Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross ‎– The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

After their, now famous, soundtrack to "The Social Network", which granted both Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross an Academy Award, the soundtrack to David Fincher's remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has been eaglerly anticipated... even more so than the movie! The good thing is, that the soundtrack lives up to the hype... but it's also a lot different than you might expect.

The soundtrack mostly follows the same template seen in "The Social Network". The soundtrack opens up with a surprisingly good cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," with Karen O on the vocals. The cover takes a industrial rock spin on the original version, and it actually works really well... though obviously it doesn't manage to beat the original version. The soundtrack also ends with "Is Your Love Strong Enouhg?", performed by How to Destroy Angels, which ironically is Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross's band, though with the addition of Trent's wife on the vocals. This track starts out with just her voice, building up to a great and atmospheric ending.

Everything in bewteen is slow, atmospheric, industrial ambience. The soundtrack has a nice atmospheric flow, and most tracks transitions into each other, making for one long contionous listen. TThere's two things that are surprising about the soundtrack.

1) It's almost 3 hours long, just a little bit longer than the movie itself.

2) It's unbelievably dark. The original film was dark, but it had it's few light moments, which was also reflected in it's soundtrack. The music here is so dark that it get's unsettling and almost terrifying. I haven't seen the remake itself, but I'd almost swear that Reznor and Ross made a soundtrack for a horror movie.

The downside? Some might find the soundtrack repetitive. I find the music in here excellent, but it's all ambient for around 37 tracks, and that's about it. It's dark and unsettling and all that, but it can end up sounding too similar to each other.

But with that said, Trent & Atticus's soundtrack to "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is an excellent soundtrack. It sucessfully captures the dark spirit of the movie's premise, and just runs with it in it's own dark and horror like way. It might not win as many awards as their work for "The Social Network," btu this one could very well go on to become a classic.