The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
I’m not sure if there is an embargo on this film or not. They usually do that when a big-budget film is really bad. They took our phones before the screening too. Anyway, spoilers, but The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is boring. It’s 158 minutes of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara looking at photographs and books and using their MacBooks and then the killer is the only other character in the film. Much like The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, and So You Think You Can Dance, this was a book I didn’t read because I read good books and seem to be immune to the insecurities that draw so many to ubiquitous trash so I didn’t even know the killer was going to be Stellan Skarsgård but come on, they’re on an island with like four other people and he’s Stellan Skarsgård fo fuck’s sake.
What I don’t get is how David Fincher thought he was even remotely “pushing the boundaries” with this film. It’s like about at edgy as an Inspector Morse telemovie, except there is Rooney Mara with a leather jacket and piercings and there are Rooney Mara’s breasts. You know those kids in high school who dressed all alternative to show how different they were but were really just as mediocre as everyone else? That’s this whole film.
“You wouldn’t understand, you’re not different enough.”
Of course, Lisabeth (the different girl) is all fucked up because “she’s had a rough life” so that explains it, if her father hadn’t raped her or whatever she would have been blonde and smiled more and got a job in marketing. I went in thinking that the popularity of this series was owed to some exploration of what makes someone do disturbed things, that the superficial whodunit would be a mere plot device to reveal some inner world of the characters, that in their quest to uncover the truth about these heinous crimes they would encounter their most dangerous foe: THEMSELVES. Or something.
But no, it’s Stellan Skarsgård.
Which leaves one wondering: why make this film? Why spend $100 million to have some cheesy Fincher-self-parody-opening-credit sequence and avoid reading subtitles? My hypothesis for this colossal misfire is that David Fincher is actually morphing into Christopher Nolan.
