The Playlist first ran a retrospective of David Fincher’s films back in 2010. At that point, the release of “The Social Network” brought the grand total of his narrative features to a whopping eight. In most cases, we wait a while before diving in to give a director the full retrospective treatment —Woody Allen had to hit a total of over forty before we accorded him that honor— but Fincher, in this as in almost every way, is atypical.
READ MORE: Best To Worst: David Fincher’s Complete Music Videography Ranked
This week, “Gone Girl,” the director’s tenth narrative feature (his feature filmography comprises eleven titles if you add in his “debut” concert documentary, which we have included below for completeness sake) is released into cinemas. In the intervening years, he’s also added two episodes of an acclaimed TV show to his resume with “House of Cards”, and has gone back to his music video days with a high-profile spot for Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z’s “Suit & Tie.” But the bare bones credits on his IMDB page really only represent the tip of an iceberg we’ve been trying to chip away at during our Fincher Week. First, we ranked all 55 of his music videos from his prolific late 80s/early 90s period, shooting promos for some of the biggest names in pop (and The Outfield). Yesterday we compiled an exhaustive literal A-Z of all the projects and scripts he has in the pipeline, has ever mentioned, has ever been rumored to be attached to, or has ever been seen in the same postcode as.
It can be comforting to know that someone with such a blazing talent and such a remarkable formal technique genuinely honed his craft: Fincher didn’t drop into this world fully formed as a filmmaker. In fact, after a brief stint with stop-motion pioneers Korty Films, Fincher moved to ILM (Korty’s “Twice Upon A Time,” on which he worked, was produced by none other than George Lucas). But he left after a couple of years (not before he worked on “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Return of the Jedi” —you can find evidence of Lucas and Steven Spielberg‘s influence in the fun 1985 Rick Springfield video he directed for “Bop Till You Drop”) when a commercial he directed for the American Cancer Society caught the eyes of LA producers looking for a director for Rick Springfield’s concert documentary, “Beat of the Live Drum.” And here is that commercial.
Lord knows what exactly it was in that clever, disturbing spot (which we can presumably count as the first film Fincher ever directed) that made them think “yes, this is the man to direct a concert film by the ‘Jessie’s Girl’ guy!” but we’re glad they did, as it launched Fincher into music videos and commercials, which saw him join the remarkably influential Propaganda Films, a stable that over the years has also counted Michael Bay, Antoine Fuqua, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Alex Proyas, Mark Romanek, Zack Snyder and Gore Verbinski among its show ponies. And from there, he got the “Alien 3” gig and the rest was smooth sailing.
Except of course it wasn’t. His relatively tiny list of feature films may be the visible tip of that iceberg and the reason for this retrospective, but that’s not to say that all are peerless classics. In fact “Alien 3” was a stumble that derailed a tremendously successful franchise (pitching it into the even murkier waters of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Alien Resurrection” and thence to the b-movie oblivion of the “Alien vs Predator” spinoff series), one during which Fincher clashed with Fox and which even now he dislikes —“to this day, no one hates it more than me” he told the Guardian in 2009. It affected him so badly that Fincher reportedly swore off reading any movie scripts for a year and a half, before a draft of Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay “Se7en” fell into his hands (apparently with the head-in-a-box ending) and Fincher rolled the dice on another feature. This time he delivered his first flat-out classic.
From there, there’ve been ups and downs, which makes Fincher one of the less reliable, or should we say more unpredictable, auteurs. To put it in his own terms, while we’re always hoping for another of his “films” (he counts “Fight Club” and “Zodiac” as films, while the more commercial pictures he makes are “movies”), what we seem to be getting increasingly are Fincher “movies.” “Gone Girl,” which opens this Friday (review here) and is based like ‘Dragon Tattoo’ before it on a bestselling thriller, does not seem to buck that trend. But while we wish he were taking on something more original, more unusual or more of a challenge to his consummate skills, there are few directors who can bring such distinctive personal flair to even less personal projects, and fewer still who can make slick, stylish, popcorn entertainment feel so coolly smart and compelling. So here’s our ranking of Fincher’s features, from worst to best, from “movie” to “film,” and while it’s a short filmography, it’s one marked by more than its fair share of growing cults and re-evaluations and passionate defenses of even the more unloved titles, so do feel free to bawl out our rankings in the comments.
12. “Beat of the Live Drum” (1985)
One for Fincher or Springfield completists only (and no prizes for guessing which camp we fall into), this feature debut is a live concert recording of a Springfield gig from the height of the Australian soap star/heartthrob/pop singer’s fame. There are some directorial flourishes, like cutting away from the live show to footage from three music videos, two of which —“Celebrate Youth” and “Dance the World Away”— were also Fincher’s work (you can see how they fare on our complete ranking of all Fincher’s music videos). But mostly it’s a competent concert doc that gives a good sense of what Springfield was like at his zenith, setting the pink frosted hearts of his teen fanbase ablaze (despite being in his mid-thirties) with his wildly successful pop-rawk catalogue. Unfortunately that zenith came at the midpoint of the 1980s, so it’s very hard as a casual viewer to get past the mullets and gratuitous fist dancing, even though he’s clearly giving it his all —crawling on all fours; tossing his guitar into the air; grabbing his guitarist by the shirt and singing nose-to-nose at him during the particularly torrid opening to “Jessie’s Girl”; frequently dropping to his knees; kicking a rose. It’s probably very affecting if you’re of that generation and were ever a Springfield fan —to the rest of us it’s fairly mystifying and occasionally unintentionally funny. While we’re grateful to Springfield for giving Fincher his break into music video direction, which would eventually lead the director to the big screen, when it comes to the director’s musical collaborators, sorry, we’ll take Trent Reznor any day.
11. “Alien 3” (1993)
There’s a reason that the documentary about the making of “Alien 3” on the original “Alien” quadriology set was named “Wreckage and Rape;” this wasn’t a smooth shoot. Originally conceived as a film about monks living in a wooden planet, under the creative guidance of Fincher, his first proper feature turned into a story about a prison colony of murderers, thieves, and rapists who take in the marooned Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, sans hair) and help her fight the drippy alien beast from the previous films. Well, not exactly like the previous films. This beastie was born from a dog, so it was slicker and sleeker and moved around the tight corridors like a rocket, which is a good metaphor for the neophyte director. Working from a compromised conception, not to mention an ill-negotiated premise (the film’s misleading teaser, riffing on the famous tagline of the original film, promised “on earth, everyone can hear you scream”) and an impossible release date, the resulting film is a fascinating muddle: every actor, their head closely scalped, looks exactly-the-fucking-same; intriguing subplots (like a prison worshipping the alien as a dragon) were sheared away; and Fincher’s unerring cynicism turned a summer escapist romp into a tortured examination of the nature of death. His keen eye was already present (the drippy facility, the bar-codes on the back of the prisoners’ necks), but his sense of story still needed sharpening. If Fincher’s reputation for control precedes him, all you need to do is look back on the disastrous results of this film —and the directing experience which he described as his worst— to understand why.
10. “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” (2008)
Fincher’s seventh feature-length effort is his beautiful folly: a sprawling epic about a man who ages backwards (Brad Pitt), set against the backdrop of an ever-changing America and formed from the relative scintilla of a F. Scott Fitzgerald story that never quite finds its emotional footing. Even within its gravity-defying premise, the film is peppered with some great moments (like the opening clock tower story/backwards war sequence) and some delicately calibrated performances (particularly from Cate Blanchett, whose lovely turn as the self-centered but completely magnetic object of Benjamin’s affection is surely one of the finest performances Fincher has ever coaxed, and shifts the film’s orbit whenever she’s around), but the director seems more interested in the technology of aging and then de-aging a rather detached Pitt than anything else (that technology is admittedly impressive). Additionally, Eric Roth’s script takes an episodic approach to the story that spends equal time and effort on the less interesting or dramatic periods of Benjamin’s life, and also falters over little logic gaps —like, if Benjamin narrates from memory, how exactly does he know the events that surrounded Blanchett’s accident? And those are stumbles that undercut the film’s successes, like Benjamin’s extended affair with Tilda Swinton which is a great little detour, so that the entire enterprise feels off-kilter and wobbly, veering from impressive highs to crater-ish lulls. Most of all, it feels like Fincher is not stretching himself, but is instead reaching —as cynics would sneer —for an Oscar with the “Forrest Gump“-ish would-be weepiness of the story. But sentimentality is not a trait that comes naturally, and the result feels simply unconvincing; Fincher wearing the story’s heartstring-tugging like he’s trying on a new suit that doesn’t quite fit.