Dark and suspenseful- Overall Well Done

Rating: 9/10 (7 February 2014)

Thanks to David Fincher, the world now has Rooney Mara to admire (and stare at). She plays the Goth misfit Lisbeth in this film, her first lead role, and she's actually pretty good. She does revenge particularly well. A fierce character, while not dominating every scene, Rooney dominates the film. She is the one we think a hour later.
I will not try and compare her performance with Noomi Repace's, whom I also love to watch. Both do Lisbeth their own way.
When Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) gets into some political hot water and needs to get out of Stockholm, he takes a job as an investigator in the Swedish countryside trying to solve the mystery of a disappeared girl, but there are people that do not want him to to find the answers. Eventually he teams up with Lisbeth and they work on the case together.
In the first part of the film, the intersecting story lines between the two main characters are done with skill. Many scenes are not action or dialogue based (they are just visual), yet all they all add to the story. The decision to film this version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Sweden, as opposed to swapping it out for some American city, was a well made one.
Since so much of the story is told in images, kudos goes to the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall. Both are long time collaborators of Fincher, and they've both won multiple Oscars, including one for this film. I get the suspicion that they worked extra overtime on this movie; there are just tons and tons of scenes, a complete 180 from the style of Panic Room.
The chemistry between Rooney and Craig really builds throughout the film as the two work great together. The irregularity of the pairing makes it much more interesting and intriguing to follow than most typical, on-screen romances.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most depressing of all Fincher productions, but it's still pretty low down there, and I mean this in the best way possible. It's either always raining or cold outside while sometimes this environment is contrasted against interior scenes that are pristine, white, clean. Tension. Clean rooms don't seem to appear often in Fincher films, and as expected there are many others that are dark and dirty.
The film ends in a reasonably satisfying way leaving us hanging, waiting for the sequel.
Errata: I could have gone without the final Stockholm scene when Lisbeth is riding her motorbike through the streets as it snows. A similar situation occurred in The Wolverine (2013) where Logan rode a motorbike through the mountains in Japanese winter. These situations would never occur. Motorbikes and snow are never a very convincing combination (for me anyway).
More reviews at getthebonsaw.blogspot.com