The Gorge on Apple TV was OK, maybe a little better than OK, but not great. Let’s give it a B-, graded on a curve for movies about sinister crevasses.

The Good:

— Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are good, better than this plot deserves. Their growing interactions and relationship is the best part of the movie (until it moves into verse form, which is painful if you pause the video and read it, which I did. She should have just set fire to it and bailed).

— The setup for the plot and the stark sets are suitably weird, with lots of cool little details and events. Then as the action starts taking strides, things stay tense and exciting, although the plausibility takes a huge hit.

— The creepy visual effects were baller, too. Very neat stuff, and a wide variety of it.

The Bad:

— Sigourney Weaver is criminally underused here, given nothing more to do than stock villainhood, playing the Paul Reiser character from the (much better) Aliens movie but with far stupider lines.

— The premise, as eventually didactically explained, is pretty trite and dumber than most movies like this.

— There is occasional painfully clunky dialogue (e.g. an unearned “this place is pure evil”) that you have to kind of shake off like a bad burrito. There are good lines too, but they are frontloaded, and the last half of the movie is less fun and far less well-written than the first half.

— Miles Teller as a bemused, curious, bored guy is fun, while Miles as a guy in love is 100% Anakin Skywalker. Yes, I went there. Yes, it’s accurate.

— There’s also a lot of questionable physics, plans that don’t make sense, and questionable survival of very old equipment, along with a plethora of the kind of poor choices people make in scary movies, augmented by improbable coincidence.

— Those drones couldn’t possibly carry that many bullets, but that doesn’t matter a whit, because they shoot like stormtroopers. I feel like they were maybe designed as soil aerators rather than machine-gun drones. That would explain it.

— There were also probably six better endings they hinted at during the movie than the groan-worthy one they eventually chose.

The Ugly:

— There’s a wretched maybe two solid minutes of solemn spoken-word voice-over exposition explaining why things in the movie are the way they are. The person speaking the words would have no conceivable knowledge of these events, these initiatives, or how it works. The evidence they’ve found is cryptic and very limited. There’s a neat scene with a movie that’s a primary source and quite affecting – they should have just left it there, but the screenwriters seemed to want you to know their full explanation for everything, which would have been more excusable had it been, like, a good explanation, rather than the plot of five thousand video games and B-movies of yore. Let the mystery steep, dude. Show, don’t tell.