"Basic Instinct" or "Fatal Attraction" For a New Era

Rating: 7/10 (6 February 2015)

Gone Girl seems to me like a "Basic Instinct" or "Fatal Attraction" for a new era. It has the same psychopathic woman using situations to keep a man under her thumb of control and also to get away with the evil she has done. It does slightly stray from this in the fact that she is committing these awful acts against her husband. To make things even more complicated, she seems justified in the beginning with her plan because of her husband's infidelity. The real story is revealed throughout so you know what is going on, but you never really know what the outcome could be.
One of the problems I saw was that much of the plot working out the way it did relied on the presence of poor police work and our main character withholding information from the authorities about his wife. It ends with a cliffhanger, them staying together not knowing what they will do to each other. But why? In the end why is he still afraid to expose her? What control does she have over him? He feels responsible for their child? A good response there would be to prove the atrocities that she has done and get the child out of her reach.
David Fincher is an excellent director as we have seen many times before and it is always nice to see an author adapt their own book for the screen. Gillian Flynn wrote an intense and all around screwed up story that is sure to mess with peoples emotions and moral responses. The acting was reasonable and even though the seriousness of the matters at hand, I found it surprisingly funny which was one of its strongest points in my opinion. In the end I thought it was a descent thriller about something we have kind of already seen before but it's not really what it is all cracked up to be.