The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Directed by David Fincher
Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the disappearance of a weary patriarch's niece from 40 years ago. He is aided by the pierced, tattooed, punk computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander. As they work together in the investigation, Blomkvist and Salander uncover immense corruption beyond anything they have ever imagined.
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38 films that influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
What critics say influenced The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Fincher is not passionately engaged by the Swedish scene, and I feel that had he re-created Larsson's book in California it might have achieved an illuminating anger that matched Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, a film with significant parallels with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
As the investigation covers more monstrousness, and as Mikael and Lisbeth come to recognize each other as strange bedfellows who may well be kindred spirits, Fincher evokes, ever so subtly, great past thrillers such as " Repulsion " and " Blow-Up " while building a completely in-the-now sense of dread that's been largely missing in contemporary cinema since Hitchcock and Kubrick were at their creative peaks.
There’s a long history of solving mysteries by photo editing, and in watching Dragon Tattoo I was taken back to the seductive power of images in its early prototype: Antonioni’s Blow-Up .
There’s some nifty Blow-Up -style business here as Blomkvist strings together these images, reconstructing the events of her last known day on earth.
The hacker scenario promised in the opening credits never pays off, unless the essence of anonymous espionage involves Google and Wikipedia; Fincher guides our attention toward endless visual cues that explain Salander’s attitude better, apparently, than he thought Mara could (the T-shirt she wears when first meeting Blomkvist, in a nod to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, reads “Fuck you you fucking fuck”).
Watching the redone-but-not-really Tattoo, I was reminded of Gus Van Sant's silly attempt to remake Psycho, in which Vince Vaughn replaced Anthony Perkins, and Van Sant re-created virtually every shot of the original.
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It also, not unlike Zodiac , owes a bit of debt to Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men in the way the poring over of codes, files, parchment, photographs, digital photogaphs, scribblings, notebooks, and dates is made positively thrilling, able even to match the scenes of methodical torture, anal rape, car chases, visceral intimidations, fistfights, explosions, and gallows humor not necessarily found in Pakula’s film.
Highlighting Fincher's background in music videos, Girl opens with a pulsing goth-rock cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song' by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross while fetish-infused visuals of oil-drenched figures writhe across the screen, not unlike the introduction to 1999's Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
In 1936 the Hollywood mogul David O Selznick bought the Swedish movie Intermezzo , signed up its star Ingrid Bergman and remade it in 1939 under the same title with Bergman repeating her original role in an otherwise British and American cast.
…vengeance scene since Margaux Hemingway’s in Lamont Johnson’s unjustly forgotten Lipstick.
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It's certainly not the case that this was an unnecessary remake of Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Swedish version, a great and faithful adaptation of the novel but by no means a consummate picture warranting no further attempts (compared to, say, Point Break.
Films like 2002's "Insomnia" (a remake of Erik Skoldbjærg's excellent original and a rare misstep for Christopher Nolan) and 1993's "Point of No Return" (a rather pale remake of 1990's brilliant Luc Besson film "Nikita") were far inferior to their non-American predecessors.