Not that effective...

Rating: 6/10 (20 October 2014)

The problem lies in the fact that Gillian Flynn tried to be extremely faithful to her own book, giving much attention to the facts and the story development rather than the layered personality of the main characters. Ben Affleck was never praised by his acting skills, and his natural apathy fits well to the character because in the book Nick is described as a guy unable to express his feelings and emotions. The movie doesn't make his personality clear enough as in the book, giving the feeling that Affleck is just delivering a bad performance, which he is not. Only those who did read the book will understand that no matter how low skilled Ben Affleck is as an actor, the character is exactly like that.
Rosamund Pike does an incredible job mainly in the moments when those ones who did read the book will understand the real meanings of her looks and actions. In other words, the actress knew well the original material and exactly what she was doing, but the movie doesn't succeed or matters to explain her magnificent intelligence as described in the book. When Flynn and Fincher finally try to come to terms with it, it is too late and ineffective.
The film editing never achieves the same magnificence of some of Fincher's latest movies. The dialogs and the conflicts between characters aren't fluid as in the book. Fincher cuts it all the time like a soap opera discussion, making a table tennis with the cameras for meaningless and unnatural reasons. The same about the music. Although Reznor and Ross composed an amazing score that sounds naive, relaxing and at the same time creepy, for sure it is used effectively to distinguish the different times set, but it doesn't quite intensifies some dreadful moments, sometimes sounding more invasive rather than an important scene composition.
I did like the story development, which is the same as in the book, and the other characters are pretty interesting. Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Margo (Carrie Con) steal most of the scenes. The amazing thing for me is that the actors chosen, the scenography and locations are mostly exactly as I imagined when reading the book and that makes clear how rich is Flynn's description even being a 1st person narrative.
It's a fair adaptation, but far away to be one of Fincher's best movies. For me he is so desperate to make another huge thriller that he is not making movies for fun and pleasure anymore. He did not find yet a material to make him passionate to work on like he did with Se7en or Fight Club. He is obvious unfocused, shooting everywhere to eventually hit the target and accomplish his mission. All the acclaimed reception are mainly because Fincher is always overestimated. They did the same with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and people later discovered that his adaptation wasn't that good at all when compared to the Swedish version. Even being well developed Gone Girl lacks of important subtle details that make the main characters so rich and full of tricky personalities (they also forgot, for example, Nick's sarcasm and self depreciation). A book so rich in words and description that were underused in the movie. When compared to Fight Club and the impressive way Fincher reveals what was obviously clear but we could not see, we know that he could have used different and more elaborated ways to reveal important facts. That doesn't happen even in the most important turning moment of the story, a moment that in the book is shocking because it is unexpected and the movie delivers it in the most ordinary and unsurprising way.
Maybe all the few things that keeps the movie away from its glory is about Flynn's inexperience as a movie writer since this is her first movie writing work, but also feels like Fincher wasn't passionate for it anyway and he just delivered an ordinary hired work.