The first half hour or so of watching The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was kind of hard for me to get over the hump of this literally being a shot for shot remake of Män som hatar kvinnor. I had it in my mind that there is just no way that I can give this Remake anything higher than 3 1/2 Stars. It's not that there is anything wrong with David Fincher's film. The acting was fantastic, the cinematrography was stunning and it had some of those classic Fincher shots that you know very well. It's just that the original film was still fresh in my mind and the remake wasn't offering me any surprises at all. I knew what was coming up next, long before the current scenes played out.

This is a very hard film for me to rate because there are things that I prefer from the original film and things that I like in this one more. I thought the best thing about this movie was definitely Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander who was just as captivating as Noomi Rapace was in the original. As good as Mara was, I think I still prefer Rapace performance. That's not to say there was anything wrong with Mara's performance. But watching her, you can't help but compare the two. It's an impossiblity. The one thing that I liked in the Remake was the ending, where we get an expanded look at Lisbeth draining and moving accounts which wasn't much in the original film.

I think both films are solid. If the Remake was in fact the first one to come out, I would probably have given it 5 Stars for sure. But since it didn't, it will have to suffice with 4 Stars. Like I said, this is a unique situation and a hard film to judge on its own when the original still overshadows it. Definitely worth a Rent for sure. I do look forward to the planned sequels.

I went NUTS when I saw the opening sequence.  David Fincher does great openings (see this great retrospective of David Fincher openings) but this one that's just black and oily and ****-up... it kinda reminded me of James Bond openings but with pierced balls... and I mean that as a great compliment.

One thing that got me was the **** scene.  Not that it was rough and crazy (it was... particularly the end) but I had written a **** scene in a book I'm doing and just thought "that's what *I* was gonna do (except for the tattoo), I gotta change that now!"

The Red Camera style actually had a nice bit of fridge brilliance to it because it made it look like the Social Network, two movies where computers play a big important part.  I'm now starting to associate that look with that style, if I want to write a long moody dialogue-heavy script I keep thinking now "gotta be shot on Red!"  He set a style.