'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ trailer looks excellent

A four minute-long trailer for David Fincher’s ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ has premiered online, teasing the film’s sinister mystery plot and impeccable visual style.

Sony generated a good deal of positive buzz for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last week, during early screenings of the Straw Dogs remake - where it premiered some eight minutes of footage from director David Fincher ’s take on the late Stieg Larsson’s international best-selling novel.

Now a nearly four minute-long trailer for the film has been released online, offering everyone a better look at Fincher’s latest Noir thriller - including, Rooney Mara’s turn as punk Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander, the film’s stylishly gloomy mise en scène (re: visual design), and newly-minted Oscar-winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ foreboding score.

It bears mentioning again that while there will definitely be similarities between Fincher’s version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev’s acclaimed adaptation, the former is not actually a remake of the latter. In fact, several key members of the Fincher production - including screenwriter Steve Zaillian and star Daniel Craig - have made it known that they refused to even watch Oplev’s film - so that their interpretation of Larsson’s story and characters would be truly their own.

For those not familiar with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, here’s a synopsis for Fincher’s adaptation:

The film is based on Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling novel centering on a murder mystery looking as far back as 40 years at the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families. All these years later, her aged uncle (Christopher Plummer) continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist (Craig), a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander (Mara). Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.

Now check out the official Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trailer (via iTunes Movie Trailers) below:

Mara very much appears to have made the role of Salander in Girl With the Dragon Tattooher own. Physically, she resembles the character - as described by Larsson - perfectly; she also has the anti-heroine’s awkward conduct and defensively introverted mannerisms down pat (her accent is pretty good too).

The rest of the cast likewise looks more than solid, including Craig as the strong-willed, yet vulnerable Blomkvist; Plummer as the dignified, yet tormented elder, Henrik Vanger; Stellan Skarsgård as the shifty Martin Vanger; and especially Yorick van Wageningen as Lisbeth’s unscrupulous and abusive “caretaker,” Nils Bjurman.

That Girl With the Dragon Tattoo looks to also excel on the technical side of things should come as no surprise. Fincher is working with a fantastic color palette here, ranging from the amber-tinted flashbacks to the Vanger estate, forty years in the past, to the bleak and restrained visuals of the wintery present. It nicely compliments the troubling and often outright disturbing nature of the plot - which is succinctly, yet efficiently, outlined in the film’s latest trailer - as does Reznor and Ross’ haunting electronica soundtrack.

While we can heap praise on Fincher’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all day - and, based on this preliminary footage, there’s good reason to - that doesn’t mean this will be the movie that finally brings the acclaimed filmmaker Oscar glory. There have been many a great Noirish mystery tale made throughout Hollywood’s history (see: Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, etc.), but the edgier and more adult they are in tone (a la Dragon Tattoo), the harder it seems to be for the Academy to fully embrace them.

Then again - who cares about Oscars, we just want to see a kickass movie, right? Judging by this new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo footage - and the popular rapidly-edited Dragon Tattoo teaser - that’s exactly what Fincher aims to deliver.

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo arrives in U.S. theaters on December 21st, 2011.

Source: iTunes Movie Trailers