15 Most Underrated Movies Of The Decade (So Far)

13. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Remaking recent foreign-language hits in English is one of the most creatively-pointless (but regrettably financially-sensible) practices in modern moviemaking. What made the likes of Ringu or Oldboy work is heavily linked to the culture from which they originate, which is naturally lost in translation, especially when the English version is just trying to retell the same story, only in suburban America, rather than actually create something with any relevant subtext (just look at Dark Water).

It's easy to tar David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which hit only a couple of years after the Noomi Rapace-starring Swedish version, with the same brush as those cynical attempts to cash in on name recognition and audiences' aversion to subtitles, but to do that lets the knee-jerk reaction from the when the project was first announced overshadow what eventually ended up on screen.

Fincher isn't a director who lets studio mandates come anywhere near his process and that shows in his semi-distinct take on Stieg Larsson's novel. The original film (and, to a lesser extent, its sequels) is solid and certainly brutal, but there's a sickness lying under Fincher's film that makes it a worthy remake (or readaptation, if you're using publicist parlance).