionment and world-weary state is a byproduct of a lonesome life marred with violence and darkness. Levi is summoned by Bartholomew, a hotshot with a lot of pull in the administration (whose real identity remains initially unknown), who assigns him to a top-secret mission to an unknown part of the world—without informing him what the nature of said mission is to begin with. To maintain the secrecy around the mission, Levi is sedated and transported by air, has to skydive to reach the ground, and traverses a significant distance through the wilderness by following navigational directions to finally reach his destination—a deep Gorge with two watchtowers on either side. Levi meets Jasper Drake, a Royal Marine Commando who stood guard in the western watchtower of the Gorge for the last year, and Levi will replace him to spend the next year guarding the Gorge. The Gorge is heavily fortified with automatic weaponry, artillery, mines, and a separate armory—as if set up to keep something from escaping the misty depths of the valley below. The area is also concealed from satellite mapping with the help of an advanced Cloaker transmission system, and there is no possibility of communication with the outside world except for a radio check once every month. Contacting the eastern watchtower operative, who, just like Levi, will check the ammunition and artillery while guarding the other side of the Gorge, is forbidden. If the Cloakers get sabotaged, a certain Straydog protocol will be activated—and if that happens, JD advises Levi to escape as far away from the place as possible.
Given the hush-hush nature of the mission and the baffling job details, Levi is confused as to what to expect—and JD leaves him with the only intel that his predecessor had left him with about the place. The twin towers across the Gorge are from the Second World War era and were built by a coalition of Western and Eastern global superpowers – but their existence is off the record to such an extent that the heads of the global superpowers are unaware of them. Levi is surprised to learn his main objective from JD, which is to stop the inhuman monstrosities known as ‘Hollow Men’ from coming out of the Gorge. While JD knows nothing about their origin and modus operandi, he knows that, back in the 40s, three battalions consisting of more than two thousand soldiers were sent to clear out the Gorge, and none of them returned. Since then, containing whatever horrors are lurking inside the Gorge has been the main objective of the secretive coalition forces.
How Did Drasa and Levi End Up Inside the Gorge?
JD leaves after entrusting Levi with the duty of guarding the tower, but his freedom is short-lived as, while being airlifted, he is killed by the operatives who were sent for extraction—in order to maintain the clandestine nature of the entire ordeal. Drasa is revealed to be the operative posted in the eastern tower, and after spending a couple of months in the absolute monotony of their daily routine, she decides to communicate with her counterpart in the western tower—by writing messages. Levi is initially hesitant to disobey his directive, but eventually he decides to go with the flow, and the duo gradually decide to open up to each other. In such a godforsaken place, where they have to spend a year being cut off from the rest of the world—the chance of having a soul to share their burdens with is everything Levi and Drasa could have asked for. On one occasion, they come across the Hollow Men for the first time—whose hideous appearance as plant humanoid creatures, striking a visual match with the likes of the character Swamp Thing, is straight-up nightmare fuel. The creatures try to scale the Gorge barricades on either side, and both Levi and Drasa defend each other from the oncoming monstrosities. Without speaking a word to each other, the duo entrusts each other with their lives—which strengthens the bond between them over time. It should be mentioned that, on one occasion, Levi notices a high-tech drone leaving the Gorge.
Eventually, Levi grows feelings for Drasa, who appears to be at her lowest on one occasion following the death of her father (it’s Feb 14th already). Drasa wishes for Levi to be with her, and to fulfill her wish, Levi shows ingenuity by using a rocket launcher to launch a zipline across the Gorge and meets her. After sharing more about their personal lives, the duo spend a night together, and the next day Levi prepares to return to his tower. However, at this point the Hollow Men once again try to scale the wall on the western side, resulting in automatic miniguns opening fire at them, and the zipline snaps. Attached to the broken zipline, Levi falls into the Gorge; desperate to save him, Drasa follows suit and paraglides into the Gorge.
Drasa loses her auto ascender, which was the only feasible way to scale the tower wall, after falling into a river inside the Gorge. She reunites with Levi, and much to their horror and awe, they come across a surreal, nightmarish dark world inside the Gorge, which makes it seem JD was accurate in his assessment of calling the Gorge a doorway to hell. Deciding to follow the river to get out of the Gorge, Levi and Drasa face a number of unearthly creatures—ranging from Hollow Men on horseback to centipede monsters, skull-spider abominations, and whatnot. As the duo manages to kill a number of Hollow Men on horseback, they notice their attire resembles soldier uniforms from the Second World War era—recognizing them as the battalions from the 40s—and there is an entire dilapidated township inside the Gorge. A number of former residents of the township appear to have poisoned themselves with cyanide to evade a fate worse than death, prompting the duo to speculate on the nature of the mystery and evil surrounding the Gorge.
What Was The Truth Of The Gorge’s Nightmarish World?
Finally, the duo starts getting answers after stumbling across a lab, seemingly built in the 40s, where they manage to restore power by accessing a backup generator. Levi plays a projector reel found at the lab, which reveals that a coalition of countries from East and West had begun creating experimental biochemical weapons around the same time Oppenheimer and his comrades created the nuclear bomb in the Manhattan Project. However, in 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War, a terrible earthquake hit the area surrounding the Gorge, resulting in essentially a Chernobyl-like incident, but in this case not with radioactive compounds but with toxic biochemicals. The compounds changed the entire ecosystem of the Gorge, fused the DNA of humans present in the facility with existing flora and fauna—and as a result, nightmarish monstrosities of every kind were born. The Gorge is a hell alright, but in this case a man-made one, and the operatives are sent to keep the denizens of this hell from wreaking havoc in the outside world.
The obvious question that arises at this point is why the higher-ups didn’t just destroy the place by bombing it or something; after all, they don’t have any aversion to blowing up places filled with innocent civilians anyway. As Drasa and Levi reach another section of the lab, which appears to be from the late 2000s, they access a computer that reveals Darklake, a private militia company, had been extensively experimenting with the genetic samples retrieved from the monstrous creations of the Gorge. Darklake aims to use the genetic samples to create super soldiers, and they had been sending operatives to protect this secret of theirs from the rest of the world. It goes without saying that Bartholomew, the chief of Darklake, has a strong influence over the States government, and the same holds true for the other side; whoever from the Russian intelligence agency sent Drasa to guard the eastern tower. Ultimately, it boils down to corporate exploitation, which justifies creating monsters for profiteering selfish reasons.
Levi gets to know about the Straydog protocol, which is a self-destruction procedure to be implemented inside the Gorge using a nuke, which is kept in the abandoned township in case the Cloakers end up getting sabotaged and the world gets to know about the heinous machinations of Darklake. While drawing up a plan to escape the Gorge and return to the tower, he reveals his plan to Drasa to destroy the Gorge to stop the horrors once and for all. There is another issue regarding exposure to the Gorge’s toxic environment, which might or might not have infected them already. Although there is a lesser chance of that happening, as it was mentioned in the recorded video that prolonged exposure increases the risk, still Drasa and Levi promise to each other that they will end things if the infection gets to either party.
Did Drasa and Levi initiate the Straydog Protocol?
While escaping, Drasa gets captured by the mutated Bradford Shaw, the first soldier who was sent to the western tower back in the 40s, and Levi manages to save her life by putting him out of his miserable existence. The duo manages to return to the eastern tower by connecting a grappler with an old military jeep winch, and while scaling the wall, kills hordes of Hollow Men following them. Levi returns to his tower using a zipline to be there for the upcoming radio check so as not to raise unnecessary suspicion; fortunately, this time he safely reaches the other side. Drasa wanted to escape with Levi and start a life together in secret, going to a town in France where they would be able to maintain their cover—but Levi wanted to put an end to Darklake’s vile plans.
However, Bartholomew has already become aware of suspicious activities in the Gorge, as an alert signal was sent to her when Levi and Drasa accessed the computer in the lab. As she questions Levi about his possible involvement, Levi lies, and Bartholomew orders him to kill the eastern tower operative, stating she might have been the one to have entered the Gorge. In reality, she is aware that Drasa and Levi were both inside the Gorge, as the moment they accessed the computer, an attached webcam had recorded their actions.
The next day, Levi and Drasa set up mines across the Cloaker, and Bartholomew decides to apprehend the duo by bringing in a team of operatives. Levi and Drasa run through the wilderness on each side to clear the detonation radius as they plan to initiate the Straydog protocol and hang on for dear life while fleeing from the military drones of Darklake. Finally, getting almost four kilometers away from the Gorge, both the snipers hit their target Cloaker on each side of the Gorge, triggering a chain reaction that takes down all the Cloakers. As a result, the Straydog Protocol is initiated, and with the destruction of the nuke inside the Gorge, the entire place is annihilated. Levi is hit with the explosion blowback and falls into the river, while Drasa manages to reach a safe distance. After spending five days in quarantine, Drasa is revealed to not have been infected, and she visits the rendezvous location in France in hopes of meeting Levi—to no avail.
However, as the movie nears its end, Levi is revealed to have survived, and he manages to find his way to Drasa, who is now working as a waitress in a café in France. In the final moments of The Gorge, the lovers reunite, leaving their past lives behind; they will try to turn a new page together. However, some unresolved questions remain still, which the movie doesn’t address by the end. For example, what happened to the samples of genetic materials collected from the Gorge, which can result in an outbreak in the worst-case scenario? Also, some of the Hollow Men or similar creatures from the Gorge might have escaped during the time Drasa and Levi spent inside the Gorge, which could result in a global outbreak of the undead creatures as well.
