I’ve never read the book, but I get the feeling that you put this material in the hands of most directors, it falls apart. But you team Fincher with his gang, including Reznor and Finch doing the music, and it’s a dark descent into a marriage. The movie is like 2 1/2 hours long, but you’re riveted the whole time.
I have such a crush on Gillian Flynn, but I’d be halfway terrified if we ever went on a date. The stuff that goes through her head…
I forgot this was a David Fincher movie! I can see his take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in this, now that I look back, but none of his other movies are reflected here.
IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET, GET THE HELL OUT OF THIS THREAD!
I don’t think I’ve liked Ben Affleck this much in anything else he’s ever done. I usually find him flat & overrated, but he’s perfect here. Neil Patrick Harris is brilliant as always, particularly the way he rides the line between charming & creepy.
And Rosamund Pike… Well, I’m not sure what to make of her. In retrospect, I suppose it’s the movie’s red herring to make her so nondescript initially. For the first half-hour or so I was somewhat disengaged, thinking “Oh, there’s the snarky bartender, here’s the couple who think they’re cleverer than everyone else, and now they’re moving to the suburbs to be boring. Yawn.” And it seemed like even the volume of Pike’s early dialogue was muted to match the authenticity of her character, but that may have just been my theater.
Then the movie proper gets going, and she finally comes into her own. I enjoyed the early red herring sightings, and about halfway through the movie even found myself reevaluating my own assumptions of who was innocent. Well played, movie.
From the time the dominoes started dropping, I found myself thoroughly engaged & enjoying just about everything except that silly, overwrought local news gal. The second interviewer, whose show is probably the biggest payoff in the whole movie (especially after the movie forces his hand at the last moment), is so good that you could probably use it to teach writers how to effectively earn & then execute scenes.
I do wish it had ended less abruptly, but I suppose the opening scene settles any questions of ambiguity people might have had. On the whole, I’d say this is one thoroughly entertaining movie, and I’d almost call it a thriller more than a mystery, even though it’s clearly inspired by that genre.
I want Trent Reznor to score films full time, the music in this is so great. If you’v read the book, have fun going with people that haven’t read it, the last half hour blew everyone’s mind that I went with.
It was great.
I don’t know quite how, but I managed to go into this without the faintest idea of what it was about or who was in it. The only thing I knew about it was that David Fincher directed (that’s enough to get me in the theater) and it was based on a book that seemed to be popular. Anyway, I’m really glad I went in unspoiled as it was a ton of fun just following along with all of the shifts and turns.
This movie is a perfect example of why you folks who watch trailers are missing out.
Haven’t seen the movie yet, but it was a fantastic audio book. Her other two novels(Sharp Objects and Dark Places) are just as good, and the latter is also an upcoming film.
Sounds like the story and its twists remain intact, and yeah, going in blind is the best way to see this movie. The book was quite fun.
Neither of the trailers that I saw had any spoliers that I can remember.
Movie was excellent and even Tom and DingusX favourite Tyler Perry was good.
Yeah, but you probably got some kind of murder mystery theme out of the trailers. The way that unveils itself tonally is just as surprising as the plot.
And Tyler Perry knocked it out of the park. Almost all of the main characters had great performances.
Spoilers below
yep
I didn’t know much of anything about the book going in, but I had a vague idea that there was going to be some ambiguity in the film about who we should root for. Welp, scratch that the second you hit act two. Amy (blonde Hannibal Lecter) was like a figure from the most nightmarish fever dream of an MRA. Like, Fincher is a generally cold and cynical/clinical director, but with Flynn in the mix I’m not sure anyone at the top of the production has a kind thought about people in their heads.
Very well cast, Kim Dickens was my favorite, Perry was surprising. Great to see the kid from Almost Famous again.
I was alarmed at the beginning by how terrible the dialogue was. I relaxed once I figured out these were excerpts from Amy’s romanticized version of the past, but then the dialogue started clanging outside of those flashbacks. Some of lines were good, but a lot was just uneven. (Everything NPH had to say was very affected, and even some of the Margo lines were stiff. “I was with you before we were born,” for instance.)
I was ambivalent about the score. Sometimes it was gripping, sometimes it sounded like a slight remix of The Social Network. I think Reznor and Ross need to figure out a few new sounds to layer into the droning.
I’m surprised at how well it’s doing with audiences (92% audience score on RottenTomatoes). Fincher said he believes that people are perverts, and maybe the mainstream has a greater appetite for sordid stuff than I thought.
I heard the book on audio (which I recommend, the actors doing the reading were superb), and just saw the film. I liked it, felt it was a good adaptation and a fine film.
question
One difficulty with a film is explaining how all the pieces worked in a plan as elaborate as Amy’s… what was the deal with her staging for Desi’s cameras…are we to assume she reordered the footage or something?
I assumed…
The cameras didn’t cover every inch of the house. She prepped off-camera and then performed for the camera when in range.
Also saw it without knowing anything other than it was Fincher. Liked it a bunch, though as a noir fan a lot of it ended up as familiar rather than surprising - there’s quite a long pedigree for this particular type of plot/character.
But holy crap what a lot of perfectly cast roles. I knew from their previous work that Scoot McNairy and Kim Dickens would be good, but who thought Tyler Perry would work so well in a thriller (especially after last time)? And then there were a lot of people where I thought, “They’re good and they seem familiar, I bet I’ve seen them in a bunch of things” … and I hadn’t. Fincher and his casting director sure have an eye for putting the right person in the right role.
Wasn’t a fan of Tyler Perry, but he really nailed his role.
Just mho, I felt Perry was flat, and 2-dimensional. Very ‘television’. As if he learned his lines 3 minutes before the shot. I felt he stood out in a bad way in scenes with the other actors.
This didn’t really work for me, and I’m the guy who thinks Aliens 3 was underrated.
I don’t really know what I was supposed to get from this movie. Reviews and impressions elsewhere range from treating it as a crazy thriller, to some kind of satire, to a reflection on marriage and identity. And I can see bits of what all those people see in this movie, but that’s ultimately the problem for me, it’s all of those, and none of them work.
The Game is certainly a crazy twisty thriller that’s well beyond plausibility. But something about that movie works. It had a dreamlike quality that let me just enjoy it. This felt more like a story that’s every bit as unbelievable, but played straight, and that’s a problem. I wish I could articulate the difference somehow.
I also got little hints and suggestions here and there that we were supposed to be more conflicted about Nick’s character. And if you read a summary, he’s certainly still a lousy husband, but the movie only pays lip service to that, and we’re pretty firmly in his corner the whole time, and absolutely on his side by the end, where it felt like they were still trying to make some kind of “look how broken they both are” statement about Nick and Amy. Or maybe it wasn’t trying to say that, I don’t know, I was never sure what point it was trying to make.
I’m no Ben Affleck hater, and no one stood out as bad in this movie, but the only performance that had any life to it was Carrie Coon’s Margot. Everyone else was just fine, not bad, but no one really elevating things and carrying the movie.
And we’ve hit diminishing returns on Reznor and Ross’s Fincher scores. The Social Network was great, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo felt like a b-sides album from that session, and this felt like the most generic sections of that just rehashed.
Nice review.
SPOILERS
Overall I enjoyed the movie quite a bit but two plot developments that I thought were a bit weak.
Were these better developed in the book, or is it supposed to seem sudden and weird because she is so crazy? It struck me as scenes from lesser movies that makes a character oddly change his mind and then the audience goes “uh-huh, sure”. Feel free to tell me I am crazy, too.
A CONTINUATION OF SPOILERS.
On Amy killing NPH, that part sort of made sense, but I had related questions. It made sense because going to NPH in the first place was plan B. She wasn’t going to end up with him at all, except she got robbed. She turned to him in desperation, and it was pretty clear right away that she wasn’t going to last with him.
What I was curious about was what exactly her motivation for returning to Nick was supposed to be. I couldn’t tell if it was just totally cold calculation that he was a new escape from NPH, since she’d now be able to spin and control the situation with Nick, or if we were supposed to believe that in a bizarre way, his TV interview actually got through to her. I’m pretty sure there was conversation that hinted at this, but I don’t remember the details, or whether we were supposed to take her at her word at any point.
The best example I can remember that hinted at this was right after Nick does the interview, Tyler Perry is really impressed, and Nick says something dryly like “What can I say? She brings out the best in me”. Nick didn’t actually mean it this way, but in retrospect I wondered if in a way, from Amy’s perspective, that was actually true. That she was impressed by his stepping up and fighting back in her game, that he was showing the initiative and intelligence she no longer saw from him in their failing marriage, that his fighting crazy with crazy rekindled her interest in him.
Maybe someone who watched the movie more closely or read the book could address that.
Yeah, she was honestly taken by his interview performance. Now that’s the man I married!
Remember, she recalls the first years of their marriage fondly. It’s only after Nick’s laid off that it starts going sour, and it’s the affair that makes her mad enough to execute on the whole plan. So when he basically admits he was wrong about all of that, well, “that’s the man I married”. And her takedown of NPH isn’t sudden - there’s a multiweek gap between that interview (where you can clearly see her changing her mind) and the eventual bloody result. Also, as far as I can tell everything she said while playing minigolf about why she didn’t kill herself was honest, even if the context wasn’t. It clearly wasn’t necessary to get Nick up on charges, as we saw.
Overall, I really liked the style of the movie and most of the acting, music, etc, and that ending is pretty damn dark…but I do agree that Affleck’s a little too solidly sympathetic (especially since he’s so strongly associated with heroic/charming roles - now, Casey Affleck in the same role…), and I have a real issue with the premise, which takes a very real problem - cycles of spousal abuse that end in murder - and upends it to make said spouse the actual villain of the piece. I think I can get past that, because it’s fiction and it makes for that ending, but I do not blame feminists for being up in arms about it one bit.