Extraordinarily poor script

Rating: 2/10 (30 May 2016)

I have seldom watched a movie where the script writer took as many random shortcuts as those taken in "Gone Girl." I've seen this before when a writer -- either because of laziness, lack of talent, or time pressure -- simply has the character do something which advances the story, but without any foundation or rationale for that action. In "Gone Girl," each scene failed to supply sufficient information or motivation for what each character did next. At the beginning of the movie, this was merely annoying, and I thought perhaps it was being done deliberately in order to provide a simple sketch of the characters' backgrounds and then quickly get into the meat of the movie.
Unfortunately, those "sketches" turned out to be essential to the rest of the movie, and because these scenes were not completely fleshed out, much of what followed rang hollow.
It is a complete mystery to me how Gillian Flynn, the screenplay author, could have been nominated for any awards for this mess, and yet she was. This makes me very suspicious of the awards process.
The script is so bad that, as the movie progressed, I kept thinking perhaps they had filmed the "treatment" (the script outline used to sell the movie idea) rather than an actual, finished script.
By the time the movie stumbled and lurched to the final, totally unsatisfactory conclusion, I found myself almost angry at all the holes in logic and motivation, and the completely inexplicable things each of the two main characters said and did.
I don't mind endings that are unexpected or unusual, but I do mind endings that feel as though the writer copped out because she lacked the creativity to come up with a much more interesting, clever, and logically consistent ending.
This ending was none of those things.
The only reason I gave the film two stars instead of one is that the basic production values are quite good