"Little more than an exercise in style, but oh what style!"

November 26, 2023 6:46 AM

Every David Fincher Movie, Ranked (SLVulture, updated to include The Killer)
posted by box (25 comments total)

posted by box

eponysterical!
posted by chavenet at 7:24 AM on November 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

[unboxed version of the article]
posted by chavenet at 7:26 AM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Alien 3 at #11... feh!

unhinges jaw
drips slime
eats list writer
posted by kokaku at 8:27 AM on November 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

I was surprised to find that I had seen most of these films, as I don’t really think of myself as a Fincher fan. I wouldn’t dispute putting Zodiac up top, it is a great film, but I feel that the writer doesn’t understand Fight Club. It’s a comedy, first and foremost, from its “Office Space” beginnings to its destroying capitalism finale. I thought it was hilarious at the time, and was really baffled when I started running into guys my age who took its ideas of “fight clubs” seriously. I still think it’s a really funny satire, but if it has a flaw it’s that it played it too straight, was too deadpan.
posted by Kattullus at 8:36 AM on November 26, 2023 [12 favorites]

Blank Check Podcast also just wrapped up a series on Fincher. Recommended if you want way too much detail and an excess of bits.
posted by q*ben at 9:02 AM on November 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

It appears that I enjoyed Alien 3 more than just about everybody, including David Fincher: “a lot of people hated Alien 3, but no one hated it more than I did.”

...though perhaps there is yet time for a renewed appreciation....

"However compromised it might have been in the end, this is still a Fincher film through and through and one that fits in perfectly with his distinct filmography. This became even more apparent in 2003 with the DVD release of the so-called Assembly Cut, a version of the film running some 37 minutes longer and a fairly close match to Fincher’s original rough cut."

posted by fairmettle at 9:04 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Honestly would probably swap Gone Girl and Dragon Tattoo and drop Mank down to last, thus raising Alien3 from that spot.
posted by Artw at 9:27 AM on November 26, 2023

Somehow I still haven’t seen The Facebook Movie, despite it getting good reviews and me generally being very excited about its release. I should probably correct that before the end of the year.
posted by thecaddy at 9:41 AM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I feel that the writer doesn’t understand Fight Club. It’s a comedy, first and foremost

It’s also a much, much better movie than Seven is, speaking of exercises in style.
posted by atoxyl at 9:52 AM on November 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

I thought it was hilarious at the time, and was really baffled when I started running into guys my age who took its ideas of “fight clubs” seriously.

This reminds me of Alan Moore's bafflement that a certain sort of comics fan actually liked and identified with Rorschach from Watchmen, a character that Moore went out of his way to make unlikeable. It may actually be the unlikeability that makes the character attractive to his fans, just as it's the essential idiocy of bare-knuckle boxing (which can and, over time, will fuck up your hands pretty badly) that seems to have drawn these guys in.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:53 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Benjamin Button is last on my list.

What the hell, it's only twelve movies (eleven, I haven't watched The Killer), I can do that:

11. Benjamin Button
10. The Social Network
9. The Game - Probably a three-way tie for last, I just don't care about these people
8. Mank - Simultaneously a very personal project and, somehow, a Netflix movie
7. Dragon Tattoo - It's the rare American remake that improves on the original, and this isn't it
6. Alien 3 - Right in the middle of both Fincher's work and the Alien movies
5. Fight Club - Loses some points with me because it's such a dude movie
4. Seven - It's the David Fincher/Brad Pitt movie I like
3. Panic Room - Right in his wheelhouse, and executed so, so well
2. Zodiac - See above, plus I like a period piece
1. Gone Girl - It's the rare movie that's better than the (very good) book

For what it's worth, here's how people that rank movies on IMDB' IMDB and Letterboxd rank 'em.
posted by box at 9:54 AM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mank is a movie about Orson Welles that’s done in the style of Hitchcock. That’s just perverse.
posted by Artw at 10:00 AM on November 26, 2023

The Big Picture podcast just did their David Fincher movie draft.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:08 AM on November 26, 2023

Zodiac is the best! So they got that right.
posted by mazola at 12:25 PM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Honestly, I like Fincher's video for "Freedom! 90" better than many of these (certainly better than The Killer). I feel like he often picks subject matters that emphasize the least interesting aspects of the thriller genre. Though I still haven't seen Gone Girl, and maybe I should get around to that.
posted by praemunire at 12:30 PM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Social Network is my fave, it just came together really nicely.
I'm that person who thought Mank was cool, outvoted I know.
God I fckin hated Benjamin Button, sappy interpretation of an interesting Fitzgerald curio with a creepy intergenerational romance in the middle. And a big hit, for some reason?
posted by ovvl at 12:33 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I...kinda like Alien 3 more than Zodiac. Though Panic Room is my personal fav. I'm kind of angry right now.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:34 PM on November 26, 2023

I'm in the anti-Social Network camp, partly because I'm not a Sorkin fan.

I do think it plays as a horror movie, as per "The unsettling ambience of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar-winning score sets the surprisingly portentous tone."
posted by doctornemo at 4:18 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

…and then we get Hall of the Mountain King.
posted by Artw at 5:17 PM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seven is forever overrated to my mind. It's a brilliantly made movie but I reject the premise pretty much absolutely as I reject any serial killer story that works a deranged-sort-of-poetic-artistic-genius angle. That shit's pure fantasy.

To his credit, Fincher has twice more or less corrected things in that regard.

Zodiac which is everything that Seven isn't. It doesn't play to sensation, doesn't play to an eighteen year old's idea of pure evil, but rather lays out the banality of it, the murkiness; so much so that ... SPOILER ALERT ... they never catch the guy, he gets away with it, whoever it even was. Now that's horror!

Also the Netflix Series Mindhunter (season one in particular), which again plays to the reality of serial killers. There's nothing cool or seductive or even edgy about them -- they're banal boring monsters, who if they had an ounce of imagination/artistic flair wouldn't need to kill people to get their rocks off.

I really hate most serial killer entertainments.
posted by philip-random at 7:12 PM on November 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

A good list. I know that re-evaluating conventionally hated movies is the thing. So I did the thing--I watched Alien 3 for the first time since it was on HBO back in the 90s. I didn't like it then, so I figured the directors cut on my big 4K tv would make a difference. It's true that it looked much better, but it's also true that it's not a good movie, and I can now say with certainty that it is baffling to me why anyone would think it was. Nice cinematography and sets, and...that's about it. Zero suspense throughout, little action...anyway, that's a post in itself.

Se7en is brilliant, as is Fight Club. I need to revisit Zodiac; I thought it was good but anti-climactic. It just kind of stopped rather than ended. The Social Network I don't really get--the origin of Facebook is not that interesting a story to me and Mark Zuckerberg is not that interesting of a person.

Mindhunter is a series but Fincher directed a majority of those episodes, IIRC. An excellent series that shouldn't have been cancelled. We should've gotten at least another season out if it.
posted by zardoz at 8:16 PM on November 26, 2023

ALIEN CUBED is great, no matter what people (including Fincher) say. Especially the Assembly Cut.
posted by brundlefly at 11:32 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

SPOILER ALERT ... they never catch the guy

They never caught the guy in real life, why would they catch him in the movie ?
posted by Pendragon at 3:22 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Benjamin Button was the worst tease for me. I spent the whole movie waiting to find out what cool metaphysical shit would go down when he eventually became a baby. Would it show him regressing to a single celled organism? Would he separate into a sperm and egg? Would there be something mind blowing I'm not expecting?

No, he turns into a baby and dies, the end.

Spoilers I guess.
posted by Silentgoldfish at 9:43 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Social Network I think is given the praise it gets in large part because he called out Zuck as a piece of shit a good five years before that became a mainstream narrative.
posted by macrael at 11:05 AM on November 27, 2023