Alfiejbear - The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

David Fincher's previous directing feats including memorable films like Fight Club and Panic Room left us last year with high expectations for the long awaited and hyped "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button". Iv'e noticed that as a director Fincher tends to adapt films from novels which often depict different...or unusual stories that make them attractive to a wide range of audience, but still of which can maniputlated into a mainstream cinema like genre. On top of this, he's using very high octane actors like Bradd Pitt (Benjamin Button) and Cate Blanchette (Daisy Williams) which to me seemed to be a promising feature.

The overall story fulfilled most of it's expectations but not all of them, however i couldn't quite get away from the fact that i felt it had some sublte similarities to "Titanic" and "The Note Book", it almost seemed as if it were a mixture of the two with a few twists in between. For example in Titanic, the old lady tells the story, but in this case getting the daughter to read the diary back to us. Despite the film lapsing with a total time of two hours and fourty minutes, the snippits or sections of Benjamin's life came across as somewhat rushed to me which lowered my general impression of the film. However, i feel that they were OK sections simply because of the performance that Pitt and Blachette were able to pull off but it if were anyone else acting, then it may have been awful.

Most of the lighting was natural which worked well..., but something i picked up on was that there is quite alot of expressionistic lighting on the majority of close ups, i think this was to help the audience concentrate of the facial expressions and identify with the main protagonists more
rather than just being a spectator. I thought the non diegetic background music could have been more empthasised throughout, just to bring out more of an emotional response at what should have been high points of the film such as when he leaves her and their child.

The effects surrounding the CGI were very impressive when manipulating the age reversing appearence of Brad Pitt, however this was romoured to set back an astonishing $130 million dollars, which i find hard to believe was actually worth it alone. However if they were going to spend it on one person, they spent it on the right person, as he's seen as a global hotty to most women and they would like to see him in his younger form perhaps?

I couldn't help not putting myself in his situation, watching the ones i know and come to love grow old and die around me, whilst knowing i would grow younger and forget everyone only to become a problem child. This was probably one of the points i sympathised with him the most as it made me think about my own family. I think that was what Fincher was trying to do aswell as telling a sort of weird love story, but i failed to see a reasonable fusion between the two mainly for the reasons above.

In conclusion, the film hadn't lived up to the expectations it had to set out to acheive, but this may be because i'm a little harder to please than other film watchers, although i'm sure this film would probably appeal to the elder audience who may have fallen in love more times than myself and dealt with many more of the issues brought up during the film such as love, war & death, I just couldn't quite get that sync with the film, therefore it wasn't for me.

Thanks for reading (''')O.o(''')