Can't get behind Gone Girl (SPOILERS)

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2014)

First of all, let me say, I am fan of David Fincher. I like his films a lot. But I cannot get behind Gone Girl.
No, I have not read the book, and I don't care. Movies are free-standing, and it is not their job to be an addendum or a companion to the source material. The film should work on its own. If it doesn't, it only has its makers to blame.
This film has a too many flaws to ignore.
First, the beginning setup back story was pretty bad. I understand all the flashback stuff of Nick and Amy when they first met and started dating is important to the story. I am just saying that it was bad. Some of the dialog was so stupid, I wanted to laugh out loud in the theater. If the dialog was taken verbatim from the book, well, its the director's job to see that in film form it doesn't work. And for me, it did NOT work. It was just so contrived and unbelievable as to be  well  dumb. That is the only word for it - dumb. And this back story, in the form of flashbacks, litters the first third of the film.
But the film finally starts gaining steam, overcoming the cookie-cutter mundanity of the first act. Amy's framing of Nick is being revealed. Nick is now being looked at hard by the police. The physical evidence is starting to pile up. Yet they still have no body to charge him with murder. Nick must run to a fancy lawyer. He is being slayed in the media. Perhaps that is the strongest part of this film  how the public is so impressionable and so deceived by the media. Most people will believe almost anything they are told on TV or read on the Internet and become overly emotionally involved. It's pretty disgusting. We obviously have seen that numerous times in the past 5 years or so.
So, it's inevitable  at some point Amy is going to be found alive or she is going to come home. You just know that is coming. And come home she does, after murdering poor Desi Collings and framing him for her abduction.
So you think the movie is going to end soon. Nope. What we are lead to believe is building up to some awesome, climactic ending slowly drips to disappointing dud. And no, I don't care if this was how the book was written, and when you read the book, "it's awesome." This is a film, and it has to work on it's own, as a film. To me, it didn't.
Look, I don't mind unresolved, unconventional endings. I am fan of art films, so this is not some plebeian movie-goer here complaining about how the ending "sucked bad, bro." But it just didn't work in this case. It was not THAT type of film for the entire runtime. You can't just tack on some awkward ending and accept the audience to accept it, when the rest of the film was trying to be something else. To be blunt, the ending was just awful. If Gone Girl was not based on a book, I would have assumed that they didn't know how to end it in the writing process, so they just tacked on some awful ending that was thought up in a production meeting or something like that. It was that level of bad.
And speaking of awkward. The score just didn't work for me. It seemed like Fincher once again teamed up with Reznor and Ross because he uses him on all his films now. The score was good on it's own, but it seemed out of place in this piece to me. It made the whole thing, cinematography included, seemed forced and out of place.
Affleck was okay. The best acting in the film came from the female cop, the twin sister, and of course Rosamund Pike, who played her character to perfection, even if a lot of her dialog was contrived and unnecessary.
Anyway, I am sure a lot of people will disagree, but but that is how I see it.