- Directed by Scott Derrickson
- Written by Zach Dean
- Stars Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 7 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUSdnuOLebE
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was better than we expected and more than we expected. The preview was done right, giving just a little taste of the movie, and it was good going into it blind. It wasn’t a perfect film, but we both enjoyed it.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on Drasa, sleeping in a cave. She marks another day off her calendar as she points her sniper rifle out toward a far distant airport. One shot, and her victim falls down dead. Credits roll.
We cut to Levi, getting up and driving to the beach as the sun rises. He’s told to report to the military base, where he meets Bartholemew, who’s a high-up spy. She talks about his history as a Marine Corps sniper. He’s got quite a list of kills. She’s got a job for him.
Meanwhile, in Lithuania, Drasa and her father visit a graveyard. They talk about her latest kill, an arms dealer, who totally had it coming. The old man is dying, and she’s going away for at least a year, so they say their goodbyes.
Levi parachutes down over the no-fly zone and has to walk miles to his very isolated destination, an extremely deep gorge. He meets J.D., a soldier who briefs Levi. Neither of them have any idea what country this is. J.D. hasn’t seen a single person during the past year, and Levi will be his replacement.
Levi tours the observation tower where he’ll be spending the next year. There’s another tower on the other side, but Levi isn’t allowed to make contact with them. There’s a lot of technology and air raid sirens. It’s all very secret. Russians and Americans have been working together on this for decades without their own leaders knowing about this place. It’s even cloaked electronically from satellites.
Levi needs to stop what’s in the gorge from coming out. They hear “The hollow men” down below screaming. Those things are extremely lethal.
“The gorge is the door to Hell and we’re standing guard at the gate,” J.D. hypothesizes before leaving Levi on his own. The helicopter then comes to pick up J.D., and the man on board shoots him.
Levi walks the wall of the gorge, and there are some very heavy weapons and mines and barriers installed there. We see that Drasa is now working in the tower on the other side. A couple months in, she holds up a sign wanting to know his name. They both know they aren’t allowed to communicate, but they do it anyway. They soon learn that they are both master snipers. They make a lot of noise, enough to wake up whatever’s down below.
They see the things crawling up the walls, and they both shoot the horde. Between the machine guns and the explosives in the walls, they get most of the plant-covered creatures. Drasa gets splattered in the shoulder with a molten metal from one of the mines.
In the morning, they have to clean up and replace the mines. Something like a rocket or drone comes up out of the gorge and flies away.
As the months pass, they continue to communicate by holding up signs to each other. Levi assembles a zipline by shooting the other tower with a rocket. As Levi crosses, he hears the creatures way down in the foggy gorge. They have a nice evening together. They talk about their assassinations over their careers.
On the way back across the zipline, one of the creatures sets off a mine, and the cable snaps. He pops his parachute and goes down. Drasa jumps into the gorge with a parachute after him as well.
Levi finds himself being attacked by a giant caterpillar and then he’s attacked by hungry tree roots. Suddenly, they’re attacked by more of those plant-creatures, but this time, they’re on plant-horses. These aren’t alien monsters, they’re the men who were sent into the gorge in the 1940s, infected with some kind of plant plague.
They walk through the landscape, and there are skeletons and bones everywhere. Then they find a long-abandoned town and they stop in to hide in an old church. There are many bodies inside, apparently suicides. They’re attacked by a horde of skull-spiders and then more humanoid creatures, and it’s all very action-packed and intense (how much ammo could they be carrying?).
They leave the church and get into an old WWII-era lab. They turn on the generator and the lights come right on. They find a movie reel and watch it. The scientist on the film says it’s 1946, and the Allies have been working on biochemical missiles, but then an earthquake wrecked the base and broke their containment. The stuff they were working on merged the DNA of plants, animals, and even insects.
Levi figures out that people have been down here, recently – there’s a modern computer. That explains the drone they saw months ago – it was taking DNA samples. Private companies have been studying this stuff to create super soldiers. There’s also a small nuclear bomb set up to self-destruct the whole gorge if necessary.
Drasa steps into a trap and is dragged away by one of the horsemen as Levi is left behind alone.
Drasa wakes up tied up in a room with a tree-man. They end up fighting with swords and knives. Levi eventually arrives to save her. From the uniform, Levi recognizes the “man” as the first occupant of the tower, back in 1946.
Levi explains what he’s figured out about the origin of the contaminant and the purpose of this place. They find lots of mutated people that have merged into one big creature. They set off a bomb to burn the creature.
They find some WWII Jeeps whose batteries, engines, and tires still work (really?). They drive to the side of the gorge and connect the Jeep’s winch to the cable remnant they have. Naturally, they are attacked again and now they’re finally low on ammo. They ride the Jeep right up the side of the cliff (that’s quite a winch!).
Halfway up the gorge wall, they are attacked by more creatures. They actually do manage to climb up past the mines and automatic defenses. Back in the tower, they wonder if they’ve been infected; they both know they were hired because they’re expendable.
They decide they have to destroy the gorge by setting off the failsafe. They know that they can spend up to five days without showing signs of mutations, so it’s too soon to know if they’re safe or not.
Levi calls at the scheduled time on the radio, and Bartholomew knows he’s been in the gorge. She points out that if it wasn’t him down there, then it must have been Drasa. She orders him to kill Drasa. Meanwhile, Bartholomew has video of the two snipers together from that modern computer in the gorge they were looking at; she knows all about what they’ve been up to. She and her best men pack up to go to the gorge…
The soldiers and Bartholomew arrive at the tower in a helicopter as Levi and Drasa are out in the woods running cable. They send drones out after the renegade snipers. Luckily, good snipers have no problem shooting down military-grade drones.
Now at a safe distance, Levi and Drasa shoot the cloak towers, exposing the gorge, which sets off the self-destruct nuke. With two minutes warning, Levi and Drasa are far enough away to run for it. Bartholomew and her guys try to fly away from ground zero. The bomb goes off, destroying the gorge, the towers, and the helicopter.
Drasa hides in a cave and marks off the days. She finds that she’s not infected and moves to France. She goes to the spot they had agreed to rendezvous, but Levi doesn’t show.
Months pass, and Levi eventually finds her. They’re happy ever after.
Brian’s Commentary
The plant-based zombie-things are very reminiscent of the virus in “The Last of Us.” The CGI is overall pretty good, although some of the creatures look straight out of a videogame. The Jeep, winch, and the near-unlimited ammo make this one a little hard to believe, but at least it never gets boring.
From the trailer, I expected the couple in the towers to talk and meet, but I wasn’t expecting all the time they spent down in the gorge and how much monster action we’d get.
Overall, I liked it!
Kevin’s Commentary
Boy they were tough surviving getting beat up and dragged around and blown up. And the ammo counts were questionable. But those issues aside, it was an entertaining film that didn’t go in the direction I was expecting it to. It was well cast, and the chemistry between the two main characters was believable. I’d recommend it.