Gone Girl Review

The movie Gone Girl recently came out in theaters and was a huge hit. In general, the movie followed the plot of the book. It started out with Nick taking a relaxing morning and then getting a call from his neighbor that his cat was outside and the door was open. When he got home, he found a scene that made him think someone stole his wife. He called the police and it turned into an investigation for his missing wife. As the movie progressed, the police and public began to blame Nick for the murder. He was not only acting unsympathetic about his wife, but many clues led to him. During the beginning half of the movie, Amy speaks aloud what she wrote in her diary, and the audience also starts to believe Nick really did kill Amy. However, once Nick figures out all of her clues for her annual treasure hunt, he figures out that she is messing with him, and that she is trying to get him killed. After this realization, it shows Amy on the highway gleefully throwing her pens out the window.

The rest of the movie shows both Amy’s side and Nicks side rather than just from Nick’s point of view. Amy ends up losing all her money and having to call Desi, her long time “friend”, to save her. Then she uses him to get back home and blames him for everything (not to mention she also kills him). Meanwhile, Nick does interviews to help his case and to try to get Amy to come home. Once she does come home, she manipulates the police into believing everything she says and convinces Nick to never leave. She also uses the sperm donor place to get herself pregnant.

The book and the movie were very similar. As I said before, they followed the same plot and no characters were changed in any way. However, I think the director did a good job at making the movie a new experience for readers, which is hard to do. The director still got the sense of unreliable narrators as in the book. Just like in the book, you choose sides and change those sides of characters as the movie progresses.

However, the movie and the book were different in some ways. In the movie, after it shows Amy on the highway safe, she has to give an overview of what she did to get there. She basically tells us everything she did in the background. In the book we get to figure it out as she does it. Also, the movie did not go into the other people she screwed over in her earlier years. They chopped out the part of when Nick finds out the real story of her stalker best friend.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. I think the characters were really well casted. Rosamund Pike, who played Amy, did a wonderful job at showing how insane Amy is and how she is a psychopath. Her facial expressions were spot on. I also think Ben Afflick did a great job at showing how Nick did care about Amy but didn’t seem like he did to the public. As a viewer, I really felt for him when he was getting blamed for everything. My favorite part of the movie was when Amy was driving on the highway because she looked so cool and by then we knew that she was doing this all because Nick cheated on her. All girls want to be able to figure out a way to ruin a cheaters life and she did it perfectly. However, I did not like how they lived in an extremely nice house. They were supposed to be almost broke and the town was supposed to be run-down.

Oldboy!!!!

Oldboy is a South Korean film that follows the life of a man named Oh Dae-su. He is a man that is imprisoned for fifteen years without knowing the reasons why. During the film when he is finally released, he decides to figure out why he was imprisoned. While figuring this out, he falls in love with a woman who works at a sushi restaurant. Also, his captor is continuously communicating with him to lead him to new clues and to remind him that he only has a limited amount of time to figure it out. It turns out that Dae-su went to school with his captor as a boy and watched something that he was not supposed to. He saw his captor making love with his sister in the upper room of the school. It is not exactly mentioned that he spread the word to everyone, but the captor makes it seem as though the entire school found out about his and his sister’s relationship. Consequently, his sister kills herself by jumping off a bridge and the captor blames Dae-su for the entire event. The captor wanted Dae-su to suffer, and he definitely did while prisoning him, and for eternity as well; Dae-su fell in love with his daughter.

         The most obvious and pointed out theme in the movie is vengeance. The captors motive to destroy Dae-su’s life was based only on getting revenge for something that happened to him many years ago when in reality Dae-su is not even that responsible for his sisters death. Vengeance is also closely related to violence, and in this movie there is a lot of violence. There are beatings, fights, guns, and knives that make this movie a gory film. The film’s violence is made to create repulsive feelings, however, many scenes that are violent could have been a lot more graphic. For example, in Dae-su’s first fight scene on the street he beats up a group of guys but the camera cuts off after a few punches. The director uses this technique to create an emotional response in the audience without showing too much blood.

         Another theme is incest. The captor is in love with his sister and had a sexual relationship with her. He felt upset that she killed herself and he had to blame it on someone, so he blamed it on Dae-su. To make revenge on him, he got Dae-su to fall in love with his daughter, and to have sex with her. He then tapes them having sex and plays it for Dae-su once he finds out about his lover. Knowing that he had sex with his child made him feel the greatest guilt and sadness. Incest is against all morals and Dae-su understands that. The worst part is that they are in love, which makes it hard for them to separate forever because they have feelings for each other.

         Hitchcock influenced the movie Oldboy in many ways. One of the most prevalent is how Oldboy’s mise en sce`ne is dreary and heavy stylized much like Hitchcock’s films. The film uses shadows and camera angles to create a scene that is abstract and interesting. For example, while Dae-su is fighting men in an ally, the audience’s view is from the inside of the wall to see him fighting each man and seeing their profiles. The long shot is impossible to create in real life, because in real life it would be impossible to see from inside the wall. Although it is not realistic, it creates a great effect on the viewer, which is a common aspect in Hitchcock’s films as well. The shadowing in this scene is also highly exaggerated. 

         I enjoyed the film for the most part. It was interesting and fun to watch even though a few scenes were extremely graphic. The ending was unexpected, yet it was very clever. I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes graphic and messed up films.