Fincher's "Dragon Tattoo" Heats Up

Now this thing means business!! Columbia Pictures has released a second trailer for their much anticipated anti-Christmas release "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," with David Fincher directing Daniel Craig & Rooney Mara in the roles of crusading muckraker journalist Mikael Blomkvist & Sweden's favorite bisexual goth-punk hacker Lisbeth Salander.  The first teaser released early in the summer was propulsive and hypnotizing if not pretty standard in terms of what audiences would expect from a Fincher take on "Dragon Tattoo," emblazoning the minute-long clip with huge gritty font that announced it as "THE...FEEL...BAD...MOVIE...OF...CHRISTMAS" to a Led Zeppelin score and giving fans of Steig Larsson's literary phenomenon Millenium trilogy something to squeal about thanks to our first peeks at Rooney Mara as Lisbeth, etc.

So along comes this totally rad full-length trailer, which runs nearly four minutes and narrowly misses a single plot point from the book as it thumps along. What is clearer still with this latest clip is that Fincher isn't remaking the Swedish film trilogy, which was a big success internationally and in stateside art houses last year, surprise surprise. He's sticking closely to Larsson's original pages and giving the whole thing a typically Fincherian grime that promises to deliver exactly the adaptation "Dragon Tattoo" deserves, and from Hollywood at that.

Most impressive of all, perhaps, is Mara's absolutely spot-on Lisbeth accent, which gives the virtual unknown a perfect opportunity to totally become the iconic postmodern heroine rather than merely an actress playing Lisbeth. Robin Wright also speaks in a notably Nordic accent, and along with the rest of the cast heard speaking here (save Craig, it seems, who apparently couldn't be bothered to dial down his British accent and join the club full throttle), we now know that Fincher is aiming for authenticity over Hollywood revisionism, save speaking actual Swedish. This is a good sign.

Judging from this latest trailer, I'm leaning more and more toward the likelihood of a Best Actress Oscar play for Mara (though it won't be easy to emerge from the shadow of the original Swedish films' Lisbeth, played with Oscar-worthy excellence by Noomi Rapace), and the film's chances over all as an Awards Season contender are also picking up steam as December approaches. "Dragon Tattoo" is one of a small handful of big studio wild cards that aren't finished yet and will be skipping the obligatory fall film festival circuit entirely. The other big studio question marks that appear locked for Oscar contention despite the fact that nobody has seen them are Spielberg's gorgeous-looking epic adaptation of the smash stage production "War Horse," the magical realism-infused post-9/11 weeper "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock and directed by two-time Oscar-nominee Stephen Daldry ("The Hours," "The Reader"), and to a lesser extent the broader, fluffier-seeming Cameron Crowe picture "We Bought a Zoo," with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson + a zoo.

Check out the new trailer below, and the latest in a string of all-over-the-map poster-ish art for the movie below that...this one is a far cry from the controversial nipple-baring first one, which is covered intelligently and reasonably by Anne Thompson in "The Pornification of Lisbeth Salander" over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog at IndieWire. Oh, and if you're an HD purist, head over to Apple for the magnificently crisp high-def download. Otherwise, without further ado, BOOM: