David Fincher's sleek The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reimagining arrives on Tuesday; while the film enjoyed modest box-office success - and received five Academy Award nominations at this year's Oscars, winning one for Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter's editing - it also found itself the subject of much public scrutiny. Many critics questioned the need for another The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo so soon after the 2009 Swedish version, arguing that Fincher's take on the material never properly distinguished itself, that it was just a big-budget redo of a story that Stieg Larsson's original novel and Niels Arden Oplev's subsequent adaptation more-than adequately covered.
Viewed now, after the arguments have died down, one can recognize the strengths in this new The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, from the harshly beautiful compositions that Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth have created, to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' forbidding soundscape, to Rooney Mara's take on Lisbeth Salander, which wisely does not mimic the performance that Noomi Rapace gave three years ago. As Martin Liebman writes in his Blu-ray review, "Fincher's vision for the story stays pretty much true to the source. Seeing the people, watching them work, and witnessing their...places in the world gives an added layer to the story that nicely supplements the written word and helps tie together some of the ideas and themes that are fully explored in the book but that seem a little more obvious when watched rather than read. The movie is expertly crafted, and the performances are superb."
Even more controversial than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale. Like The Hunger Games - which premieres on Friday - Battle Royale is the film version of a popular novel (by Koushun Takami) set in a dystopian future where tyrannical governments force children to battle to the death. But Battle Royale lacks most of the young adult signifiers that made The Hunger Games so popular; its view of combat is unflinchingly bloody and savage. This subject matter has made Fukasaku's film harder to see than most; it only just received its its first official U.S. theatrical run on December 24th, 2011. But Anchor Bay's Blu-ray set - which bundles together Battle Royale and its sequel, Battle Royale II: Requiem - rectifies that issue, offering U.S. viewers a widespread and comprehensive home media option.
While Martin Liebman takes some issues with both features at the end of his review, noting that, "the controversial first film, while not exactly a slice of original filmmaking, offers audience a quality experience that nicely intermixes both social commentary and general action. The second doesn't scrap the commentary, but it beats the audience over the head with it rather than subtly introduce it into the final product," he does praise "the Battle Royale Blu-ray collection, as released by Anchor Bay, [which] is largely excellent."
The third major novel-to-film reworking to reach the HD format this week is Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The Let The Right One In director had the unenviable task of tackling widely beloved source material; not only is John le Carré's original novel a classic of spy fiction, but it also inspired John Irvin's equally venerated 1979 miniseries starring Alec Guinness.
In whittling the tale down to 127 minutes, Alfredson makes le Carré and Irvin's work his own, finding new insights and depths as he depicts the moral rot at the core of British Intelligence, circa 1973. The film version also gets a boost from a sterling cast that includes Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Ciarán Hinds, Stephen Graham, and Gary Oldman, who won a Best Actor nomination for his performance as George Smiley, the brilliant-but-tortured intelligence officer hunting a Soviet mole. With his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown praises the picture's complexity, writing that, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy may not be immediately accessible - or all that accessible at all - but it proceeds with an understated confidence and almost silent intensity that makes it a far more intriguing mole hunt than your run-of-the-mill spy thriller."
The week's most purely delightful reimagining comes courtesy of the new The Muppets. Though the film's broad strokes may seem somewhat conventional - after years of separation, the Muppets must reunite in order to save their beloved theater from an evil oil baron - what surprises is how seamlessly director James Bobin and writers Nicholas Stoller & Jason Segel have melded their own impulses (Bobin was one of the chief architects on the Flight of the Conchords television show, while Stoller and Segel worked together on Undeclared and created Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to the Muppets' unique brand of family-friendly mayhem.
The end result respects the furry protagonists' history as well as sends it in different creative directions. Kenneth Brown adores The Muppets and calls it "one of the best all-ages movies of the year. High praise, I know, but having watched The Muppets five times now, it's high praise that isn't going to be watered down anytime soon...It isn't a flawless reboot...but Segel and his Muppet-loving cohorts get so much right that it's easy to overlook the few missteps they make along the way."