The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Reviews

Not quite in the top 5 of David Fincher's best films ('Se7en', 'The Social Network', 'Fight Club', 'Gone Girl' and 'Zodiac') but it does come close. And this is somebody who found a lot to like about all his films, including his lesser ones like 'Alien 3' and 'Panic Room'.

Despite being often considered a remake, personally prefer to call it a second adaptation of the book. The book is a fantastic read, and as an adaptation while it is condensed and has some changes Fincher's film still adheres to the basic tone of the book as does the Swedish version. Of the two versions, the Swedish version just gets the edge for its incredible atmosphere complete with bleakness, chills, shocks and is more authentic, with Noomi Rapace burning the screen enigmatically with her presence.

Where Fincher's film improves over the previous version are in four areas. One is the production values, which are far more audacious here. The cinematography, both bleakly moody and exquisite to look at, is more cinematic and perfectly captures the frozen landscape which is like a character in itself. The film is very tightly edited too in a way that is distinctively Fincher. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' music score is another winner of theirs, it is haunting and gives a really unnerving vibe, combined with some clever sound mixing. The script, even when condensed, is more polished and tighter and also has more flow. While Lisbeth is a fascinating and complex character in the Swedish film, the Lisbeth in Fincher's film has even more complexity and more variation of emotions.

Fincher's direction is exemplary, showing a mastery of visual style and mood setting, ensuring that the film stays intriguing throughout the length. In lesser hands and with less assured pacing, with the long running time 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' could have been a long haul but had plenty of intrigue. Much of the storytelling is gripping, and while not as authentic or quite as masterful in atmosphere like the Swedish counterpart was it has its fair share of chills, twists and turns (without being convoluted or illogical) and shock value as well as a murky bleakness. Contrary to what some believe, this second adaptation did have point (was fearing it wouldn't), as it made the story more accessible and gave it more exposure.

Good acting helps. Daniel Craig is very wisely restrained, the character should have a quiet determination and dignity which Craig handles very well. Christopher Plummer is simply terrific as well, one of his best performances in recent years, while Stellan Skasgard is frighteningly demented and Yorick van Wageningen is unsettlingly sadistic. Robin Wright does her best with a shallow character. Best of all is a magnificent Rooney Mara, such a multi-layered performance and sees Mara not just playing the role but disappearing into it. See her appearance for example, so committed that when you see her in other films you would not believe that it's the same person.

There are faults however. Did not think much of the Gothic James Bond-like opening sequence that just felt jarring and out of place. Nor with the accents, which were a mix for some of the actors of having one too heavy or thick (Wright) or not attempting one at all (Craig). The decision to use both English and Swedish in some scenes did have a tendency to confuse, while the central relationship (mostly successfully done) did feel underdeveloped and, even for characters that are the heart of the story, takes over the story a little too much somewhat.

All in all, almost as good as the Swedish version and better than both of that film's heavily flawed but still worthy sequels. 8/10 Bethany Cox

I saw the original trilogy of this. The American version pales vastly in comparison. The fact that the sequels were never made is quite telling.

If the scene of the opening credits already affirms that it will be a heavy dip in a violent world, covered with dense blackness and incendiary, what follows is an attempt to reveal this evil once hidden behind the power and the many untruths that people from the story are trying to impose itself. The corrupt businessman to the meticulous killer, maybe even beyond that.

The great ambition of the film is pervaded all these facts by the figure that resonates with insane intensity of credits lost in the narrative development, Lisbeth Salander cultivates in her "inability to live socially" - which the state condemns a hallucinatory force in her proper strangeness of being. Her impenetrability marks the film, or perhaps the latter is molded to it. And it is in the journalistic curiosity that Mikael and Lisbeth in the particular vehemence that the entire film unfolds, not only the desire of Blomkvist to uncover the truth and try to prove to himself that after all is still a work in a universe capable unfair, but also a woman afflicted with many cruelties, far from innocent, but that is the search for a killer of women the desire to exterminate this scum of men who mistreated, echoing ghosts of Christmases past that the film does not reveal, but it suggests. Salander is the driving force that has long, affecting Mikael and the rising tension, which grows, in an investigation of a past that resonates even today.

David Fincher here is in the same technical finesse of Social Network", but quite superior to echo the masterpiece of director who is "Zodiac." He is able to develop his work respecting the genius of suspense that Stieg Larsson writes in the text at the same time deepens the personalities of his intriguing characters, from a family background that exudes decadent bitterness, wickedness and misogyny that characterize the protagonists to be precisely to the contrary, whether feminism is a transgressor of Lisbeth or the breakup of this family structure represented by Mikael, all enrolled in a theatre now conscious and well thought out.

I liked this movie, I liked the second half of the movie better though. However I thought the acting was really really good, Rooney Mara definitely did very well in this movie and transformed herself into this character. I still haven't watched the original ones, I heard they are still much better than these newer movies. Also I need to read the book, but overall it was really good I enjoyed the cinematics and acting.

Having never seen the original Swedish trilogy, I can’t compare the two films. And having never read the books, I tried but found it to be incredibly dry for the brief page count I made it through, I can’t say how it compares either. In fact, the source material has never had much of an interest for me. I only saw this because I’m such a fan of David Fincher. And he delivers a solid film, but it’s by no means perfect and it feels strangely beneath his immense talents.

I won’t repeat the plot, which by now everyone should be at least vaguely familiar with, so instead I’d like to focus in on the technical aspects of the film. The film opens with a powerful bang that the rest of the film never quite matches. I’m, of course, talking about the opening title sequence in which the entirety of the trilogy’s technological and psycho-sexual complexities are enacted over an avant-garde cover of “Immigrant Song.” As oil drenched versions of our two main characters morph, violent tear each other apart, or have computer wires wrap them up like poisonous vines, everything we need to know about this pulpy series is played out before our eyes. The rest of the film feels almost unnecessary by comparison.

And, as with The Social Network, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver an electronic score which goes back and forth from icy, remote textures that recall that darkest of the New Romantics as envisioned by modern day technology, and a more Industrial Rock sound that wouldn’t seem out-of-place on a Nine Inch Nails record. I hope, should they make the other two films, they’ll come back and expand on the soundscapes that have been created thus far for the franchise.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is blessed with a remarkable cast from top to bottom. Daniel Craig does a variation of his James Bond performance, but instead of being wildly competent and a real user of women, he turns that archetype upside down and creates a portrait of man who is a bit of a womanizer but is also very bruised, emasculated and dependent upon the help of others. Christopher Plummer, always a welcome sight, Joely Richardson and Stellan Skarsgard are given juicy and prominent supporting roles and turn out fantastic performances.

The rest of the cast is uniformly strong if without making a lasting impression. But Rooney Mara as Lisbeth, the main role and much like Scarlet O’Hara a coveted woman’s role for the ages, is something of a revelation. Sure her accent is wobbly and a bit of a mess, but she is fearless in her performance. When decked out in full-on Goth/Punk mode she is a spectre of techno-geek gone horribly wrong. And like how Travis Bickle wore his Mohawk as a suit of armor, so too does Mara. Her performance isn’t perfect, it’s frayed around the edges, but it’s a great leading role for new starlet.

Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs. The animating force in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy — incarnated on screen first by Noomi Rapace and now, in David Fincher’s adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” by Rooney Mara — Lisbeth is an outlaw feminist fantasy-heroine, and also an avatar of digital antiauthoritarianism.
Her appeal arises from a combination of vulnerability and ruthless competence. Lisbeth can hack any machine, crack any code and, when necessary, mete out righteous punitive violence, but she is also (to an extent fully revealed in subsequent episodes) a lost and abused child. And Ms. Mara captures her volatile and fascinating essence beautifully. Hurt, fury and calculation play on her pierced and shadowed face. The black bangs across her forehead are as sharp and severe as an obsidian blade, but her eyebrows are as downy and pale as a baby’s. Lisbeth inspires fear and awe and also — on the part of Larsson and his fictional alter ego, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played in Mr. Fincher’s film by Daniel Craig) — a measure of chivalrous protectiveness.

She is a marvelous pop-culture character, stranger and more complex than the average superhero and more intriguing than the usual boy wizards and vampire brides. It has been her fate, unfortunately, to make her furious, inspiring way through a series of plodding and ungainly stories.

The Swedish screen version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” directed by Niels Arden Oplev, often felt like the very long pilot episode of a television crime show, partly because of Larsson’s heavy-footed clumsiness as a storyteller. Despite the slick intensity of Mr. Fincher’s style, his movie is not immune to the same lumbering proceduralism. There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching “Cold Case” or “Criminal Minds,” but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques. Hold your breath, it’s a time for a high-speed Internet search! Listen closely, because the chief bad guy is about to explain everything right before he kills you!

It must be said that Mr. Fincher and the screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, manage to hold on to the vivid and passionate essence of the book while remaining true enough to its busy plot to prevent literal-minded readers from rioting. (There are a few significant changes, but these show only how arbitrary some of Larsson’s narrative contrivances were in the first place.) Using harsh and spooky soundtrack music (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) to unnerving and powerful effect, Mr. Fincher creates a persuasive ambience of political menace and moral despair.

He has always excelled at evoking invisible, nonspecific terrors lurking just beyond the realm of the visible. The San Francisco of “Zodiac” was haunted not so much by an elusive serial killer as by a spectral principle of violence that was everywhere and nowhere, a sign of the times and an element of the climate. And the Harvard of “The Social Network,” with its darkened wood and moody brick, seemed less a preserve of gentlemen and scholars than a seething hive of paranoia and alienation.

Mr. Fincher honors Larsson’s muckraking legacy by envisioning a Sweden that is corrupt not merely in its ruling institutions but in the depths of its soul. Lisbeth and Mikael — whose first meeting comes around the midpoint of the movie’s 158-minutes — swim in a sea of rottenness. They are not quite the only decent people in the country, but their enemies are so numerous, so powerful and so deeply entrenched that the odds of defeating them seem overwhelming.

Mikael, his career in ruins and his gadfly magazine in jeopardy after a libel judgment, is hired by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), to investigate a decades-old crime. Dysfunction would be a step up for the Vanger clan, who live on a secluded island and whose family tree includes Nazis, rapists, alcoholics, murderers and also, just to prevent you from getting the wrong impression, Stellan Skarsgard, the very epitome of Nordic nastiness.

The Vangers are monstrous, with a few exceptions, but far from anomalous. The gruesome pattern of criminality that Lisbeth and Mikael uncover is a manifestation of general evil that spreads throughout the upper echelons of the nation’s economy and government. The bad apples in that family are just one face of a cruel, misogynist ruling order that also includes Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), the sadistic state bureaucrat who is Lisbeth’s legal guardian. And everywhere she and Mikael turn there are more bullying, unprincipled and abusive men.

Sexual violence is a lurid thread running through “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and Mr. Fincher approaches it with queasy, teasing sensationalism. Lisbeth’s dealings with Bjurman include a vicious rape and a correspondingly brutal act of revenge, and there is something prurient and salacious about the way the initial assault is filmed. The vengeance, while graphic, is visually more circumspect.

And when Mikael and Lisbeth interrupt their sleuthing for a bit of nonviolent sex, we see all of Ms. Mara and quite a bit less of Mr. Craig, whose naked torso is by now an eyeful of old news. This disparity is perfectly conventional — the exploitation of female nudity is an axiom of modern cinema — but it also represents a failure of nerve and a betrayal of the sexual egalitarianism Lisbeth Salander argues for and represents.

Still, it is her movie, and Ms. Mara’s. Mr. Craig is an obliging sidekick, and the other supporting actors (notably Robin Wright as Mikael’s colleague and paramour and Donald Sumpter as a helpful detective) perform with professionalism and conviction. Mr. Fincher’s impressive skill is evident, even as his ambitions seem to be checked by the limitations of the source material and the imperatives of commercial entertainment.

There is too much data and not enough insight, and local puzzles that get in the way of larger mysteries. The story starts to fade as soon as the end credits run. But it is much harder to shake the lingering, troubling memory of an angry, elusive and curiously magnetic young woman who belongs so completely to this cynical, cybernetic and chaotic world without ever seeming to be at home in it.

NYT

Based on a Swedish Novel published in 2005, made its English Debut in 2008.

This recent 2011 adaption is quite a gripping one, which has made his way to Oscars Nomination for 2012.

While the film’s two hour and 38 minute run-time is likely to turn off some moviegoers who don’t enjoy sitting that long for one movie in a theater, it’s hard to imagine any onscreen scene or exchange that doesn’t belong in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and that is the beauty of the movie that keep the viewers gripped and mystified under the story line.

This movie without question one of the most provocative films of 2011 – and will deliver a compelling ride for die-hard fans of the book series, dramatic thriller enthusiasts, as well as anyone who enjoys Fincher’s darker works.

The Girl With Dragon Tattoo, is wonderfully directed by David Fincher, what impresses me is that Rooney Mara, has taken the role of Lisbeth Salander seriously and with professional-approach, and no doubt a hard-work brought her Oscar-nomination. I have been fan of original Swedish version, and I was repeatedly thinking, whether if this movie would impress me or not, since I came to know about David Fincher, attached to the project, I imagined the dedication and mastery Fincher provides to his project; and no doubt the result is all there! A near perfect movie!

Fantastic adaptation!
Once again, David Fincher can't disappoint! I changed completely my opinion about Daniel Craig; looks like Mr. Bond is not just a pretty face on the screen, but a really good actor!
Rooney Mara deserve all the congratulation she can have; the little Erica Albright who pass completely unnoticed in The Social Network reveals herself as a future actress that we can count with!

Well done!

***************SPOILER ALERT***************
Unfortunately for me this movie doesn't do it.
As much as I loved and rooted for the Swedish (original) movie and series, primarily because the characters looked and acted so real, this American version is plain pitiful.

The titles/intro, not to mention the music throughout the movie, were one of the worst I've ever seen. So already there, I wasn't thrilled...

Rooney Mara is the worst interpretation of Lisbeth, who (in the Swedish movie, tv series and book on which everything is based) is not prone to show emotions. I regret to say that in several scenes of this American movie by Fincher, emotions are clearly visible on the character's face/throat. Plus, I really felt that she was trying to 'imitate' the original Lisbeth actress, Noomi Rapace.
Daniel Craig is not at his best, but in some scenes, his performance stands out (towards the end).
Plummer, lucky for us, is not on much, and quite honestly, he does not give a great interpretation either.
The other downside for me is that (aside from having seen the original movie/tv series) Stellan Skarsgard, often and particularly recently, plays bad guys - I've quite frankly, never seen him play a good guy in any movie.
Robin Wright looked so dull! And I usually appreciate her performances.
However, the director is to blame here as normally, these actors give out wonderful performances.

Also note the difference of ending for this US remake. Nothing to do with the book or the Swedish movie/tv series, which clearly showed and mentioned Harriet had gone to Australia where she started a new life.

However, the one good thing the movie has is the photography. The scenery shown is amazingly beautiful and captivating. And the location scouting obviously paid off. Two stars.