The Gorge is a wildly silly action-sci-fi-horror-romance, released on Apple TV+ on Valentine’s Day to alert you to the way it stresses the “unusual love story” angle. Maintaining a conventionally brooding atmosphere through gloomy CGI, The Gorge is about two top snipers stationed in towers on opposite sides of a sinister chasm in a remote forested location. Both are assigned to keep whatever’s in there from getting out.

Since one sniper is played by beautiful Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) and the other is played by handsome Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick, Whiplash), it’s obvious that somehow the gorge will have to be spanned so the two can get together. And whatever’s actually inside the gorge will have to be confronted.

On top of that, a tough and sinister “top spook” type (Sigourney Weaver) who gives the male sniper this strange assignment is half-obscured by a shadow during the entire scene. So that means there’s an evil and secretive plot run by the NSA or the CIA or some nasty global corporate entity that’s centered on the gorge, and that will have to be confronted too.

Okay then!

This cold war is ongoing as the ex-military sniper representing America, Levi (Teller), faces off opposite the covert op mercenary representing Russia, Drasa (Taylor-Joy). Actually, she’s Lithuanian, but her dying father was a KBG agent who taught her how to compartmentalize her dreadful acts because dwelling on them “makes the heart sad and the brain mad.”

In contemporary terms, it seems at first as if the film will probably be an allegory of the ever-growing impossibility of connecting with our fellow human beings, romantically or otherwise, in an increasingly dehumanized world. I mean, there they are eyeing each other through telescopic lenses at a considerable distance, armed to the teeth and separated by a literal abyss. And on top of all that, shadowy authorities have forbidden them to make contact with each other.

But the two snipers do make contact in highly personal ways so quickly you have no time to contemplate any such notions. Taylor-Joy’s Drasa is very fetching from the get-go, writing out flirtatious messages on a large white drawing pad. Soon the snipers are actively courting through rock songs played at top volume, with the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” an especially nice choice, plus showing off dance moves and drumming skills and drinking toasts to each other.

A lot of the tension of the first part of the film involves the way the two are so quickly infatuated and distracted, they seem to forget the threat of the monstrous so-called Hollow Men who periodically try to scale the walls of the gorge and have to be shot down. That name is derived from the famous 1925 T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men,” which ends with the endlessly quoted lines, “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

That’s all they know about the aggressive humanoid entities below. We learn that the name “Hollow Men” was given to the creatures by the very first soldier stationed in the tower right after World War II, information that’s part of Levi’s briefing by the British Royal Marine (Sope Dirisu), who hands off to him the responsibility of “guarding the gate of hell.” It seems that, from 1947 on, each person occupying the American tower also leaves a poetic or erudite quote of some kind written on the wall — besides T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cyril Connolly are other choices, and Levi himself contributes a little something from Buddha. It’s a cryptic and maddeningly unhelpful tradition.

But it speaks to Levi, who happens to be a poet himself. Yes, you read that right. He’s a sensitive military-trained assassin with PTSD who is also a poet. He tells Drasa he’s writing a poem for her called “She Collapsed the Night” that he won’t read to her yet, so you have that hanging over your head through the whole movie, knowing it’s going to be forced upon you at some lugubrious point. Factor that into your considerations about whether to watch this film, along with the surprising knowledge that The Gorge, written by Zach Dean (Deadfall, The Tomorrow War, Fast X), was a “Black List” script, meaning a script that makes an annual list of highly praised yet unproduced screenplays circulating through Hollywood.

Directed by Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), The Gorge does some mildly creative genre-mixing that at least makes for occasionally unexpected moments. The early, unlikely, and fairly amusing scenes of long-distance romance are probably the best, because the lead actors are winsome, with Taylor-Joy especially endearing as an oddly sweet-tempered killer of considerable punkish charm. But after a certain suspenseful though absurd point in the plot involving a zipline across the ravine so the two snipers can have their first date, with an obvious fall into the gorge to follow, it’s pretty much derivative action-oriented chase scenes all the way. The movie gets more rote as you start to recognize borrowings from other, much better films like Alien (1979), 28 Days Later (2002), and Annihilation (2018).

The visually flat, green-screened quality of the extensive sequences inside the gorge leech any remaining life out of the movie. It’s a shame that what’s in the ravine turns out to be an overly familiar bio-engineering-gone-wrong narrative dead end, represented in formulaic CGI. This was never going to be a film for the ages, obviously, but something weirder and pulpier might have kept the plot boiling along with a chance at some less innocuous conclusion.

However, this is the way The Gorge ends, not with a bang but a whimper.