Last night’s advanced screening of Straw Dogs opened with a surprise trailer: eight minutes of David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still maintain the Dragon teaser trailer (viewable here) to be the best of its kind in a good long while – well, maybe, since the teaser for that other Fincher flick last year. The eight minute extended trailer does little to dampen my enthusiasm. It’s an exceptionally cut bit of marketing – laying out all the beats for the film’s first act and teasing the rest to Trent Reznor’s bombastic score. For a breakdown of the eight-minute trailer, hit the jump.girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-movie-image-daniel-craig-rooney-mara-01The trailer opens to a pan of an icy cold landscape. This chilly distanced tone extends throughout the trailer. Much of the footage seems filtered through a dark tinted green like an aged photograph. From here, we meet Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth as she defends her background check of a disgraced publisher (Daniel Craig) to a room full of suits. It seems the suits want to use Craig as a pseudo-detective masquerading as a disgraced journalist. His mission: to uncover the truth about the disappearance of a young girl years prior. Craig appears to be in good form in the trailer, justifiably pensive and bewildered as he interviews a who’s-who of character actors (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Steven Berkoff, Joely Richardson) about the young gal’s vanishing.But the trailer’s not about Craig; its single purpose seems to be to convince you, dear readers, that Rooney Mara’s one to watch and perfectly suited for the admittedly iconic role of Lisbeth. Watch Mara as she coolly quips one liners, coolly drives her rad motorcycle, coolly picks up a girl in a bar, not so coolly fends off the advances of an overweight man… It’s impossible to judge a performance or a film’s merit purely on a trailer – but Mara does seem, well, suitably cool and frothy in the clips shown.I’m not a fan of either the book or the first film adaptation, so it’s a testament to just how good this extended trailer is that I’m excited for Fincher’s take on the material. Hopefully the eight-minute clip/trailer will be released for all in the not too distant future.The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo opens December 21st.girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-poster-01