Niels Arden Oplev
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I will give writer Ben Ripley credit for not just slavishly copying Joel Schumacher’s 1990 original, which was not a particularly good movie but became a surprise box office smash because it costarred Julia Roberts and was released in the wake of Pretty Woman.
The original also benefited from the newly minted stardom of Julia Roberts , whose Pretty Woman had recently set the box office afire.
Julia Roberts brought along everybody who had just seen her previous movie, Pretty Woman.
Back in 1990, Flatliners made a bit of a splash (grossing the equivalent of $114 million today) largely due to historical accident: It happened to be audiences’ first opportunity to see Julia Roberts after Pretty Woman made her an instant superstar.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Themes Plot
His movie at times may remind one of Blow-Up (1966) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
This film has been compared to "The Silence of the Lambs," but that is an easy and inaccurate assessment.
Like Thomas Harris' novels (and subsequent screen adaptations) Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior.
Based on the international bestseller by Stieg Larsson and already wildly successful in its country of origin, Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has drawn comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs and a remake is reportedly being eyed by David Fincher (with George Clooney and Carey Mulligan being named as possible stars).
Once the film has burned through that initial flush of concept, Flatliners is just another Final Destination or Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Residency.
What follows is a bland, flatly executed and joyless slog that manages to take elements of the original Flatliners , Final Destination and every single ghost movie since the mid 2000s and squander them in an inert tale that fails to leave any real impression.
It never feels distinctive and often has the air of just another entry in the Final Destination series.
The Damned (1969)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Themes
Niels Arden Oplev's perfunctory adaptation of Larsson's first book veers from Visconti's The Damned to Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs without the decadence or the thrills of either.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Themes
Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!" is being positioned as the "spiritual sequel" to "Dazed and Confused," the director's exuberant 1993 ode to high school life in the 1970s.
His movie at times may remind one of Blow-Up (1966) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
But as David Fincher’s redo of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” recently attested, it’s hard, if not downright impossible, to improve on the original.
Hard Candy (2006)
Directed by David Slade
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Characters
American remakes are in the works, and it's hard to imagine who could replace her: Ellen Page was gripping as a slightly similar character in "Hard Candy," and she may be a closer physical match to the prose Salander, but Rapace will be a tough act to compete with.
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)
Directed by Lucio Fulci
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Films whose florid labels such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, and Black Belly of the Tarantula gave an arty dimension to what were basically paperback thrillers.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Directed by Dario Argento
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Films whose florid labels such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, and Black Belly of the Tarantula gave an arty dimension to what were basically paperback thrillers.
The Lion King (2019)
Directed by Jon Favreau
influenced by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Characters
She was creating waves globally as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , which was based on the bestselling book.
Another piece to this overly complicated puzzle is that when Glass arrives to the scene of the initial joint attack, he discovers that three crew members are still alive in the Russian sub, including the captain, Andropov (the late Michael Nyqvist, best known for being the male lead in the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films), who becomes key to the American’s mission.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced Dead Man Down (2013), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Oplev, of course, directed the original version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , which was an international hit in 2009 but, more importantly, was based on the writing of Stieg Larsson.
The slow-simmering potboiler is the first American film for Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, who created such a cold, calculating thrill, with Rapace as his muse, in the 2009 Swedish version of Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."
Two damaged souls thirsty for revenge?and maybe a little companionship?collide in "Dead Man Down," a slack neo-noir crime drama directed by Niels Arden Oplev (2010's superior Danish adaptation of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo").
Those familiar with Stieg Larsson's trilogy and the Swedish film adaptations of that will know I'm obviously talking about the first entry in that work: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."
As alarming as it was, it may not have shocked devotees of Stieg Larsson's phenomenally successful international best-seller, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and its two sequels.
Though it doesn't bring with it the box office clout of the Twilight books (maybe it's the rapes, incest, serial killings and bisexuality), Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is its own kind of juggernaut, with 15 million copies in print and a small legion of fanboys eager to support the film's director, David Fincher (The Social Network, Fight Club, Benjamin Button), holiday returns should be good for this slice of psychopathic entertainment.
For a little while, the NDE returnees get supercharged brain activity, like Bradley Cooper in that Limitless movie.
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Directed by Ron Howard
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Themes
Nazis also play a key role in this cinematic version of the first novel in deceased Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” though unlike kindred best-seller phenom The Da Vinci Code, this tale is less about fancifully rewriting history than merely indulging in exploitation-fiction devices.
As with Howard's impersonal The Da Vinci Code, the film is professionally shot, ably acted, and edited.
Like Thomas Harris' novels (and subsequent screen adaptations) Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior.
But it’s hard to say what the director of Seven and Zodiac could bring to a film that’s already as dark, moody, and vice-focused as Seven, and as intricately procedural as Zodiac.
Like David Fincher's Zodiac, this is a hypnotically visual movie about research into an unsolved crime.
Mystic River (2003)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Themes
In recent screen-adapted crime fiction — Dennis Lehane's Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, for example — detectives are heroes and children are victims.
Gone Girl (2014)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Plot
Just as Hitchcock produced his most unconventional and memorable work in the most conventional of genres (particularly 1958’s twisted romantic thriller Vertigo, a film to which Gone Girl owes a great debt), Fincher is at his most masterful when reworking the familiar—the police procedural in Seven (1995) and Zodiac (2007), the mystery thriller in The Game (1997), the biopic in The Social Network (2010)—and Gone Girl will surely rank as one of his strongest films, especially after the vague sense of disappointment that accompanied The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).
Riders of Justice (2020)
Directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
influenced by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Based on a concept by Anders and Nikolaj Arcel ( The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , 2009), Riders delicately balances the terror of loss, the sheer void a sudden, unexpected death creates, with humor born out of natural interaction.