The most overlooked entry in David Fincher's filmography is also one of his best.
The Game had a lot to live up to. It was the film David Fincher chose as his follow-up to the wildly acclaimed Seven, a film that had thrust the young director into the limelight and prevented his career from reaching a premature end after the mixed reaction to his debut, Alien 3. Suddenly, he was no longer the man who’d killed the little girl we’d spent all of Aliens trying to save.
It's perhaps this reason that contributed to its muted reaction. Reviews were positive but far from glowing, and its middling performance at the box office saw it ignored by all major award shows. Fincher himself considers it one of his weakest films, and in retrospect, it was a strange choice to base a sophomore feature around .
The Game’s pacing is some of the finest in the genre. The screenwriter duo of John Brancato and Michael Ferris avoid playing their best cards too early and keep the plot twists coming with the regularity of a ticking clock. The dialogue is also excellent, with plenty of snarky one-liners befitting a world of such cruelty . One of their smartest additions is Christine , a waitress who gets unintentionally caught up in Nicholas’s game… or at least, that’s what he’s supposed to think.
Choosing to open the film with a home video of a young Nicholas’s birthday is also an excellent choice. There’s something unsettling about watching such a joyful occasion via footage that’s so degraded it looks like a silent horror film. This disconnect between what we’re seeing and how we’re seeing it sets the tone of The Game perfectly. In this midst of the erosion, we catch glimpses of Nicholas’s father, a man who looks like he puts fun in the same category as disease.
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