The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) ***/*****

David Fincher’s new adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s first Millenium Series story, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is a pretty unique tale. It simultaneously details a shamed reporter’s (Daniel Craig) attempt at solving a decades old murder that took place on a secluded Swedish island populated by a wealthy family of Nazi sympathizers and introduces us to a tattooed, standoffish computer hacker (Rooney Mara) who is struggling to deal with a lifetime of abuse at the hands of men. It doesn’t seem like these two stories should be able to coexist, but they do, and they even begin to weave together in intelligent ways that produce very interesting and very unique results.

I should have walked out of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo thinking that it was one of the most original mystery movies that I had seen in a long time, but the whole time I was watching it I couldn’t help but compare it to two other films, and with good reason. This movie gets released while we’re still very much in the wake of both the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which just played most U.S. theaters last year and was very well received, and also Fincher’s previous film from a year ago, The Social Network, which I consider to be his best work. Those are some titanic movies to be in the shadow of, so how does this one measure up? Despite the fact that this is largely perfectly fine filmgoing on its own, I have to say, it doesn’t measure up very well.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some places where it does. The digital image here is the clearest, least plastic looking, and most beautiful I’ve seen since The Social Network. Digital photography is one thing that Fincher has definitely mastered, and both his eye for detail and his artistry puts this film visually on par with not only The Social Network, but also Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which was beautiful in its own right. The film manages to measure up in the acting department as well. Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara are both pitch perfect playing roles that I felt had already been brought to life by definitive performances. Even if pressed hard I wouldn’t be able to tell you who I prefer between their version and Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace’s version of the Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander characters. I even think you could mix the two acting duos up and get results just as good as you already do in both films; everyone here is just that talented.

There are too many ways that this film doesn’t match up with either The Social Network or its Swedish counterpart to not view it as a disappointment, however. One big place it falters is in the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score. I absolutely loved their moody yet infectious work on The Social Network and can hum their main theme in my head now, even after having not seen that film for over a year. The music they give us in Dragon Tattoo pales in comparison. It’s a bunch of dull pulsing noises, and there was one scene in particular that takes place in the office of Lisbeth’s state sanctioned ward where I didn’t know if what I was hearing was part of the film’s score or just the noise from a janitor using a floor buffer outside the door. That may have been intended for effect, but the effect is that your music is much more boring than it should have been.

The lack of that patented David Fincher flair is missing here as well. In The Social Network he took some fairly dry material and elevated it quite a bit with his unique approach to visual storytelling. Here, like in Zodiac, he seems to be muting his style in service of the story, which is best told after setting a very bleak, cold mood. As a matter of fact, the opening credit sequence, which features some models and some computer equipment getting covered in an inky substance and then doing some angry dancing, was by far the most dynamic, stylized aspect of the film. They felt like they were a little much for what ends up being a fairly standard, though interesting murder mystery story. Where is all of the modern edge and danger that the credit sequence promised? Most of this movie is a man in an isolated cabin going through old files, focusing on matters that happened in the late 60s, and chasing ghosts. If anything this story is old fashioned and stuffy, not as modern and cyberpunk as the opening credits and the brief interludes showing us Lisbeth’s life would have us believe. Which begs the question, why did Fincher choose to adapt this material at all? Especially when it had already been done so well just a year or two ago. In my opinion he would have been better served taking on something that gave him more of an opportunity to show off. If he wanted to go after something slick and cyberpunk I’m sure there are still about a million Neal Stephenson books out there waiting to be made into Hollywood adaptations. Who could go for a David Fincher directed Snow Crash?

While this Fincher film shares many of the good qualities of its Swedish counterpart, it shares some of its faults as well; but it also accentuates them. Most prominently, the length of this story and the way it’s structured create some pretty serious pacing problems. You have the main plot of the serial killer, which is very exciting, very immediate, and has life and death stakes, and then there’s the less overpowering B plot about Mikael Blomkvist’s crusade to expose a corrupt business man; comparatively it’s not as exciting. The problem here is that the more exciting story gets wrapped up long before the lesser one does, so we end up sitting around for another half hour of film after we’ve already gotten through what felt like the big climax. It makes a two and a half hour film feel like a three hour film, and for some reason the effect was even more pronounced here than in the Swedish one. During the first Dragon Tattoo movie I caught myself checking my watch once, here I was checking it every few minutes, which caused me to give this one a worse star rating than the original. And maybe that’s not a fair distinction to make. Maybe it just seemed worse here because I was watching a mystery story unravel for the second time rather than the first; but that’s what you get when you decide to remake a movie that just came out a year ago. Your version better be significantly better or at least significantly different to not feel completely redundant, and in that respect, Fincher fails.