Rated R

Over the years, David Fincher has shown himself to be a director of risk, invention and vision, often taking on projects of surprising, and sometimes confounding, subject matter. Risk doesn’t always equal success, however. For every “Fight Club” there’s a “Panic Room”; for each “Zodiac,” there’s a “The Game.” Let’s just give “Alien3” a pass, it was his first feature, after all. But his ability to adapt difficult material, from the surreal “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to the hyper-real “Social Network”—each of which landed three Oscars apiece— has placed him in the circle of rare Hollywood directors allowed by the studios to choose their own assignments, with hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at their decisions.

At first glace, re-adapting Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular first novel, which already was made into a solid, if made-for-television-quality film in its native Sweden, might appear to be a pretty safe bet. Involving corporate malfeasance, sexual deviance, moral obscurity, Nazis, ne’er do wells and serial killing, the story touches on a good number of themes that apparently, for better or worse, remain close to Fincher’s heart. The problem, though, is that it would seem his heart just wasn’t really in it.

At its center, the adventure of careworn industrial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and his thoroughly damaged punkity hacker assistant Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is a story of complex individuals attempting to find their places in a world taken over by impenetrably large machines. In Blomkvist’s case, in the face of a huge industry gone rampant; for Salander, amidst a society dominated by male ego and violence. Larsson’s writing endeavors with great detail to describe the sprawling landscape of corruption and despair these characters negotiate, and subsequently sets them up as larger-than-life entities ultimately equal to their battles. In the Larsson trilogy, Blomkvist presents as the single decent guy in all of Europe, and Salander as a latter day mirror of Hannibal Lecter, rejecting all social convention, doing only as she pleases, always three steps ahead and never looking back.

The convoluted intricacies of the original text may be near impossible to scrape through in any film. Though this may be a necessary omission for the form, it serves as an unfortunate reduction of the characters themselves. Here, the big mystery the pair are brought on to solve, that of a young daughter of industry gone missing for 30 years and the search to find her killer among her reprehensible family of upper-class low-lifes, is condensed to a pat series photos and post-it notes connected by thumbtacks and string, becoming incidental at best, immaterial at worst and tedious in the middle. This liability is only exacerbated by Fincher’s stated determination to dial down the “superhero” aspects of the main players, toning them down to near inaudible levels, and losing just about everything that made them interesting on the page.

As emotionally vacant as the story may be, Fincher hits on all cylinders technically. The movie is gorgeous, making the absolute most of the chilling Swedish setting to bring an undeniably unnerving atmosphere to the fore. His choice of shots in incomparable, occasionally edging on genius—especially on display in the film two most harrowing scenes involving Lisbeth’s violent violation by her state appointed guardian and Mikael’s desperate capture by their main murder suspect, which deftly echo each other in tone, angle and movement. Of all the decisions he made, to bring “The Social Network” musical director Trent Reznor back to score this one might have been both his best and worst. The music rises to become the only significant character in play, often blending with the sound design itself to effectively exemplify all the dread and confusion denied from the actors. Its strength, however, is a mistaken eclipse, ultimately highlighting how little we are offered from the people on whom we should be focused.

Asked recently if he expected to receive any Oscars for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Fincher answered, “No.” Asked to elaborate, he explained, “Too much anal rape.” It could be true enough that Academy members don’t traditionally smile on such things, but this answer may also be an inadvertent dodge. Though the Finch don’t flinch from the more excruciating elements of this story, somewhere in the back of his mind, he may be admitting to himself that his latest effort, fully style and very little substance, just isn’t that good.