The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Fincher (2011)

Plot
Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a reporter for the news paper Millenium, is sentenced to pay fines, as one of his articles includes false accusations against a CEO. Mikael soon gets a call from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), formely the CEO of Vangerkoncernen. Mikael decides too meet with Henrik, but what he doesn't know is that Henrik Vanger's right hand Frode (Steven Berkoff) has been checking up on Michael, with the help of hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).

Henrik Vanger wants Blomkvist to help find his niece's killer, who mocks him by sending a picture of a flower every year. A gift his niece used to give him on his birthday. Mikael borrows a small house close to Henrik Vangers mansion, and starts to dig into the family's history.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander tries to get trough, after her intendant gets a stroke Lisbeth's life is turned for the worse. After being sexually abused by her new intendant Nils Bjurman, she decides to get a revenge on him that he will never ever forget. At the same time, Blomkvist is starting to get somewhere in the case of Harriet Vanger's killer.

Opinion
This is a remake of a Swedish film that is really good. A film that is about two people working together before they even know they are. This is not the case in the American film. Lisbeth and Mikael are working in different places the whole time, and when the meet, for some reason they seem to be lovers since forever. Lisbeth has for some reason turned into a trusting, weak girl.

The un-swedishness of the stiff boring surroundings makes the film a poor choice if you like the original one. It seems like the director is using a lot of American, Swedish stereotypes. They look and behave like Americans think swedes does, and what they don't know, they make it american. This is not working, and everything from, dialogue to surroundings seems stiff and unnatural. It also annoys that they mix Swedish and English all the time. Keep it consistent, that would have been a bit better. I also find it weird that the American actors were speaking english poorly, and swedish poorly. Skarsgård were the only one actually speaking both languages the best.

There is no chemistry between the two actors either, and there is no conviction in their acting. It feels like they are just going trough the motions.

On top of that, there is a lot of things that you in the Swedish version can guess yourself too. Build you own story trough what happens in the plot, but in this case you can't build your own story. Everything, every little detail is shown, or told in the plot.

There are two things I can find that is good with the movie, and that is  1) the intro. It is computer animated and looks really good and 2) Stellan Skarsgård as Martin Vanger.

I will not recommend anyone to see if if you like the Swedish version. I will not recommend it anyway as the film is really awful.