The Gorge (2025).

The first half of this will be my spoiler-free thoughts on The Gorge. The second half of this (which will be indicated) has many spoilers, as I’ll talk through what changed from the first draft of the script to what we saw on screen.

Engorged.

Levi lives a simple life - sure, as a world renowned sniper, he kills people for a living, but other than that it’s pretty simple. He’s got no attachments, no family, and his only interest seems to be writing mediocre poetry, all traits of someone perfect for an assignment on…the gorge.

See, The Gorge is a geographical oddity that has been hidden from civilization for decades thanks to the cooperation of both the West and the East. It’s a giant chasm with a self sustaining guard tower on each side. Each tower provides one person to guard the gorge for a year, and their instructions are simple - maintain the gorge defense systems. There are sensor-activated machine guns that need maintenance and ammo restocks. There are barbed wire spindles, bombs and mines that need to be replaced. There are cloaking radars to make sure the world doesn’t understand the gorge exists, possibly the most important part of the operation, because if the cloaking radars go down, it activates Stray Dog protocol, and while the operators don’t know exactly what that is, they know it’s bad. Human contact is prohibited - no phones, no internet and no communicating with the other side. Just Levi, his thoughts, and a pair of binoculars to keep an eye on the East side operator. It’s been like this for decades, dating back to the second World War.

Dragging or rushing? He’s definitely dragging this time around.

Almost immediately, Drasa, the operator of the East side tower, breaks the contact rule. The two communicate through messages written and displayed, replying after spying the words through their binoculars. While they’re not far apart in terms of physical distance as the crow flies, they are a gorge away, and start to build a long distance relationship. When they’re not flirting, they’re defending the gorge from what early operators referred to as “Hollow Men”, odd plant-like human hybrid creatures that look like more realistic, grotesque versions of Groot. Six months in and extra horny, Levi decides he can’t take it anymore. He rigs up a zip line with a rocket launcher and slides his way into her tower, a move that goes sideways in the worst ways possible.

They are Groot?

Home sweet home.

There’s a lot to like about The Gorge. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play the operators and they are great together on screen. I bought the relationship between them, as we see them flirt, put on faux concerts and play long distance chess. At some point it turns from a romantic two-hander into a sci-fi/actioner with some big ideas - ideas that were so big and cool, that I thought they may have been better served by a mini-series.

The gorge itself is filled with terrifically designed imagery - trees with skulls embedded, atmospheric color-filled fog, and late 40’s architecture, along with a variety of incredibly designed, extremely creepy creatures. Spiders with skulls for bodies certainly unlocked new nightmare fuel. The floor of the gorge really feels like a land where anything can happen and everything is trying to kill you. It felt like the best sci-fi survival horror video games, right down to a very exciting action set piece featuring a jeep and a winch that felt like it was snagged straight from an Uncharted game.

I went into The Gorge with no expectations and left pleasantly surprised. It has a lot of heart, some great action sequences, and while I wasn’t necessarily surprised by anything, it did hit its predictable beats in a satisfying way. I’d recommend it to people who like genre-heavy sci-fi and the lead actors.

Script to screen differences (SPOILERS AHEAD):

…and whoever.

Unlike many scripts I read, there are a TON of changes from the original script to what made it into the final film. Were they good changes? Or did the final film water down The Gorge?

On the page, Levi is shown performing the assassination in the opening scene. Afterward, we catch up with him at a San Diego junior college, struggling to recite his poem aloud during an introductory poetry class. His PTSD is not shown in opening scenes and his is never violently awoken by his dreams, as he is in the film. We are quickly introduced to Drasa, but not at a cemetary, and her father does not have cancer. He simply wishes her well when she says she’ll be gone a year. There’s a scene where Levi shows up to his ex's house. She’s got a newborn baby and a husband, and he’s clearly not on the best terms with her. He leaves her an envelope telling her that if he doesn’t come back, she’s his beneficiary. When he finally meets the mastermind of the mission (played by Sigourny Weaver in the film), it’s an old white man named Bartholomew.

Once at the gorge, the interaction with J.D. (the operator whose shift is now over) happens mostly the same way with a few major differences. First, the Stray Dog protocol is not mentioned. Second, he jokes that, “There’s a running theory that when our tours are done...they kill us.” and that he reckons he’s going to find out. We are never shown his extraction. He learns about the soldiers of the past through logs on the bookshelf, rather than simply quotes behind the bookshelf. Some of the passages are detailed and are described as being read by the writer as Levi reads them.

Once the hollowmen show up for the first time, they are simply described as “nightmarish creatures, resembling something that were once perhaps human, but no longer...RIB-THIN AND VEINED WITH GHOULISH DEAD GREY FLESH AND RABID, FRENETIC EYES AND BONE WHITE PUPILS.”

Stockton, California.

Everything up until Levi falls into the gorge is more or less the same. Once Levi falls into the gorge, when stuck in the tree, there is no centipede monster and there’s no sticky mouth creature on at the bottom of the tree. In the script, he cuts himself down but breaks his arm while falling, and then is immediately attacked by the five horseback hollowmen. He takes four of them down with his pistol and then is saved by Drasa after getting his arm bitten by the last one. This is where he learns that the hollowmen are old military soldiers, not in the last third like in the film. Unlike in the film, the horses are just regular horses, and after she reveals her two auto-ascenders (she did not lose them in the river), they jump on horses and ride through the gorge.

This is where things get real different. Instead of heading into the church and having a big battle against the skull spiders (which were awesome) and hollowmen, they enter an overgrown town hall. In the middle of the town hall is a cage, and J.D. is locked in it and looks like he’s aged by decades. He explains that, after he left Levi, he went toward his extraction point and was ambushed by three choppers who “gassed me, drugged me, and I woke up at the far south end of the gorge. With no way to get out. I was able to last a month, exploring mid-day, hiding at twilight. Eventually the Hollowmen found me. But they didn’t kill me. Instead, they put me in that fuckin’ cage...” He then leads them into the bunker once they set him free, although he does ask them not to trust him. There’s no plant life present. The pack being used as bait is the same, but the auto-ascenders are in it. In this version, three hollowmen start firing tommy guns at the protagonists before Drasa is snagged by the trap. Levi picks up the pack that was left behind before he and J.D. follow on horseback.

J.D. had a much meatier role in the script.

After an argument in which J.D. urges Levi to forget about her, they descend into the missile silo. They do not find a tape explaining experiments, but find a broken warhead missile that is leaking it’s payload. They deduce that water falling into the hole hits the payload and vaporizes, and that the longer you breathe it in, the worse you’re transformed (as J.D. has been breathing it for five weeks). When Drasa awakens, instead of a brutal fight between her and Groot, she bites his finger off and quickly slashes it’s throat. Instead of getting the cool catwalk scene in the film in which Levi and Drasa maneuver through a web of living goo and developing creatures, Drasa has to try to silently walk past hundreds of hollowmen sitting cross-legged in a meditative state. When one grabs her legs, she has to run up the missile silo stairs, getting help from Levi and J.D. with gunfire and, eventually, a grenade that collapses the ladder into the silo as the three escape on horseback with plenty of hollowmen in tow.

They get to the cable, but with three people and two auto-ascenders, they take weight tallies and J.D. goes up on his own. Then, Levi and Drasa go together. Due to the weight, it’s a slower ascent than J.D.’s, and this is where the cable scene happens. It’s just them frantically trying to fend off the pursuing white walkers with kicks and elbows. Levi gets his calf bitten and J.D. tries for a sniper rifle but his vision is too blurred, so he sends them down a cable cutter. Levi cuts the cable, sending the hollowmen back into the gorge.

Going up!

There’s a long scene of the three celebrating and drinking at the east tower, but in the morning, J.D. is standing over a sleeping bag with Levi and Drasa inside. He’s got an axe and his eyes are white. Instead of killing them, he leaves. When Levi and Drasa wake up, they see him very far away and know they need to kill him before he gets to the treeline or he would end up in civilization. With his broken arm, Levi and Drasa work together to fire the longest kill shot in history. They decide to destroy the cloakers and leave together.

The last shot is the program leader, Bartholomew, reading Levi’s journal. He tells a commando to activate all of the kill teams and to get Levi’s replacement enroute, and we cut to black.

Script or final film?

“I am Groot.”

Overall, I think the final film was better than the original script. The added plot point about plant and insect DNA merging with humans led to some very cool imagery and much better looking creatures, as in the script, the creatures feel like the little guys from I Am Legend (although I’d have loved to see them use some tommy guns). J.D. isn’t a very interesting character, so we didn’t need more of him. I think the Jeep winch scene was way more exciting than the slow ascender ride would have been. The original script also had no private military subplot and no comeuppance for the leader, which, while setting it up for a sequel, was far less exciting than the explosive ending of the film.