The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series Reviews

[The Great Owl]

I don’t see a thread for this, so here goes...



Walmart has an exclusive two-movie double disc pack with The Girl in the Spider’s Web and the first disc of the 2011 David Fincher version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so I bought that, since I’ve never owned the Fincher version. This Walmart edition is not listed here on the site, though.


Anyway....

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a flawed movie compared to the original Swedish films, but I love Claire Foy in the role, and it’s not a bad action flick on its own terms.

Too bad there’s not a domestic 4K release of it yet.

Here’s my movie content review...

My favorite fictional characters of the new millennium are Lisbeth Salander, a fascinatingly resourceful Swedish woman who has braved a series of life tragedies and uses her photographic memory to work as a computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, a Swedish investigative journalist who helms a controversial magazine. These two first appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a 2005 novel that was published posthumously after the death of author Stieg Larsson, and they are also featured in Larsson's two follow-up novels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. The first novel of Larsson's “Millennium Series” is still the best, and, when I first read it several years ago, I was captivated by its explorations of the notion that every person has sordid secrets and, more importantly, by its examination of predatory male behavior, as is explicitly acknowledged by the book's Swedish title, which is translated as “Men Who Hate Women.” The second and third novels, while somewhat more superfluous, expand on title character Salander's dark past while continuing to present more adventures where she and Blomkvist work together on various cases involving misogynistic villainy.

Larsson's three books were later adapted into superbly nuanced Swedish-language films starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist, while the first was also given a flashier, but less resonant English-language adaptation with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig in the respective lead roles. The literary Millennium Series has also been taken over by author David Lagercrantz, who published the fourth and fifth books, The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015) and The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017).

I have not read the fourth and fifth entries by Lagercrantz, but, if the new 2018 adaptation, The Girl in the Spider's Web, is any indication, then Lisbeth Salander is now portrayed as a full-blown superhero who spends her days rescuing battered women and doling out rightful justice to their abusers while performing one physically implausible stunt after another. In this film, Salander, played by Claire Foy (Unsane, First Man), is drawn once again into her traumatic past while completing her latest chosen hacker assignment, a task that forces her to cross paths with a diabolical underworld figure, played by Sylvia Hoeks (Blade Runner 2049). Sleekly photographed explosions, car chases, shootings, and rescues ensue.

My lack of familiarity with the source novel of The Girl in the Spider's Web puts me at a disadvantage in this review, but I would hope that the literary story provides a more imaginative MacGuffin than the one in this movie, a computer program that controls nuclear missile codes. This film also reduces the wonderful character of Blomkvist to a mere aside whose only function is to stand by as an audience perspective on the plot proceedings, it largely eschews the cerebral meditations on abuse and power found in the first three stories, and it brings some unnecessarily cardboard characters, in the form of an American NSA agent and a Swedish Secret Service director, into the fold. If, however, you want to see Salander jumping off a boat dock and speeding across the surface of a frozen river in a motorcycle, or you want to see her narrowly escape a fiery explosion by jumping into a bathtub full of water, then you're in the right place.

The most unfortunate casualty of this movie's lackadaisically action-packed script is Claire Foy herself, because she is actually quite excellent as the title character. She has the right look for the role, and she also conveys Salander's antisocial tendencies in a way that is spot-on to Larsson's creation. Director Fede Alvarez, who is best known for the outstanding 2016 horror movie, Don't Breathe, is undeniably talented, and he gives us one remarkable visual after another here, but even he cannot rise above the shortcomings of the screenplay.

I'm torn with regard to my evaluation of The Girl in the Spider's Web, because I really do love the idea of Lisbeth Salander living on in cinema as an updated James Bond type of hero for enlightened contemporary audiences. I just wish that the character's wondrous resilience and imperfections had not been shortchanged in this by-the-numbers action movie. This is a decently engaging film in its own right, but it is also a forgettable film, and “forgettable” is not a word that I ever imagined that I would type while discussing a tale featuring Salander and Blomkvist.

[Mr. Chaverria]

Jesus. I just got to seeing the The Girl Who Played with Fire. Holy crap did the visual quality drop for sure. The story can barely push me through cuz the visual quality of it is just depressing. I knew of the reasons why but it doesn't help.