Completely lifeless.

Rating: 2/10 (23 January 2012)

I wish that I could write up a long review elaborately explaining the things that I disliked about this film, but honestly it just comes down to the fact that I found it very dull. There's a little stretch in the middle where I was mildly interested by it, but the large majority was just a tedious experience for me. I wasn't on board with the tone that David Fincher was trying to achieve, mostly because I felt that there was no tone to it. I don't really understand what happened here, but it honestly felt like there wasn't a shred of enthusiasm from anyone involved. It felt like none of them really wanted to be there and they were just phoning it in.
I'm a pretty large Fincher fan and was devastated by the utter lack of innovative style here. Even in his big misses like Panic Room, he's always been a director who can at least make things look good even if the overall product isn't so much, but here I didn't feel any of Fincher's technical prowess on display. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose work in Social Network I loved in it's unconventional appropriateness, felt totally out of place here and really grated on me quickly.
With that slick, well-designed opening credits sequence accompanied by the very impressive cover of "Immigrant Song", I thought this was going to be a pretty exhilarating journey but two hours and forty minutes later I realized that those opening credits were the best thing about the film. For me, it was just an uninvolved exercise in needlessness. I thought that Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara had a decent bit of chemistry together as actors, which made their few scenes together slightly less unbearable, but Mara's performance as a whole is one of the big disappointments of the year. It was all visuals with no soul.
Mara made the part look right but that's all she did; it's an impressively aesthetic work with nothing going on underneath. Perhaps she's just not an experienced enough actor yet, because on a technical level she did everything right but she didn't let the character breathe at all. She focused too much on getting all of the appearances right, but wasn't capable of truly sinking into the character beyond that. Overall it's pretty firm in it's standing as the biggest disappointment of the year for me. There was nothing offensively bad about it, but nothing to praise or really remember either (except maybe Daniel Craig's wardrobe, which was excellent). I feel like by tomorrow I'll have completely forgotten about it, which will be a blessing.