Not quite the dragon.

The Girl with the Dragon tattoo
Directed by David Fincher

From the title credits sequence I knew what I had gotten myself into. A nineties style music video to a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song by Trent Reznor and company. Why?

Maybe I should have walked out right there, Fincher’s Dragon Tatoo is, more than a new adaptation of Stieg Larson’s bestseller, a completely unnecessary, by the numbers, remake of Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 superior film. Let’s keep in mind that these constant remakes are meant for American audiences that are too lazy to read subtitles.

While the original film’s acting, subdued direction, and mainly Noomi Rapace created a sense of believability for the amazing events portrayed, with Fincher we get all the trappings of Hollywood, fake accents, artificial acting, unbelievably pretty main characters, and big budget excess that give the film an all around artificiality. Some sequences that stand out as examples of this needless show off are Lisbeth’s subway fight and escape, which turns out as an Indiana Jones stunt, and an over the top explosion with avenger style close up to a gun in hand with flames in the background (because there has to be a big explosion).

If we believed Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander from the original, this time we get very forced acting from Roonie Mara, and it is difficult to avoid the comparison between the two actresses. The standardized beauty of Mara is no match for the much more unusual and foreign looking Rapace, which adds to Lisbeth’s status as an outcast in Swedish society.

Content wise we get the same story and despite the over the top liberties of Fincher, the real shocking aspects of the story are minimized. The violence, sexual and otherwise, is less shocking than in the original. All in all, the credit still goes to Stieg Larson who weaved a tale of misers, evil reptilian people out to destroy; the seemingly never ending Nazi threat still living amongst us, hiding in the shadows and acting like “normal” people.

The only aspect that could be seen as an improvement on the original is the technical execution, Fincher’s version is more cinematic and the cinematography really pushes the sense of the freezing arctic weather on the viewer. But just that is not really worth wasting two and a half hours to rewatch a bad cover version of a song you already know and love. If you are curious I would recommend to rent the original trilogy and spend an evening with Lisbeth Salander. You’ll need to read subtitles but you’ll get the real thing.