Movies Reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Movie Review

By Anne Brodie Dec 20, 2011, 18:13 GMT

The Hollywood adaptation of the first book in author Stieg Larsson\'s hit Swedish trilogy.A disgraced financial journalist teams up with a female hacker to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a woman 40 years prior. ...more

It seems odd to remake the critically acclaimed Swedish film "Män som hatar kvinnor" and to remake it so closely resembling the original, but from any point of view The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a treat. 

It’s still a deep,  labyrinthine, visceral and engaging adventure with one of the most dysfunctional and fascinating heroines in modern movies, a brainiac who may be addicted to drugs, sex and deadly risk.  But they did it and the result is sensational.

The American remake is still European at its heart. It’s set in Sweden in what looks like the same house with bridge in the original.  The blue grey tone against grainy white is the same and the story’s as captivating as ever.

Rooney Mara takes over the reins from Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander.  Rapace didn’t want to play the same role she’s played in three films despite her popularity.

Daniel Craig who plays photojournalist Mikael Blomkvist takes over the role originated by Michael Nyqvist and brings greater warmth and compassion.  And David Fincher, who dealt with a serial killer previously in Zodiac, replaces Niels Arden Oplev.

Blomkvist is a respected journalist who has just escaped a libel suit.  He has been given the intriguing and lucrative task of chronicling Sweden’s largest private family business, by its patriarch (Christopher Plummer).  That job masks what he’s really been hired to do, to solve the forty year old murder of the man’s teenaged daughter during a family party on the family’s private island.

Blomkvist arrives at the island, a chilly, grey, wintry place where each family member sits in his own house, not speaking to the others, each stewing in the weirdness of the family and its legacy of Nazism, sexual and physical abuse and at least two murders.  He is given boxes of photographs, business documents and other family ephemera and he goes to work.

Through the family lawyer he learns of the great computer prowess of Lisbeth, a punk with a sad, bruising past and a resulting distrust and hyper alertness.  She’s eaten up all her bad experiences and made herself a protector of all hopeless girls, especially murder victims.  

Lisbeth is raped by her welfare officer in scenes less explicit that the original film and she has her revenge.  We know she is a warrior, capable of plotting, strategizing, using brute force and brain to have the results she wants. 

Lisbeth and Blomkvist make quite the investigative twosome. There is understanding between them and soon, a sexual relationship. And their hunt for the truth as dangerous and deadly as it is, begins.

This one of the great opening sequences.  Trent Reznor’s blazing yet strangely moody rendition of Led Zeppelin’s The Immigrant Song, as tattoo ink or blood flows over tight close-ups of crime scenes in shades of black. 

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35mm thriller
Written by Steven Zaillian (screenplay), Stieg Larsson (novel)
Directed by David Fincher
Opens:  Dec 21
Runtime: 2.5 hours plus
MPAA:
Country: USA |Sweden |UK |Germany
Language: English