The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I keep trying to get to the bottom of why, exactly, I feel like this movie is so misconceived. It's probably not worth the effort, and there's probably not just one reason I can boil it down to, but one big thing I have spent years trying to articulate that bothers me about this era of <PERSON> is the specific texture of slickness and how it overwhelms any sincere engagement with the material - the plasticky, CG-snow-assisted, soft-lit, ultra-stabilized, fast-cut, goth-Lexus-commercial vibes. This movie gestures towards moodiness, it gestures towards procedure, it gestures towards any number of earth-shattering emotional crises but it does so from the vantage point of a salesman, not a dramatist. No moment has any breath, no performance has any grit (I don't even like <PERSON>, but I don't think <PERSON> is a playable role as written). 952
It's watchable because it's been trimmed, polished, and lubricated to within an inch of its life, not because it's compelling. <PERSON> ass movie. $90 million and you can't even crash a real Range Rover because everything has to be art directed just so. Does it even matter that the case itself is a mess? Or is the image of a mystery all we need?
Anyway, it's still an improvement on the book, which is damn near unreadable. If anybody wants a piece of modern pulp that manages real thematic depth and some of the most visceral pit-of-stomach dread and disgust, and does so in half the pages with no aspirations toward prestige, I'd recommend reading Generation Loss by <PERSON>, which I hope nobody ever tries to film.
(Also this rewatch kind of made me appreciate The Killer even more, if only because <PERSON> somehow found the precisely correct material for his godforsaken aesthetic.) 698