Is it just us, or are trailers getting shorter? Obviously, there have always been brief teasers around, but even the final clips rarely seem to top out over two minutes these days, happy to tantalize audiences with money shots and the “Inception” fart-trombone noise — the days of old, with four-five minute trailers, sometimes even introduced by the cast or director themselves (like this all-time favourite of ours) seemingly long gone. Of course, you can rely on David Fincher to buck that trend.
The director unveiled eight minutes of footage from his latest, an adaptation of Swedish crime mega best-seller “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” last week, and overnight, a trimmed-down version of that presentation has hit Apple, in the shape of a full, three-minute-and-forty-five-second trailer for the film. And it looks pretty strong.
Obviously less abstract than the “Immigrant Song”-scored teaser from the summer, the clip walks beat-by-beat through the basics of the story, and gives us the first real sense of the cast, led by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, but with faces like Steven Berkoff, Donald Sumpter, Robin Wright, Goran Visnjic, Julian Sands, David Dencik and Yorick Van Wageningen all cropping up too. Our biggest concern had been Fincher’s desire to get his cast to use Swedish accents, but those who aren’t native Swedes seem to pull it off with aplomb (Scandinavian readers, please correct us if we’re wrong), bar Craig, who apparently couldn’t really be bothered (or just didn’t attempt to do so according to this interview).
Mara looks like the MVP here, totally unrecognizable from “The Social Network,” and the film looks unsurprisingly gorgeous, particularly the “Festen“-esque flashback scenes. There’s more menacing score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and it doesn’t look too far from the gothic “Zodiac” that we were hoping for from the material. We’ll find out how it matches up when the film hits on December 21st; watch the trailer below, or in HD over at Apple.