You can't blame the general public and composers and studios eager for fame and profits for using the spectacle of a film score for their gain. The "think different" advertisement campaign long waged by Apple has embodied an effort by most people to equate "different" with "cool." Indeed, what Reznor and Ross provide may seem different on the surface, despite the fact that composers have been writing ambient sound design for low budget movies for a long time without the same acclaim. In the case of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you simply have rock stars awarded for diverting their careers, branching out into a different genre and, by their own limited abilities, generating music that is unconventional for its industry. What betrays their motives more than anything else is the ridiculous barrage of marketing employed in the numerous releases of this music on album. They think so highly of themselves that they give away a sampler of music through their website and publish three-hour CD, vinyl, and high fidelity digital releases, the largest package of which a hefty $300 on their website, and then literally challenge listeners to sit through it all. What film composer would have an ego so large as to exercise that kind of arrogance? Many of them have egos, granted, but the manufactured phenomenon surrounding this Reznor and Ross "event" detracts from the entire soundtrack industry by making it into a circus. Everyone involved in this production is to blame for such a commercial disgrace, including Fincher, whose application of the music in the film isn't even that effective. He forces the music to directly compliment the sound effect track in several instances, begging the question why music was necessary at all in such circumstances. In other sequences, the director bleeds the score into the background to such an extent that it is nearly inaudible, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the music itself drifts off to silence often during its recording anyway. Ultimately, the only truly appreciable insertions of music into The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are the three songs. The first is an extremely abrasive cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" to set the mood of the film in its stylish opening credits, and the last is a far more palatable cover of Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" by the composers' own group, How to Destroy Angels. In between and not included on any of the soundtrack releases is Enya's famous new age song, "Orinoco Flow," which was inserted by Daniel Craig's suggestion as a joke when source music was required for a pivotal scene in which a serial murderer is getting in the mood to execute his character. The levity is nice, but it is positioned to nearly ruin the overall atmosphere of an otherwise extremely grim film.

Lost in all of this unnecessary hoopla, naturally, is discussion about the music itself. Nobody could expect Reznor and Ross, neither of which working from much experience in the film music genre, to write anything other than what they produced. Their three dozen self-contained little suites of separate ideas all share the same generally oppressive and hazy atmosphere. That is, unfortunately, the only element of cohesion at work in the score for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There is no organic feel outside of occasional vague contributions by a solo female voice, the other samples of symphonic sounds manipulated to intentionally dilute their appeal. Sounds of the piano and chimes are most common leaders above the droning synthetic fog, the former detuned and the latter also altered in pitch to ruin the familial implications they carry. Never do the composers date this score like they did in The Social Network, the arcade techniques thankfully absent. But the stuttering, obnoxious loops that sometimes build to a lengthy crescendo are once again at play, only very vaguely generating any accelerated tone of suspense. The car chase cue near the end is extremely poorly handled, its juvenile increase in the volume of a dissonant loop making any film music collector long for John Powell's ostinato techniques that have become so popular despite the intellectual deficiencies from which they also sometimes suffer. The travesty of this score is that the plotline of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo actually did require some tokens of warmth throughout. The target of the lead duo's investigation has a very redemptive resolution to her tale, leading to a reunion that ironically compensates for much of the poor behavior seen in the rest of the film. And the relationship between the two leads, though frustrated in the end, is very genuine, at least on Salander's part, and it merited a growing emotional connection in the music that is likewise poorly developed. Reznor and Ross do attempt to address these needs with a few recurring motifs in very basic fashion, especially in the case of the missing niece, with softer chime and vocal ideas that bring much-needed tonality to three or so tracks. In this regard, listeners may be surprised to encounter roughly ten minutes of pleasantly accessible material amongst all of the muck defining the whole. But even in these passages, the composers do not allow for any remote sense of saccharine feeling in their work, plunging the environment to despair perhaps with unnecessary force. That's the kind of mistake filmmakers will make when they don't attempt to match their music to the subtle dynamics of a scene. Creating a glorified sound effects track for a film will work for purposes of mystery and suspense in some cases, but it will never be able to express gratitude, relief, or hope, all of which existing to some extent in this story.

The way the composers present their full score for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on album makes it difficult to place their suites into the proper context, but, as expected, they did press a two-CD awards sampler with different mixes and edits that assigns the suites to their actual film placements in shorter cues (of about 83 minutes total) in the film. This sampler, if the two covers of the existing songs were added as well, is the presentation that should have constituted the regular commercial release of the soundtrack, leaving the full three-hour version for the $300 "deluxe" product aimed at the fanbase of the artists. Don't look for any of these products, despite the reasonable pricing of the non-deluxe versions (including lossless downloadable offerings, a welcome choice), to find a home in the collections of too many traditional film score collectors. And don't expect most film music critics to be too kind to the process or the result of this soundtrack, either. When you have career orchestrators like Mark McKenzie and Conrad Pope, who use extraordinary expertise in instrumental applications to imply and support emotional appeals rarely completely appreciated in their final execution, struggling to enhance movies by over-performing in their rare compositional assignments, you cannot help but expose Reznor and Ross as the lucky novices they are, the rock stars diminishing a different genre of music in the process of reaping the most commercial benefit from it as possible. Even the work of a sound design expert like Cliff Martinez, regardless of its own detriments, has substantially more thought seemingly expended in its creation. Undoubtedly, Reznor and Ross will continue to enjoy the limelight in the movie industry much like Gustavo Santaolalla did in the mid-2000's, utilizing the bliss of media ignorance while covering for their total inexperience and consequent underachievement for a film that could have used a Shore, a Goldenthal, or a Shire to really accentuate the raw power of its story. The irony in all of this debacle is that the music for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, when considered both in and out of context, is arguably more accessible and applicable than The Social Network was, starting Reznor and Ross on a learning curve that will, perhaps, in twenty-five years, put them on pace to rival the effectiveness of the descendants of the current Hans Zimmer/Remote Control army of clones. If soundtracks like this one continue to win acceptance as the gold standard in modern film scoring, then all the vilification of Zimmer and his production house for dumbing down the common denominator in this genre of music in the 1990's and 2000's will have been misdirected. The fact that many in the public enjoy using occasions such as this to drive the nail further into the coffin of classicism is all the proof you need to reinforce the notion that the average movie-goer can be, in fact, a hopeless git.  *   @Amazon.com: CD or Download