Okay. Let’s talk about The Gorge. If you’ve not been hit by Apple TV’s marketing, I’ll give you a rundown. There’s a gorge somewhere that is absolutely pivotal and must be guarded at all times. This is such an important and secretive job, that “the west” has one person guarding it with some automated guns to help out and “the east”, mostly Russia, it seems, also sends one person to guard it. Makes you wonder, if it’s so important, shouldn’t there be more than one person to guard it? Now, I have never run a covert operation before, but I don’t think the best way to do something very important that requires 24/7 monitoring is to have one sad person in solitary confinement doing it. I would assign at least two people to it to each station, so one could monitor while the other sleeps and they can have their Morning Sam/Morning Ralph moments. And that seems like the bare minimum. And I also feel like the main criteria for doing the job shouldn’t be that they messed up their job in some way and won’t be missed by anyone if they die.

But that’s where we are in The Gorge, Apple TV’s original (using the term loosely) movie that released on Valentine’s Day this year, an action sci-fi rom-dramedy starring the awful Miles Teller (Whiplash, Divergent series) and the wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy (Queen’s Gambit, The Northman). I told you before that I really love small cast actor showcases, but that requires a couple of things that aren’t present in this movie. One, you need fantastic actors. Yes, it’s true that Anya Taylor-Joy is that—despite the fact I don’t always love her movies, her performances are always pretty much faultless, including the underrated Last Night in Soho. But Miles Teller, well, I know he was praised for Whiplash, but I don’t get it. To be fair, I have never seen Whiplash (though I have seen the Honest Trailer), because I don’t want to empathize with Miles Teller, not even for a fleeting moment of emotional weakness. I can’t tell you why, it’s just one of those things where someone rubs you the wrong way completely and their presence in something gives the film or show a steep uphill climb to get into your good graces. I used to be that way with Jason Segal, but Apple TV’s Shrinking won me over—however, The Gorge was far less successful.

Teller’s character, Levi, is a washed up sniper with an interest in poetry, PTSD, and massive sad boy energy and the movie is very preoccupied with convincing you that Levi’s ability to remember high school English and recognize T.S. Eliot references unprompted makes him unique that it doesn’t realize that if every soldier at the station leaves a quote on a wall from some poet or another, it makes Levi’s emo-poet-Chalamet-channeling character a lot less special, because he’s just like everybody else. However, that’s far from the biggest problem with Teller’s performance; when discovering the wall of quotes, he reads a few of them out loud. I’m not sure whether this was to done because his performance was so wooden that we wouldn’t believe that he was able to read and write or because they needed to cover the fact that this lips move when he reads. Now, again, I don’t know much about Miles Teller personally, so I may be unnecessarily harsh about him in a way I normally reserve for people who are truly despicable off-screen, but, like I said, the guy rubs me the wrong way. And now I’m getting ahead of myself.

After a short, quiet intro to Levi’s sad boy existence, we get to see Taylor-Joy’s character Drasa perform a long distance assassination and then go hang out with her dad in a cemetery. Cool. After 22 minutes of moping and exposition dumping, nothing in the movie has really happened. Sope Dirisu (Slow Horses) plays J.D., the outgoing wall-watcher who gives Levi a quick briefing as to what life there is like, mentions that there are creatures in the gorge that they call the Hollow Men and he doesn’t know why, which introduces us to Levi’s affinity for 11th grade English, because he immediately recognizes that it’s a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. Don’t get too attached to J.D., though, because as soon as his exfil team picks him up, they shoot him and drop his body from a helicopter. On top of this whole thing making no sense, that makes even less sense. I understand from a narrative standpoint, its function is to let you know that the covert group that hires people with no attachments to guard a gorge full of monsters are bad people (as if you hadn’t figured that out already), but it’s just such a cliche. At some point, you have to imagine that the pilot of the helicopter turns around and shoots that guy too, and then being a loose end himself, he crashes the helicopter to close the loop.

From there, we see Levi and Drasa both clock each other from a distance. Drasa finally makes contact, which Levi says they aren’t allowed to do—which begs the question why? The way the outposts are set up, the only way to defend your own station from a direct attack from below is for the other outpost to train its weapons on them. Why the automated sentry guns don’t work near the station, I don’t know, but the movie makes it seem like they’re just about wholly dependent on each other to defend each other’s stations, but they’re not allowed contact. Anyway, during this rom-com portion of the movie, Levi and Drasa continue to flirt via the cards from Love, Actually, blast music and dance while they watch each other through telescopes, including a full on rock and roll Christmas song (for goodness sake, it’s February, is there no relief from Christmas music? Is there no escape from this infernal genre? The Gorge has more Christmas music in it than 8-Bit Christmas) until one day Levi decides to zip line over there for a date. Of course, for a guy who has made the second longest sniper shot in recorded history (which again begs the question, who is recording the distances of top secret black ops sniper kills? Is there a rep from Guinness there when it happens, writing down the distance and then promising not to tell anyone? Does someone near the target yell “Oh no, he was killed from 2,837 meters away! I can tell, trust me!”?), he shows a shocking lack of knowledge of how gravity works, so he shoots his line straight across instead of at a downward angle and has to shimmy across the rope. Where did this guy train? He’s out here using Wile E. Coyote rules.

The two of them bond over their sniper kills—for a guy suffering from PTSD, he sure is happy to flirt using his confirmed kills—and then he drops his poetry interest on her. This whole courtship reads like a teenage fantasy. Sure, he’s a cold, hardened killer at work, but when he clocks out, he’s sensitive and sweet and loves poetry and puppies and kitty cats—he’s so dreamy. It’s the same in reverse for Drasa too; she’s a Lithuanian assassin working for Russia, but really she’s just a girly girl who loves to dance and have fun and she doesn’t even know how pretty she is! The maturity level of this movie makes Ace Ventura look sophisticated by comparison. Anyway, after a bone session, Levi does his rope crawl of shame, but it snaps midway and the action sci-fi portion of the movie begins as Drasa quickly gears up to jump into the gorge to save him. This happens about an hour into the film. An hour. We’re subjected to an hour of stilted, cringeworthy flirting before something actually happens. From there, it’s shooty shooty at some creatures that look like the White Walkers crossbred with Groot, cliched reveals and twists and turns and a conclusion to the action as boring and rote as the rest of it.

Rarely is a movie both this boring and simultaneously overstuffed. The back half of The Gorge is a whole movie stuffed into an hour, so despite the fact nothing happens in the first half, the rest of it has way too much going on and every conflict is resolved far too easily and nonsensically—at one point, one of our intrepid idiot lovers is taken prisoner by the monsters. Now, they don’t speak, they don’t have any need for information, so what exactly is the point of taking a prisoner and torturing them? It’s not like they’re going to learn anything from them. Much of this portion of the movie feels like video game missions, point to point with little thought between them and monster closets pumping out enemies until you reach a checkpoint. It reminded me of many games that were both more fun to play and had deeper, more interesting narratives than this, which is kind of a shame, because sometimes it’s nice to just watch something for two hours rather than engage yourself with a game for 20-60 hours to complete it. But not since Extraction 2 basically copied the entire train sequence from Uncharted 2 have I seen a movie that felt so much like a video game in a bad way.

There’s so much wrong with this movie, but even if you cleaned up the writing and cast Levi with an actor who can act (and doesn’t make me irrationally hate him, I fully admit bias here), you’d have major mechanical issues with the narrative structure. There are discrete sections of the film where it changes genres. I love when filmmakers play with genre expectations and intertwine multiple genres together, but this isn’t that. It’s not a creative marriage of science fiction and romance, it’s several separate movies smashed together with one set of characters. And on top of all that, it doesn’t respect your time at all, with a run time of over two hours, much of that is spent quietly doing nothing. And that’s not to say quiet films where not a lot happens waste your time, but there has to be a payoff. I remember watching The Power of the Dog and finding much of it very boring, until the third act payoff made it all worth it. The Gorge is not The Power of the Dog. It’s barely the power of a hamster.

Had The Gorge been a romantic comedy or a romantic dramedy, it could have been better. Had it been about a small team sent in to handle these monsters, it could have been better. But it decided it wanted to be both and more and ended up being far, far less than the sum of its parts or the movies and video games it drew its inspiration from. I don’t like to criticize something without offering alternatives, but because of the—let’s be nice and say—unique nature of this particular genre mashup, it’s hard to give you one movie to watch instead. If you want a supernatural military story, I would suggest Overlord, starring Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, and Mathilde Ollivier. It’s an excellent war/horror story set in WW2 about a squad of American soldiers sent behind enemy lines for a crucial mission on the eve of D-Day who encounter horrors they never expected. If you want more romance and a little less violence (but still some violence), check out Netflix’s original movie Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, a much more successful blending of genres, with a properly charismatic lead man (my fanboying over Glen Powell is well documented). Actually, just about any Glen Powell movie will fulfill that rom-com/rom-dramedy role better than this (check out Set it Up with him and Zoey Deutch if you haven’t already). If you want the romance and sci-fi action, Love and Monsters is a handily superior film and it stars the wonderful Jessica Henwick, along with Dylan O’Brien. If you want to experience the loneliness of wilderness monitoring where your only tenuous connection to life is a voice over a radio, I highly suggest the game Firewatch, which takes only about 4-5 hours to complete.

If the description of The Gorge appeals to you, trust me, you can find much better alternatives. I try not to be absolutist about criticism because at the end of the day, this is just my opinion. I’d rather say that something is not for me than say outright that it’s objectively bad, because maybe you’ll find something to enjoy here (and 65% of critics seemed to like it well enough, as well as 77% of the audience), but know that even if you watch The Gorge and enjoy it, you can still do a lot better.