Oh, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You make it so difficult for me to confidently label this post as either favorable or unfavorable.
I loved the lead character named Lisbeth, played by Noomi Rapace. She is a very muscular, highly androgynous, tattooed and pierced young woman who in the first thirty minutes or so of the movie acts out what is (I think) a common retaliatory fantasy against rapists. On top of that, she’s a professional hacker who is fiercely independent, unsentimental, and unemotional, and yet somehow she remains easy to cheer for. And kudos to the filmmakers for making her bisexuality not be a sensationalistic point of interest in the story. It’s just a fact, uncommented upon, plain as day.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the plot, up to a point. With lots of sinister affiliations rolled into one, the whodunit story that brings Lisbeth and a publicly disgraced (but framed) journalist named Mikael Blomkvist together intrigues and entices. Full of brutal details that are kept disturbingly subtle on screen, the 40 year old murder lurches wrenchingly back to life, zombie-like in its horror and its fascination which grips the audience and the characters on screen alike. Extra unsettling moment: when Blomkvist places several old photographs of a missing woman taken in succession together to create a sort of flip-book effect, revealing an important detail about the day she disappeared.
The problem was that while I was wildly enthusiastic about certain aspects of the movie, I became really spitefully resentful toward others. Unfortunately, story-wise, the first two hours were good but the last half hour was just plain dumb. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo started as a great mystery/thriller, i.e. a well paced, interesting (though not necessarily believable) story with very unique characters one could engage with, but then in the last half hour tragically devolved into a frustratingly neatly wrapped up cliché about familial ties and the virtues of heterosexual monogamy. Even the visual aesthetic switched from the cool (though expected) bluish grayish noir with a punk androgyne kicking ass in the beginning to an obnoxiously sunny-happy aesthetic, complete with tearful reunions, stilted confessions of emotional connections, and our (in my view) now fallen heroine sporting a large blonde wig, a business suit, and heels. What the hell.
I can’t even really decide whether the first two hours of the movie make it worth it to watch, either, because I just can’t ignore the flaws of the ending. What I wish is that I could re-watch the movie and just stop it around the point where things start to get ridiculous and add my own alternate ending mentally or something.
Anyway… the only way you’ll find out whether or not it’s worth it is to watch it yourself, which I suppose I can grudgingly recommend, if only for the majority of the movie and not the whole.
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A decent adaptation of a decent novel. The only thing that's especially intriguing about the book is the amazing character Stieg Larsson created in Lisbeth Salander. What she is doing in a story about financial corruption that devolves into a murder mystery is beyond me. The movie took out the financial corruption to focus in on the murder mystery--probably a smart move, but I don't really care. What I do care about is Noomi Rapace, who brought a whole new level of brilliance to an already bad-ass Salander. She rocks my socks.
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