It's long, it's intense, it's abusive, it's fascinating, and it has some acute acting

Rating: 8/10 (8 April 2012)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
It's hard to just take this movie straight up--it's a very close and really excellent remake of an excellent and probably slightly more incisive Swedish original movie by the same name, and based on a book (three books actually) that a lot of people have read. But in one sentence, let me try.
The newer "Girl" is a tightly made, well seen, well acted, beautifully situated historical crime drama hampered by a little too much complexity, leading to too much explaining and not enough plain old happening.
The best of the film is brilliant stuff, fast and vigorous, compelling as much as the first version. The worst of the film repeats some problems of the first version, including abuse of the characters that borders on the sadistic.
A couple comparisons will help even those who haven't seen the 2009 film. Daniel Craig is a more handsome and a bit more polished an actor than the Swedish leading man, Michael Nyquist, but Nyquist is frankly more believable, more Swedish (of course), and a genuine original.
The two women who play the title character are an interesting parallel, their names even with odd echoes--Rooney and Noomi. Rooney Mara (a New Yorker with a pretty good accent) is the 2011 girl with the dragon tattoo, and her tattoo may be less impressive, but her intensity is in place. She gives the movie its ultimate edge. Noomi Rapace, a native Swede though of mixed background, has some edge in personality, a slightly quirky violence and a more believable detachment from people around here, going beyond simply refusing to shake anyone's hand. Rapace's performance is completely memorable, and as good as Mara is (and she is really good), Rapace is better--more distinctive, more beautifully awkward, and even, in the end, more convincing. Check it out--the first movie of the Swedish trilogy only, however.
There is something frankly weird about Fincher's whole enterprise when the Swedish original is so good, and so Fincher-esque already. Yes, Fincher adds more atmosphere, including some very "Seven" inspired rain and music (Trent again, with a Led Zeppelin twist over the astonishing and deflecting visuals in the opening credits). But what really is to be gained by remaking the movie so soon, and with such little original input? It's almost a grad student exercise with a superstar's production budget. (The answer, sadly, might be that they wanted to cash in on the phenomenon of the trilogy before it was too late, remembering the American public's aversion to movies with subtitles. It has made $100 million in profit so far.)
So we end up analyzing Fincher's "Dragon Tattoo" indirectly. It was made to echo the Oplev version from just two years earlier, and it does. Scene by scene, you'll find overlaps, and interesting shifts, and there must be a web page out there that compares the two movies. For me, having seen each movie once, the really big differences are: 1) a more taut, spare (and Swedish?) relationship between the two leads in the first version, which is really the core of the movie beyond the sensationalist Nazi/rape/money plot, and 2) a highly different ending in both feel and significance (which I won't give away).
Let's say you haven't seen either film. What to do? Well, if you love Fincher already, you'll want to see how he's doing. But if you want a movie with a little more space to it, a little less glitz and a little more honest intensity in the characters, see the Swedish one. If you see both, which isn't really necessary (they're incredibly similar), you might note the American version cost $90 million to make and the Swedish only $13.