Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Before I give my review of this movie I must preface this by saying three things: 1) I'm going to review the trailer before hand. (Promised someone I would.) 2) It was a loooooong movie. 3) This will probably be a loooooong post, so I hope you've got a ton of food stored somewhere.

TRAILER
Got to be one of the best trailers of the year, but then again, Sucker Punch had a good trailer and I heard that movie sucked. The trailer had a lot going for it, imagery, music, everything matched the beat, and all of it built up to the title of the film. The trailer is even more perfect because it serves as an analogy to all the hype built up about this movie. I'm sure you've heard of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (it won't make you a hipster if you have, unless you say you liked it before everyone else liked it.) It started as an award winning novel (later trilogy) and then was adapted to film by the Swedish thereby making TGWTDT (2011) a remake of a foreign film and a book-to-movie adaptation. All of this being said, I don't want to reveal my thoughts of the movie just yet, all you need to know is that it was an awesome trailer.

MOVIE
Alright, lets talk about the director, David Fincher. I've liked 4 out of the 5 movies by him. His first one, "Alien 3", sucked so hard I wonder how he even made it as a director. Then again, this is the guy who made Fight Club, Benjamin Button, and The Social Network all award winning wet dreams. So he's clearly a skilled director and it shows in TGWTDT. Every scene felt how it needed to feel and every image was captured almost perfectly. But then, I didn't really have a problem with Alien 3's directing, just the rest of it. So I'll move on from directing.

The acting was atrocious...ly amazing! As one of the people I saw the movie with said (and I'm paraphrasing): it's nice to see Daniel Craig as someone other than Bond. Rooney Mara, otherwise remembered as the chick Jessie Eisenberg bitched about in The Social Network, did all sorts of an amazing job, especially with her accent. I honestly thought they cast a foreign actress for the part, turns out Rooney's from New York, go figure. The rest of the cast is filled with a bunch of old famous people, so they obviously did good.

Now my final note of the film. So I hope I've kept you on the edge of your seat with what I thought about this film, just as the mystery of the film kept me on the edge of mine. But seeing as I've mostly given good notes, you can probably guess what I'm about to say.... I hated Alien 3... but I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Absolutely loved it. It was about 3 hrs long and had a good handful of moment where it could have ended. But just like in the Lord of the Rings, it had to close off a few things it set up in the film. No problem here with doing that, it makes the movie a far more rich experience to watch. I give it an A+, see the movie. One last thing, if topics such as rape, murder, or religion leave you with a feeling of unease, you may want to stay away from the movie, unless you think you can handle it, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo really is the feel bad movie of Christmas.