Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Is it that weird to not know your wife’s blood type? Never mind, I just found out. I wouldn’t want to wind up an easy suspect the way Ben Affleck does in the new trailer for Gone Girl. David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best seller seems at first to be just any whodunit thriller, but I have to say that the spot does a good job of making Affleck’s character sound pretty guilty of murdering his wife. There’s the matter of him not knowing her blood type, for one, but we also hear passages from her diary (read by the actress who plays her, Rosamund Pike). One particular phrase she’s written – “this man of mine may kill me” – sounds pretty incriminating, albeit circumstantially.
I haven’t read the book, nor do I know how it turns out, but regardless of whether Affleck’s character did it or not, the point seems to be that he’s immediately an easy target. And in cases like this, people tend to pass judgment on a suspect as being guilty before proven so. Or proven innocent, of course. The trailer is like a news report, the kind that makes us presume an arrest equals a conviction and reasonable suspicion equals culpability. Now we have to watch the actual movie, as if it were a trial, and see if our presumption is true. Or, maybe, it’s that mysterious Neil Patrick Harris who shows up in the trailer just enough to make us wonder.
Watch the second trailer below.
There is a lot going on in this trailer, and a lot of people appear whom you may not even get a chance to realize who they are. Like Patrick Fugit looking so grown up and clean cut. And Tyler Perry keeping up some pedigree with acting projects unrelated to his own productions. There’s a lot more of Pike than one might expect, indicating that much of Gone Girl is told in flashback.
One thing I know about the book is that it alternates between the perspectives of the husband in the present as he’s investigating his wife’s disappearance and of her, in the past, via the diary. This trailer makes the movie look faithfully similar, offering a back and forth he said/she said structure that could be really interesting, though I’m sure to be disappointed there given all the reports of how the script (also written by Flynn) is different from the book. Some speculation I’ve seen implies that the alternating conceit would be too confusing for viewers.
But there I am passing judgment on the movie as being guilty until proven anything at all. We’ll get the proof soon enough, when Gone Girl hits theaters on October 3rd.
Related Topics: Ben Affleck, David Fincher
