Directed by:
Niels Arden OplevCinematography:
Eric KressComposer:
Jacob GrothCast:
Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Haber, Peter Andersson, Marika Lagercrantz, Ingvar Hirdwall, Björn Granath, Ewa Fröling (more)VOD (1)
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Swedish thriller based on the bestseller by Stieg Larsson. In 1966, 16-year-old Harriet Vanger (Ewa Froling) disappeared without a trace from a family gathering on the island owned by the powerful Vanger family. Nearly 40 years later, disgraced magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is contacted by Harriet's uncle, powerful industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who asks him to write the history of the Vanger family and find out what happened to Harriet. Joining forces with troubled young computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), Blomkvist starts to delve into the past of the Vanger family - and unearths a history more sinister and violent than he could ever have imagined. (Universal Pictures UK)
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Reviews (9)
A traditional thriller framework of Hollywood genre movies refreshed with new faces of high-quality European actors and taken apart by a superb multi-layered, detailed script that deals with a lot more than what is sufficient for a good thriller – and handles it with admirable complexity. Two and a half hours bursting with tension while the audience gets to know interesting characters and uncovers the well-concealed secret of a dark world. I am looking forward to two more films from Stieg Larsson’s trilogy of novels on which this movie’s screenplay is based, and I’m curious about the American remake. David Fincher is a sensible choice. He may be the only one who is able not to screw it up.
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From the very beginning, each scene grows darker and more depressing with each passing moment, and yet neither the final reveals or the catharsis were at all moving for me. Maybe it's because there are so many emotional walls built around Lisbeth that I ended up watching her from a distance the entire time, and I was much more fascinated by Mikael. Or maybe it was that the adaptation merely skipped a few scenes that would have greatly helped me; it's hard to say. All I know for certain is that this wave of depression passed right by me, however engaged I was in the mystery itself.
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It was clear to me that the movie could never fit in everything from the book, but the book still took a beating more than I would have expected. Perhaps the only change for the better was that Blomkvist looked for Harriet because he remembered her from his childhood. Otherwise, I was and still am quite at a loss. Everything seemed too rushed to me, even the oft-mentioned rape (and revenge), the script just had pieces of lot of things just to have them appear in the film and then move away from them immediately... It barely had any atmosphere, dammit! The book stands and falls with Lisbeth Salander's character, and I was initially happy to see Noomi Rapace play her. In the end, though, it didn't seem very appropriate - she simply wasn’t weird enough. In this respect I'm pretty much betting on Rooney Mara from the American remake, who looks much more unusual from the photos. I'm giving it two and a half stars, mainly because after an hour I was thinking "Well, if I fell asleep now, nothing would actually happen". And that's not a good sign.
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I've started reading the book, the film was first... despite the fact that in its complexity it cannot and does not want to match Larsson's juggernaut, it belongs in the top league given its atmosphere and processing. Oplev is an excellent stylist who films in a simplified form, but with a sense of logic and pace. I really, really like how the script cleverly shifted Mikael from a confident seducer to a closed weirdo – the Rapace/Nyqvist duet is absolutely excellent for the film's purposes. By the way, Noomi is extraordinarily charismatic and played Lisbeth perfectly. The film has very high quality equivalent for everything that it lacks from the book. The result is a contagious and catchy detective story... although it lacks the socially critical dimension of the original, it moves in its genre quite sovereignly. It's a very difficult challenge for Fincher...
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I didn’t read the novels and haven’t watched the other two parts of the trilogy yet, so I don’t know whether some of the apparently pointless things in this film will have any meaning in the future, but the fact is that they feel very redundant within the scope of one feature detective movie. That said, I believe in the principle that I call “pointless things happen” (not all the events that simultaneously take place in real life are important for the main event taking place, therefore, they too should be included in scripts – i.e. they don’t have to be directly causal), and as such, that relatively redundant affair with Lisbeth’s caretaker didn’t bother me at all. If the film had finished half hour earlier, I would give it five stars, but that pointless epilogue brought the rating down a point.
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