Assignment 16: Hooray for Hollywood - James Apo

The director I will be choosing for this assignment is David Fincher, maybe not as known as names like James Cameron and Quentin Tarrentino, but nevertheless a very talented director. He has made a handful of critically acclaimed films, but for the purpose of this post, I will be comparing his most recent cinematic masterpiece, Gone Girl with a much more older film from 1999, Fight Club. To start off, I would like to say SPOILER ALERT!!! Both films are dramatic thrillers that keep you guessing to the very end. Fight Club has one of the most recognized plot twists in movie history, and although I found Gone Girl's twist to be slightly more predictable, it was still quite solid. In Fight Club we follow an insomniac office worker looking for a way to change his life. He crosses paths with a raucous soap maker and they form an underground fight club that evolves into something much bigger. What you do not know until the very end, is that the narrator (Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) are actually the same person. The thing that made this revelation so effective was the fact that the two characters were so different and that it was hard to imagine that due to our narrator's sleep condition, he actually promoted a fight club across the entire nation and was sort of two personalities in one. Fincher interestingly flashed Tyler Durden onto the screen for a split second a couple times in the film, and that really puzzled me as well as intrigued me. The movie had a dark humor about it and kept me guessing til the end. Similarly, Gone Girl had a good twist too, and was also 2 hours plus. It follows an accused husband of killing his wife, and has a more serious feel to it. The first twist ends up being that his wife is actually still alive and is just framing him to get back at him for all the horrible things he has done to her. What made this so awesome, was that you thought that was the end of the movie, but there was actually still a good hour left. The search is on to find the 'missing' body, and a violent sex scene (as in murder is involved) really wows the audience. She ends up coming back, but now it is the husband that is afraid of the wife. Both movies center around a 'fight' so to speak. The first one a fight between personalities, and the second one a fight for marriage and making it in the world. Both incorporate eery moments and keep you on the edge of your seat, which I believe is a testament to who Fincher is as a director.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gone_girl/?search=gone%20girl