Movie review: Gone Girl

That feeling after you watch a brilliant and harrowing movie based on an equally brilliant and harrowing book that you don't even know how to begin writing a review. That's exactly how I'm feeling right now.

Today I took half the day off work to see the movie adaptation of Gone Girl directed by David Fincher. Based on a novel of the same name written by Gillian Flynn, the movie is about Nick Dunne and Amy Elliot-Dunne and their tumultuous marriage. On the day of their fifth anniversary, Amy mysteriously vanishes. All clues lead to implicate Nick, who is not winning any fans because of his "villainous chin" stand-offish way of dealing with people. It's 149 jarring minutes of red herrings, twisted lies, selfish motives, and you-thought-you-know-what's-going-to-happen-next-but-you-don't, and I loved every single one of them.

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I am all for justice and getting one's comeuppance, so I have to admit I was terribly affected by the ending when I read the book. However, as a reader, I am more than satisfied. Still, it's a very polarizing book and although it has a lot of fans, it attracted criticism as well. Oh well, I can just imagine Flynn smirking at every one of us who fell for this book's wiles.

Comparing a movie from its source material and enumerating where it fell flat is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg: it's pointless and the debate will never end. All I can say is that the movie FELT like the book: creepy, compelling, and diabolically good. It helped that Flynn also wrote the screenplay, deciding which parts to cut and which parts should stay. I literally felt physically drained after seeing the movie even though I was seated comfortably for the whole duration of the film.

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My Film professor back in college told us before that you would know a score is good if you don't notice it as it blends seamlessly with the scenes. Kudos to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for providing the perfect music accompaniment. The cast and the score are my favorite things about this movie. I read the book just this July, so knowing who the cast are helped me immensely in putting faces to the names. Kudos to the director and the casting team as except for Casey Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne (I couldn't help but picture her as Penny in Happy Endings as she acted so exaggeratedly that it almost looked campy), they couldn't have come up with a more fitting set of actors and actresses. Ben Affleck IS Nick Dunne and Rosamund Pike IS the Amazing Amy Elliot-Dunne.

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Come see it and learn to be more wary of the people you meet, heh. Towards the end of my Gone Girl book review, I wrote that the moral of the story is to never marry a psychopath. How do you know if someone's a psychopath? That's the problem. Choose well.