Friday, April 20, 2012

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Fincher – 2011 – USA  

I know nothing about the other series of films or the books or anything having to do with the whole “Girl” franchise, so I can’t compare how well David Fincher’s film does this or that.  I can only react to it as is, and my reaction is that it is a very striking looking and effectively bleak disappointment.  From its uber-cool opening credit sequence and overall feeling of doom, the table is set for a raw and relentless thriller.  But what we end up with is an excruciatingly protracted mystery that is solved not through activity but through talking, talking, driving places, thinking out loud, and more talking.  Like Twilight and Ron Howard’s reprehensible Da Vinci Code movies, no one’s patience or backside is to be spared from every single incident out of a bestselling kitsch book being dutifully recreated on screen, whether it’s appropriate cinematically or not.  As a moviegoer, I don’t go into a film laboring to guess what’s going to happen – (there are far more important things that being surprised by a climactic revelation) – but I have to admit that as the story began I asked a very simple question and this indeed turned out to be the big solution, only some two-and-a-half hours later.  All I can say is that when a seemingly minor character is played by a far too important actor, it probably means they’re going to end up being commensurately important to the plot later on.  I’m also extremely bored with the whole concept of a wonder-woman super-agent who can beat anyone in hand-to-hand combat, is a computer genius, and is sexually omnivorous as per the fantasies of male screenwriters; you know, the kind of character that seems to be the bread-and-butter of actresses like Angelina Jolie and Zoe Saldana. 

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