The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

A film about men who hate women, among other things…

The H-Bomb: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvyst (Michael Nyqvyst) has just been convicted of libel and steps down from the magazine he created, Millennium. But before he has time to stew over his losses, he is hired by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), an elderly business man who‘s a member of the wealthy and powerful Vanger family, to investigate the disappearance of his niece, Harriet, who vanished some four decades ago and is believed to have been murdered.

At first Blomkvyst seems to be getting absolutely nowhere in his investigation, but out of the blue he is helped by a computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), an emo-ish goth chick who has some… er… issues of her own, to put it kindly. Lisbeth ends up joining Blomkvyst’s investigation and the two strike up an unusual relationship while digging into the mystery, discovering a link to Harriet’s disappearance and the murders of other young women, and uncovering some very dark secrets about the Vanger brood.

Okay, where to start, where to start. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a Swedish import that is the first part of the “Millennium” trilogy, which is based on a series of books that is insanely popular in Europe. I’ve been reading the hype and praise for this for a good long while, with reviewers giving it four and five star ratings and calling it things like “Brilliant!”, “Amazing!”, and “A Mind Bending Thriller!” I was actually really looking forward to this one… well, you know how too much praise can be a bad thing?

When I finished watching this for the first time (notice I say first time), my reaction was simply “Meh. That‘s it?” I mean, can we say over-hyped?! Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a perfectly decent film, but I wasn‘t amazed or blown away. I certainly didn’t think it was any kind of a masterpiece, and I felt it had a lot of problems. Mainly, on first viewing, I found it to be very unfocused, where it kept going off on tangents that just seemed kind of pointless to me. Lisbeth being jumped in the subway by a pack of young hooligans, flashbacks to her as a child setting a car on fire, and an entire first act subplot about her being sexually exploited by her social guardian (Swedish version of a parole officer, I guess). These, amongst other things, seemed extraneous and distracted from the central murder mystery.

The mystery of the missing, dead girl was very intriguing, and that aspect of the film kept me completely immersed. I also thought the performances by both the leads were superb, and the chemistry between them was quite compelling. The film is also strikingly well directed (by All Niels Arden) in places… but goddamn, there just seemed to be so much fat in the movie – things that seemed irrelevant to the main plot that made it all seem so unnecessarily drawn out, that it really just muted the impact of the entire picture for me.

On top of all that, this movie also has enough false endings to give the third “Lord of the Rings” film a run for its money. At some point, during the fifteen minutes or so, I was literally chanting at my TV “End! End! End! End!!!!” Then it FINALLY ended… thank Christ for small favors.

Now, that was how I reacted the first time I saw the film. I did give it a second go, and while I still find it bizarrely over-rated by the uber-hip, we-love-all-things-foreign latte slurping cinephiles, something did strike me on the second viewing. Bear in mind, I have not read the books or seen the later films, so I’m simply venturing a guess, but it occurred to me that this is the first part of a trilogy, so many of the elements that seemed out of place and gratuitous to me the first time around will probably be of greater significance in the sequels, as the characters are developed further, particularly Lisbeth (like why she’s as royally fucked up as she is). So that considered, I was more forgiving of those elements on my second viewing and enjoyed the film considerably more.

Again, though, I still don’t think this is the modern classic that many proclaim it to be. There are still pacing issues, the movie is still too long, and there are many, many scenes of characters looking at old photos, newspaper stories, and doing online research, which I’m sure work fine in the book, but in the film, they’re not very cinematic nor exciting to watch. Another issue is that there are so many characters and names to remember that unless you’re paying the strictest attention, you could lose track of who’s who and who’s what to who very quickly. This is definitely not a “check your brain at the door” type of film.

After all is said and done, I did like this movie, despite my criticisms. It’s a sophisticated, well crafted, ambitious film with very richly developed characters and the performances are top notch. It, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is being remade in the U.S. with David Fincher directing and Daniel Craig starring, and even though I loathe this remake trend, I must confess that I am interested in seeing what they do with this story. I do recommend it overall, but I must warn you to take the hype with a grain of salt.