Presumably the grand international success of Stieg Larsson's so-called "Millennium" trilogy and the films it inspired accounts for the appearance of the American version of the first title, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." It otherwise seems passing strange that another filmmaker would make a faithful copy of a previous motion picture a scant two years after its initial release; the new adaptation, directed by David Fincher, should logically lead to two more American duplicates of the Swedish original, not at all a bad idea.

The new movie closely follows both its literary and cinematic sources in just about every detail. Once again a skilled investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), disgraced and impoverished by a libel action, takes on a commission from an elderly industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). Vanger wants Blomkvist to find out the facts about the disappearance and apparent death of his beloved 16-year-old granddaughter some 40 years before; he offers him a large sum of money and total access to all documents and records, with the added bonus of a chance to clear his name and convict the wealthy business magnate who launched the libel suit. Vanger installs Blomkvist in a cabin on the remote island that he owns, and provides him with a voluminous amount of relevant material to pursue his quest.

In need of an assistant, as in the previous film Blomkvist hires Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a computer whiz and world-class hacker who freelances for a security company, employing an array of legal and illegal methods to obtain complete information on every area of a subject's life. Because of some shocking incidents of abuse in her past, she also bears a heavy load of hostility that motivates her passion for revenge. When she understands that her collaboration with Blomkvist may satisfy that passion, she signs on, providing Blomkvist with much of the data he needs.

The odd couple works together and separately, following a number of trails, and, much like a similar pursuit in thrillers like "Blowup" and "Blow Out," through examination of documents, newspaper stories, and snapshots, reconstructs the events surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter. As they recreate the past, the people and events they uncover appear intermittently, in different lighting, at slower speeds, and fuzzier resolution, in a sort of movie within the movie. Their research leads Blomkvist into personal danger that, oddly, considering Lisbeth's personality and inclinations, initiates a torrid sexual relationship between the reporter and the hacker.

Rooney Mara plays the challenging part of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most unusual heroines - if that's the right word - in contemporary cinema, quite as skillfully as Noomi Rapace in the original film. Her corpse-white face fixed in a constant deadpan, never looking directly at another character, she performs with an utter lack of affect and a monosyllabic conversational style that, reinforced by her technical brilliance and dogged hostility, suggests a kind of high-functioning autism. Extensively pierced and of course tattooed, she dresses in a combination of punk and high Gothic style, which somehow suits her image as a dark angel of vengeance, zooming through the cold Swedish night on her motorcycle, tracking down a monster.

The director frequently intercuts between the separate researches of the two distinctly different investigators, showing them arriving by different routes at the same destination, their paths converging appropriately at the climactic confrontation with their quarry. With a perhaps heavier application of polish than in the first version, Fincher captures the Swedish location and atmosphere with the authenticity of a native - the sometimes bleakly beautiful landscapes, the smooth lightness of the blond Scandinavian interiors, and the undercurrent of violence that apparently runs beneath the placid surface of the nation's public image.

In accord with Larsson's trilogy, the movie connects Swedish capitalism with corruption and indicts the nation's past for its suspect neutrality during World War II. It equates a history of Swedish Nazism with the horror that Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander uncover, as if the tragedy they investigate within the Vanger family reveals a continuing decadence in Swedish society itself, and the ultimately degenerate line of the family symbolized a kind of insanity in the whole culture.