Together classic in comprehensiveness and intimate in detail, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button blu-ray is certainly the director’s most emotional film so far ( though Fight Club and 7 do not offer much in the way of competition).

Loosely based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald tale, this romantic drama tells the story of Benjamin Button ( Brad Pitt ), in 1918 in New Orleans as a baby with wrinkles, cataracts, and arthritis.

Benjamin will grow backwards, getting younger as he watches everyone around him growing older. Included in that group are his adoptive mum, Queenie ( Taraji P. Henson), and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the love of his life whom he meets when she is a little girl and he is an old man.

They age in reverse, but despite Benjamin’s globe-trotting journeys, their lives regularly intersect. The script from Oscar winner Eric Roth bears more than a few hallmarks in common with his earlier work on Forrest Gump : both adaptations cross decades and continents.

But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s script or perhaps the fine acting aren’t its most impressive accomplishment; the technology–both CGI and makeup–used to make Benjamin and Daisy age are remarkable, and makes the blue ray movies completely plausible, but they are actually helped by fine performances from both Pitt and Blanchett. The triumph of technology only serves to underscore the wonderful thing about this film and of the love story at its heart.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button sighs with longing and boils with intrigue while investigating the philosophical mazes and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition. It seems that skipping a ‘blowout’ garage sale she was planning paid off for up-and-coming actress Taraji P. Henson in fact, she told some in an interview after netting her Benjamin Button role.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is not just a technical wonder, it is a classic piece of storytelling with an awesome awareness of detail. That is not to say The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the most remarkable film of Fincher’s provoking career, but it is easily one of the finest of 2008 and the story sucks you right in and infrequently lets go.