RED BAND TRAILER: 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

Lisbeth Salander, the anti-heroine of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling books, is nobody’s idea of a sweetheart, but the new David Fincher-directed adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo clearly has a sense of humor about that.

A new teaser trailer (apparently pirated, though the shaky camera adds to the surreptitious vibe) actually teases itself — identifying the Dec. 21 film as the “feel bad movie of Christmas.”

See it after the jump …

Though the teaser plays out with rapid-fire imagery set to Trent Reznor and Karen O’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, we get our first major glimpses of star Rooney Mara (remember her, looking much more preppy and dumping Mark Zuckerberg hard in the opening of The Social Network?) as the gothic, damaged super-sleuth. There seems to be less of Daniel Craig, and his sullied journalist Mikael Blomkvist appears to be far more vulnerable — or at least far more easily wounded — than Salander, which is as it should be. He’s kind of the damsel in distress in this tale, no?

The footage in the teaser surprisingly plays out in near chronological order, practically the entire story with each scene reduced to a single fraction-of-a-second shot. It could almost be a black-and-white film, with such stark contrast between the snow and so much use of shadow and silhouette (including a little side-nudity that probably earns this clip its “red band” NSFW status.)

Another interesting note: the trailer doesn’t say “from the best-selling book” it says “from the international best-selling trilogy,” which suggests Columbia’s extreme confidence in this one. Plans are already in place to shoot the sequels, though it’s unclear if Fincher is on board for them. His participation will be a must, since he clearly gives the Larsson story the cold, gritty menace he previously demonstrated so well in Se7en and Zodiac. No one can beat him at modern noir.

So fans of the books — how do you feel about what you see?

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