The Girl In The Spider's Web

Savant Guard

The Girl In The Spider's Web
by David Largercrantz 
MacLehose Press 
ISBN: 978-0857059994

Regular readers of my reviews (and much thanks to those of you out there) may remember that I absolutely love Stieg Larrson’s original Millennium Trilogy... The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. I saw the various film incarnations of the series but, while I found them to be okay with some excellent performances, they felt like they were kinda missing the full flavour of the novels and compromised the characters quite a lot from who they were in the original books... especially when it came to Mikael Blomkvist and his relationships with various women, such as his special friend and lover Erika Berger. I also found they kind of over-simplified his relationship with the other great main protagonist of the book, Lisbeth Salander, to some extent. Similarly, and I feel this shouldn’t have been the case, the collection I read of the comic book adaptation of the first novel also seemed to be sadly lacking... to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to review it on here.

Now, the thing is, I have real problems with The Girl In The Spider’s Web and I really wasn’t expecting to. Larrson died within, I think, a week or so after delivering his first three manuscripts to his publisher and never lived to see the huge, global popularity that his original trilogy holds. His partner of thirty years, Eva Gabrielsson, who is also a writer, apparently has the first 200 pages of the fourth in the series that Larrson started... but I don’t think she has the rights to do anything with them. These 200 pages and their mysterious contents are not what The Girl In The Spider’s Web was based on... this one’s a new story by David Largercrantz using Larrson’s characters.

Now there’s going to be a lot of prejudice about somebody carrying on the work of a much loved author and I can certainly understand that... to some extent. However, the fact that somebody else is having a go with his characters, even if it is obviously a decision based on publishing houses making money, as opposed to keeping the characters going, doesn’t really bother me too much... art has to be funded and good art is often sourced by questionable routes. My problems with this new novel are for reasons quite different but, before I lay out why this is not anywhere near a worthy successor to the original tales, I want to tell you why I feel that writers like Largercrantz should at least be given a chance to have a tinker with this kind of stuff.

Continuing characters independently from their original creators is really nothing new. It’s kinda laughable in some ways that there is sometimes such concern over this practice. Certainly in film it is rife. Nobody complains, for example, that people other than George Lucas wrote and directed movies like The Empire Strikes Back or Return Of The Jedi. Nobody worries that an episode of a film or TV series is produced by different writers and directors... so why should literature be different? Answer... it’s not. There are a whole wealth of characters who have been acquired and plundered past the sell by date or interest of the original creators. Only this Tuesday, for example, I reviewed a new Doc Savage novel written by someone many decades after the original writer had departed this mortal coil and, believe me, he’s a much loved character around some parts. Would anybody, by way of another example, be that worried if somebody wrote a new sequel to Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeer stories?

Now Mikael Blomkvist, Lisbeth Salander and their friends and enemies are much beloved characters for a lot of people but... I don’t think it’s that alone which has caused a number of readers to approach this new novel with more than a little trepidation. I suspect it’s more to do with the fact that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and her colleagues are a more 'recent' fictional phenomenon.

Oh well... like I said, I can understand it. However, when Michael Moorcock suddenly threw his Jerry Cornelius character out into the world for other writers to fashion stories for, before repossessing him again a little later... well I don’t think there was too much complaining going on in the 1960s about this kind of practice.

So if you’re going to avoid this new novel on the grounds that it’s been written by somebody other than Stieg Larrson, well... all I can say is that if you’re going to be more forgiving if somebody writes a new Sherlock Holmes or James Bond novel... you should really give some of our much loved new heroes a chance to shine with another writer. After all, Ian Fleming’s James Bond books did get a bit ropey and inconsistent towards the end of his time on the series. And another of my writing heroes, Patricia Cornwell, has her 'off days' too. No, if you’re going to go out of your way to avoid this novel, don’t reject it on that kind of skewed logic...

Reject it, instead, because it’s just not a very good novel... at least in terms of continuing the adventures of the characters from the original trilogy.

One of the things I’ve mentioned maybe once or twice on this blog is that one of my pet hates with writers is a lot of them tend to use the same voice for all of their characters. That is to say, the phrasing and way they speak sounds like it’s all cut from the same cloth, even though these imaginary people are all coming from different walks of life and are living in different communities. Now, okay, you can probably get away with identifying that this is merely the signature style of the author shining through... and depending on what components make up that kind of hallmark, I’d be willing to go along with that most times. However, I do often find myself wondering why writers can’t inject a little more realism into both the dialogue and the inner monologues which their characters express to the reader by making them sound a little different. Some of them can do it... but very few do.

In this novel, right from early on, I started noticing that there were repeat phrases being said or thought by different characters in different scenarios and often quite closely to each other. For instance, early on in the novel a character called Kraft says to someone, “I'll get straight to the point.” I was fairly alarmed, therefore, when I then came upon this sentence... "I'll come straight to the point," Brandell said just a page or so later. A different character with a different background using almost the exact, same phrase. This isn’t the character talking now... it’s the author. Or is it?

I have a very good friend who translates things for a living and when I batted about the idea with her that it could be a fault of the translator rather than the writer, she offered up a possible defence that it
could be that certain key phrases are used like that in everyday life by everyone. If it’s a common form of expression in the original Swedish, this could be an answer to this criticism... and I agree. That being said, though, the writer does seem to do it a fair few times in the book with a number of different phrases and that defence does wear thin when he does it so often. Bearing in mind that constant phrase repetition is not good for the art of fiction, unless done deliberately to evoke a specific effect, I think this writing style does need to be thrown into question... be it the original writer or the translator. And, yes, I know I also use certain key phrases myself, from review to review, but if I was writing ‘fiction’... I would certainly labour to keep that kind of thing to a minimum and absolutely try and weed it all out in the second or third pass at proofing and corrections.

Another thing that got to me is the obviousness of the book. It’s a tale which tells of mathematical geniuses, guardians of an autistic savant child, various worldwide policing agencies and, of course, the threat of withdrawal of funding to Millennium magazine. Explosive and exciting in terms of thriller writing is what I would say about this in general... if it wasn’t trying to be a continuation of the Millennium trilogy (which I am now more reluctantly forced to picture as only ever being a trilogy, it has to be said). But, yeah, also very obvious. Right from the second full chapter, I had detected the writer planting his characters and plot threads so he could come back and pull on them later and this transparency of technique really didn’t impress me all that much.

For example, and without going into too much detail, two of many new characters are introduced in the second chapter. By the end of the chapter I knew that one of them would soon have to be dead and the other was a set up so that, when he and Salander would be thrown into the mix together at some point, their common personality traits would mean that Salander would end up learning as much about herself as she helps this new character who only she could understand. Now, as it happened, all of this did indeed come to pass in the novel... apart from Salander’s character growth. Frankly, if the writer is going to set this stuff up so obviously, he could at least let Lisbeth learn a little more about herself in the process of looking after this new character. One thing I do know, though, is this...

If Larrson had written this... I would have never even seen the set up and its consequences coming half a book before they happened.

It also doesn’t help matters that Largercrantz seems to have totally ignored the existence of certain characters and their continuing story arc from the previous novels. As an example here, I give you the case of one of my favourite characters, the muscular Monica Figuerola. She was a major presence in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (at least in the book... not in the film) and by the end of the book she was romantically involved with Mikael Blomkvist to the point where Blomkvist had pretty much given up sleeping with Erika to pursue the prospect of a more or less monogamous relationship with Figuerola. In The Girl in The Spider’s Web, however, the character of Figuerola isn’t even mentioned. Nor are any of the consequences of her involvement with Blomkvist and the effects on how he relates to others in the book. It’s like the character never even existed and the slate is all magically wiped clean. Frankly, this is a really damning thing the new book gets wrong, not to pursue where these character’s respective journey’s would take them next in the overall narrative of their lives. She’s not the only character that gets this treatment and it’s a bad mistake to just ignore these fictional people and the thread they weave... as Largercrantz has done here.

Yet another thing that was worryingly obvious was the identity of a character called Thanos... yeah, I’ll get to that name check in a minute but hold on because I want to make this point first. There’s a character we only hear of in the original trilogy. The presence of this character is never really felt and buried in Salander’s past as an abused child. However, there’s a point in this novel, about half way through, when you see the big reveal of the major villain at least a hundred pages before it happens. I actually texted my friend and said something along the lines of... "I don’t believe it. I hope this writer’s not silly enough to make the identity of this character turn out to be Person X (name removed because I don’t want to spoil it for potential readers of the novel... even if you will get their depressingly first)." But then... yeah... he totally does it. Salander has her Moriarty figure in this book and I couldn’t be more upset about the character appearing in this way and of Salander’s ex legal guardian being able to fully articulate Salander’s history to Blomkvist in the most convenient way possible, also knocking that character’s credibility in the process. I found the inclusion of this character, well written or not, quite lame...

More so even than the fact that it turns out that Salander’s hacker name WASP is kinda ‘revealed’ here to be named after Janet Van Dyne’s character in Marvel comics... as are several of the other names including Thanos, of course, from various comics such as The Avengers. Turns out Salander is a big fan of Marvel comics (yeah, right) and so Ant-Man’s wife is where she got her hacker name from. Really? I love Marvel comics as much as the next person but do you really think Larrson would have written this in as the motivation of that character? Seriously? I find it hard to believe and as irritating as the constant Marvel Universe name checking that goes on throughout the book.

And my least favourite part of the novel was the fact that Salander and Blomkvist don’t seem to be themselves. They are just pseudo versions of themselves. They are dumbed down to a point where, although the writer is certainly trying to take them to ‘edgy’ places, they are much more humanised and less intense or credible versions of themselves. They weren’t quite unlike them but, at the same time, they weren’t quite the same either. It’s like the characters went to sleep next to an alien seed pod from Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers one night and woke up like “the first impression stamped onto a coin”. And I missed them. You only have to look at the very last scene in the book to see how untrue to the originals the Salander character has become. It may well be that she was always destined to do something like she does at the end of this one but... not that quickly, not like this and certainly not of her own free will to begin with, I would say. I’m all for character development and I’m sure I might well have accepted it had it come from Larrson’s pen... but it just seemed totally false to me and, along with the various other characters missing in inaction, it really put the final nail in the coffin of the book as far as I was concerned.

That being said, the novel is a quite fast paced and an exciting read. Certainly not the worst pulp I’ve read but, alas, not up there with the best of them either. However, a continuation of the Millennium series it most certainly isn’t. At least not for me and it’s made me want to find out what was in that 200 pages that Stieg Larrson left with Eva Gabrielsson even more. Largercrantz is an okay writer and I’d not shy away from reading others by him, even in regards to this series (because I will always be interested in seeing what other people will do with these characters)... but this a good, solid thriller. It’s not a good attempt at the further adventures of Salander and company, no matter how much I wanted it to be, and I would have preferred it maybe if somebody else had given this one a go... with no disrespect to Largercrantz because, frankly, it’s a huge task and he does the best he can with it, I’m sure. If you want fast paced action and some not bad characterisation... this might be for you. If you are a fan of the original trilogy, however, then I think you may find that The Girl In The Spider’s Web is not necessarily what you would hope it to be.

Lisbeth Salander @ NUTS4R2
Click on title to take you to review.

Film
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) 
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2010) 
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (2010) 
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) 

Books
The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 
The Girl In The Spider’s Web

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

And All Who Salander

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Edited by Robin S Rosenberg
Benbella Books
ISBN: 978-1936661343

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a collection of essays written by various psychologists who are generally specialists in their chosen areas of interests. I was at first put off from buying this tome, it has to be said, because it is from a range of publications branded as “pop psychology” books and, frankly, it sounded a bit amateurish to me. However, I also ultimately found myself compelled to buy it because I am a big fan of Stieg Larrson’s Millenium Trilogy of novels (the films and comic books... not so much) and I haven’t come across any literary, or any other form of, analysis of the characters therein, to date.

That being said and much to my surprise, this is not an amateurish take on pitching a bunch of pretentious ideas and applying them to a literary character to make them fit. It is, in fact, a genuinely enlightening and, for the most part, interesting series of essays about various facets of human psychology and, though the Lisbeth Salander character does, on occasion, just seem like she’s plugged into the central ideas expounded on in a lot of the pieces in here, she is treated as such in a relevant fashion and it’s almost always a fascinating reading experience as you weave your way through various ideas and character types which are relevant to those depicted in the Millennium Trilogy, as they are brought out and explored in a little more depth.

The book starts out a little shakily at first, with an essay on the archetype of the “Goth” subculture. It’s an interesting read alright but the paper starts off with a couple of things which didn’t sit well with me. Firstly, the evidence that Salander is, indeed, part of the unofficial Gothic tribal culture is a bit annoying. I have read the books, seen the four (to date) movies and read the comic books and there’s nothing in there that would have tipped me off to the fact that Salander is an avid follower of Goth fashions or attitudes, to be honest. Secondly, the essay starts off by defining what the stereotypical response of the general public is to a “Goth” and uses that as a basis to argue for and against, in terms of details of the “general” Goth personality. Again, the writers’ conclusions as to how I would stereotype a Goth are far from what I would actually make assumptions about... so are they saying I’m not a member of the general public? That being said, the things it does reveal about the typical Goth personality are very interesting and so I have to say I got more out of it than I was annoyed by, if truth be told.

One stereotype that was definitely shattered for me, as I went through the book, is that I found the tome in question really wasn’t a pretentious and dry load of old techno-babble at all. The book challenged me a number of times and I was extremely grateful for that. For instance, in the essay which is talking about gender, I learnt that a) gender is not another term for a person’s sex, there’s a specific distinction and b) there are actually five sexes (or do I mean genders... I’m now not quite sure) - one male, one female and then three other variations of sex that can be easily hidden and confused within either one or the other, or both. This was an eye opener and something I found fairly compelling.

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was full of engaging and intriguing nuggets of information on a whole host of things and I whizzed through the book very quickly, I have to say. Mesmerising topics such as the various methods or approaches a counsellor or psychologist can use when a patient refuses to discuss anything and just remain silent, for instance. Or gems like the ingredients of a person who can develop (or naturally has) a “resilient” personality and why they become like this. Another essay talks about feminism and the way in which sexism manifests itself in various forms and there’s even one section which is a kind of psychological profile of the “hacker” personality and how that fits in with Larsonn’s depiction of his central character. All of these are, of course, interpolated within Salander’s personality and each of the various writers (most of them are writing teams of colleagues) make cases for their specific diagnosis of Salander’s personality or, in some cases, set out to disprove a basic assumption about the character, by juxtaposing various ideas and findings about specific issues and relating them back to Larrson’s work.

Now, there are some less interesting flights of fancy in the book, I would have to say, but most of the essays in here are well worth the price of admission, so to speak, and the various pieces put forward in here all have at least two things in common. One is that they all seem to think, or perhaps the word should be acknowledge, that Stieg Larrson is some kind of genius and a most empathic individual. I would have to agree with that conclusion, at least, I guess. The other thing they all have in common, and this was very important to me as someone who is not, in any way, knowledgable about psychology, is that the essays are all written in a very straight forward and elementary way. I was never once lost in the exploration of what, in some cases, might have been quite challenging concepts if they were written in a less user friendly manner. This is a very easy read and although the ideas on offer here will certainly have you thinking into the night, and possibly wanting to do more research on the subjects yourself, there are no barriers to understanding in the way these are written and... well... someone like myself certainly appreciates the simplicity which complex ideas can sometimes be couched in. So full marks to all the writers for that.

In concluding then, I'd have to say The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an excellent study, not so much of the central character of Larrson’s books but of various character types which, in most cases, are all facets of the character that he worked into the fictional personae of Lisbeth Salander. Yeah, it’s hit and miss in some places but, ultimately, my misses and hits are not going to be the same as yours and the book does its job. That is to say, it stimulates the mind and allows you to explore very real issues which you might not have known about were it not for the fact that they are being applied to one of modern literature’s most popular heroines in a long time. Anybody who wants to know what kinds of personality types make Salander tick or with an interest in these kinds of issues will most likely enjoy this book. It was, after all, a good buy and something I’m very pleased to have read. This one’s definitely worth your consideration.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (US)

Larsson around!

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2011 US

Directed by David Fincher

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Some spoilers about this film

and the Millenium Trilogy in general.

If you’ve read any of my reviews to the previous “native” adaptations of Stieg Larrsson’s phenomenal Millenium Trilogy books, you’ll know how ultimately disappointed I was with the productions... so much so, in fact, that rather than just go with my usual MO and completely ignore the US remake of a film, I decided to give these ones a go in the hopes that they would be more of an adaptation of the original novels and less a remake of their predecessors. I have to say, however, that I was both equally pleased and disappointed by this latest movie by David Fincher.

Now I know a little about adaptation and cinematic shortcuts to facilitate an appreciation of the problems involved when working from a specific piece of source material but, at the same time, when those compromises involve changing the content on which the work of art is based, I have no respect for the artist involved with such a travesty (which is why Lord Of The Rings needs a remake by someone who will do it properly pronto!). So I’ll make this quick with a review conclusion for those of you who have not read the original novel on which this movie is based... The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an entertaining enough mystery movie which won’t annoy you half as much as it would if you’d have read the original tome.

Now then, there’s good and bad about this new adaptation of the novel but the one wholly positive thing I will say in favour of this US version is that it’s not a remake of the original film (at least as much as I’ve seen of that original version... I’ve only seen the theatrical cuts and not the initial TV editions as yet). This is very much Fincher and the screenwriter going back to the original novel and taking that as something to build from. This is a much more faithful version of the novel than the Swedish version... which really surprised me. Lots of stuff which was missing in the originals was here for me including... Mikael Blomkvist’s sexual arrangements with Erica Berger (although his sexual encounters with a prominent suspect in the case he is working were not included), Lisbeth Salander’s Modesty Blaise-like adventures in embezzlement which lead to the death of Blomkvist’s professional enemy and the misunderstanding/betrayal between her and Blomkvist which leads to her not wanting him as part of her life (a crucial point which was missing from the original movie trilogy and which very much leads to a misunderstood conclusion at the end of the third with audiences who have not read the books) are all present and correct in this version and Fincher is to be applauded by the way that these are all fit into the running time of the movie... although it has to be said the editing is tight. No time for anything other than standard “cause and effect” Hollywoodland editing in service of that preposterous pseudo Holy Grail “the story” I’m afraid.

However, as much as this production team has chosen to include some pretty important points which were conspicuous in their absence from the original versions... it has to be said that there are also some glaring ommissions and negative points in this one too.

Surprisingly, from a film by the likes of Fincher who cut his teeth on the grim and gritty Alien 3 and who has a reputation for making what I could only call “designer bleak” (like Se7en), this seems to me to be a very much dumbed down or softened version of events as depicted in the novel. Blomkvists six month jail sentence, for instance, doesn’t happen in this version... he just gets a hefty fine which kind of changes the tone of certain sequences. Both Salander’s “current” and Berger’s “past” interest in a BDSM lifestyle is also very much absent in anything other than the title sequence (which I’ll have a moan about in a minute). The references to Kalle Blomquist which say everything about how Blomkvist is perceived by the media is also completely excised. Granted the US and UK audiences aren’t as likely to “get” the reference but that’s what cinema is partly here to do, isn’t it? Entertain, educate and illuminate? After all... we “got it” in the books, didn’t we?

The casting in this version doesn’t really seem to be right to me either. Rooney Mara as Salander is probably the most representative of the characters as they are in the novels. She’s no Noomi Rapace but she has a certain quality of her own which she manages to bring to the role in a raw, Salanderish way... so that’s a good, positive thing. But all the other characters, it seems to me, seemed much better served by their Swedish predecessors than as they, at least, look in this version (with the possible exception of Figuerola... we’ll see if Fincher can get himself a stunner of a “muscle-babe” for the third film).

Daniel Craig is, of course, a really excellent actor but, for me, he plays Blomkvist as much too self assured and confident than he is in the books... almost like he’s playing James Bond in a way... which is certainly credible on screen but disturbingly unlike the original character. He’s no cardboard cutout either, and Craig is enough of an actor to play this role... I just don’t believe him as Blomkvist, which is a shame. On the other hand, if you’re not familiar with the original novels then this shouldn’t be a problem for you. However, I did feel that Craig was bringing a certain unnecessary amount of baggage from his 007 role with him when, an actor of this calibre really should have been able to nail the character as slightly more vulnerable. It might have been his direction on set though so I really can’t blame him too much and he does make a convincing on-screen presence.

However, I’m thinking that having the latest 007 in their film must have gone to the producer’s heads on this one. The opening title sequence of this movie is pure James Bond and would certainly not look or sound out of place on any of the recent Bond pictures with it’s curious mixture of heavy rock, fetish wear and girly silhouettes. Where it would look out of place, however, is on a movie like... err.. well this... and it does too. What an inappropriate title sequence for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo! I can’t deny that it’s clever and well designed but... why? It’s just at odds with the atmosphere of both the novel and the movie too (as it happens) and completely killed the mood of the pre-credits sequence while totally failing to set the tone of the movie to come (in much the same way that the “cool and groovy song” over the titles of Hammer’s Moon Zero Two totally fails to set the viewer up for what they are to expect from the film)... that’s a total fail as I’m concerned.

If pushed, I’d have to say that this version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a little more faithful to the novel (although I’d prefer a cross-bred version where the mutually exclusive ommissions were reinstated from the two movies) and possibly a little more entertaining in content... but the atmosphere of the original version is a better match for the subject matter.

Truth be told, though, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is unique in that it’s the only part of the trilogy which can be viewed as a stand-alone story... which makes it very hard to speculate on the success of the next two films in the series. Certainly, if The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest manages to totally miss the story threads represented by Figuerola and Berger as the Swedish original does... I’m really not going to be very happy. All I can say is that I’ll continue to watch the progress of this series with interest and see if the director manages to continue to be as respectful of the source material as this one is... Blomkvist’s prison sentence and sexual exploits notwithstanding.

For reviews of the original Millennium Trilogy movies... please check them out here...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)

I Blomkvist A Girl

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

(Män som hatar kvinnor)

Sweden/Denmark/Germany/Norway 2009

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Momentum Region 2 (original theatrical cut)

Warning: Spoilerama ahead!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is one of the last movies I watched at the cinema before I finally decided to start up this blog site. As such, it feels kinda ironic that this first installment is actually the last of the three I’ve actually got around to reviewing... the other two are here and here. In hindsight and having watched it again, of course, I can confirm that this first installment is a much better offering than the next two movies in the sequence in many ways.

I’m a big lover of the novels and the second and third of the movies, especially, did not do any justice to the characters and events as portrayed in Stieg Larsson’s original Millenium Trilogy. At the time I saw those, I don’t think I was aware that the movies had been cut down from episodes of a Swedish TV series, with the second and third movies coming off particularly harshly from all accounts. I’ve recently realised that the boxed edition of the movies that has recently come out, at least here in the UK, contains these original, extended (or uncut to be more accurate) and episodic versions of the movies... so I’m now looking forward to grabbing this box sometime next year and giving these versions a go in the hopes that all the vital (and even some of the not-so-vital) elements of the novels are faithfully covered and the end of the third part actually gives one more of a sense of resolution as it did in the novels when you realise the true emphasis of the emotions the characters Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are feeling. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest has more of an up ending because of the history of the characters when they reach this point and, although we get exactly the same ending scene in the movie version, the lack of the parts of the story explaining the dynamics of the relationship between these two characters turn it into something of a flattened ending... rather than giving things the slight sense of hope contained in the novel.

But anyway... let me divorce myself from all that and fixate on the first movie because, as I said before, it’s a far better movie than the two which follow it.

A lot of this, I think, has got to be in the way the movie is put together. It’s a lot more leisurely in its pacing and editing, the cinematography is quite beautiful and there are some wonderful transitions and montages in this movie. I feel the direction is a lot more.... well... confident I guess. It’s not all cut shot, backwards and forwards “to”ing and “fro”ing as the second and third movies, which were helmed by a different director, seem to descend to quite often. There’s just something in the way the shots are lit which give the film, perhaps a little less visual clarity, but certainly a more sense of poetry in the images. A beautiful shot of a bridge with traffic going over it (not the main bridge which is essential to the storyline in this one, although the emphasis of that is toned down in the movie anyway) is not just used as an establishing shot, for instance, but a shot to be held for its own beauty for several seconds in and of itself.

The performances are all dead on but the two main elements which are pretty much missing in action in the movie, the swinger lifestyle of Blomkvist and Erika Berger (once a big wheel in the BDSM scene) and the Modesty Blaise-like personae of Lisbeth Salander as she adopts various disguises to build up her riches around the world, pretty much kill the set up for the next two parts. I’m hoping they’ll be among the elements touched upon in the extended/uncut versions in the new DVD set... especially since Erika Berger is such a strong character in the original novels and absolutely essential to the third book.

To be fair to the director of the two movies that came after this however, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is really the only part of the Millennium Trilogy which could be viewed as a stand alone story... being as it’s really an extended locked-room mystery story, with the whole island as the locked room... whereas The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest both interlock with each other and present a single narrative which derives from the character threads and set ups from this first story. So this one is less conspicuous when it leaves great chunks of the novel out but, the second two are very much reliant on these parts and it really shows by their absence in the movie versions.

So there you have it. When I wrote the reviews of the second one when it came out at the cinema, I was getting worried that the forthcoming US remake (think it’s released over here on December 26th?) would be a pale comparison to the original movies... but I was also hoping that the trilogy would be salvaged by a glorious last part... something which that third movie failed to deliver. Now I’ve kinda got my hopes pinned on the director of the US ones filming the novels properly and not making the same bad choices as the original versions. Time will tell I guess. One thing I will say though, is that Noomi Rapace who plays the titular character in the three original movies was absolutely tailor-made for the role... she’ll be a tough act to follow. Check back with me here at around the end of December and I’ll let you know what I think of her US counterpart.

Fiery the angel fell...

The Girl Who Played With Fire

2009 (UK release 2010)

Sweden/Denmark/Germany

Directed by Daniel Alfredson

Screening at UK cinemas now

Here be Dragons but, also, here be spoilers! These spoilers will extend to the third part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest as well as giving away stuff from the books which didn’t make it into the movies... ooh, and also gives away something which happens to Lucy in one of Patricia Cornwell’s novels. You have been duly warned and proceed at your own risk.

I’m going to start this review by trying hard to remember something Kurosawa once wrote (probably in his book Something Like An Autobiography I would imagine) about his early days learning the ropes at Toho and the difference between a novel and a movie script... a story he remembered which demonstrates the different dynamics between a book and a movie... this is as well as I can remember it so I apologise for any small inaccuracies but the message should remain undiluted.

He’d written an adaptation and taken it for approval. In the book he was adapting, a faction of people were wanted with a price on their heads. A wooden sign is posted in a village about them and when one of them saw it, he rushed to where they were hiding and told them all about it. Kurosawa was told that his direct translation was not cinematical enough. To rewrite it so that when the person in question saw the notice, he uprooted it from the ground and ran away with it to show his friends... and that this was the correct way to do things cinematically.

Why am I starting with this little anecdote from Kurosawa? It’s because I want anyone reading this review to know that I am quite aware of the difference between a novel and its on-screen adaptation. Of course things are going to be cut or handled differently to fit the demands of the medium... I get it, I really do. I’ve not got a problem with it and I want you to trust me on this one.

So I’ll go ahead and say now that The Girl Who Played With Fire is, just like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before it, a really good movie but it’s only a half good adaptation.

Stieg Larsson’s original novels are fantastic and I truly think they are bold, pulp masterpieces of their time. So it’s quite possible I’m a little too close to the source material to be totally subjective about this but I’ll give it a go...

I remember sitting at the cinema during the first movie thinking how annoying and commercial a decision it was that they’d left out the “swinging” sexual lifestyle of two of the main characters Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger. In fact, Erika Berger’s a major character in the books and has a very important role to play in the third part but she seems to be really pushed to the sidelines in the movies so far. When you think about it, there are hardly any of the female characters in that first book (save for a couple of the Millennium staff and the old lady who has the photographic link Blomkvist needs) who don’t end up sleeping with Mikael Blomkvist. He seems to be having sex with everyone. Both Salander’s and Berger’s affection for sado-masochistic sex is also kept out of the movies for some reason. I kept thinking that they would have to, at the very least, bring the Blomkvist/Berger sleep and f*ck together as the best of friends whenever they feel like it element into the movie at some point because what happens in the last couple of pages of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has serious consequences in the way that Lisbeth Salander relates to these other characters for the remainder of the other two books.

For Salander, you see, Blomkvist is her first serious relationship... the one which she has decided to go against her best instincts and finally trust someone for and invest in them after all and attempt to be a committed, loving person for them. Then at the end of the first novel, as she heads over to Blomkvist’s place to give him a Christmas present she sees him from across the street in Bergers arms and... from that moment on... she hates Blomkvist and his betrayal (as she perceives it, it’s not a totally black and white issue in the book) of her and it’s not until the very end of the third novel, some months after the main events depicted in that novel, that she decides to let him into her life again as a friend... even though he’s been helping and fighting for her the whole way throughout the second and third novels.

It’s an important slant and it’s only briefly alluded to in the second movie when we find out that Blomkvist has absolutely no idea why Salander’s been avoiding him after everything they went through in the events of the first part (just like he does in the novels). Some viewers who haven’t read the book don’t twig at all that she’s deliberately avoiding him in the movie and it’s no surprise after that little “Thank you for being my friend” message she leaves on his computer in the movie. Can’t quite remember if this note was in the original novel or not but if it was, you can be damn sure it was a covert and coded message meaning something completely other than the warm, fuzzy sentiment it comes across as in the movie.

Another glaring ommission, although not as necessary as those stated above but certainly sorely missed, is Salander’s criminal but thoroughly sympathetic global practices across the world. As she syphons off the money from the criminal organisation she’s come into contact with from the previous book and employ’s “cut outs” etc to invest and embezzle more money, she instantly becomes a multi-multi-millionaire many times over. This Modesty Blaise/Simon Templar-like figure she cuts so impressively in the novels is, again, only briefly alluded to in the movies for people who have read the books. Great swathes of her exploits were alluded to in a brief scene of her in one of her many disguises at the end of the first movie. In the second movie there are three references as far as I could make out... one scene near the start when she is instructing one of her employees how to invest her money, another scene in her former boss’s office (another character relegated to the sidelines but they’ll really need him for the third movie if they do it properly) where she acknowledges that she doesn’t need any money and then a third oblique reference on some documents Bomkvist finds in her new luxurious apartment. It was a shame they couldn’t get at least some of this stuff in the movies but there’s only so much time you can push in a theatrical release.

The film itself is very good for what it is. A tad cliched in parts (the romanticised computer hacking sequences which pay lip service to the Salander character as portrayed in the books) and the characters have, perhaps, as you can see from previous paragraphs here, been softened down a few notches to make them acceptable to a commercial cinema audience (at least in the eyes of the producers and sponsors is my guess... people liked the characters in the books enough, didn’t they?).

I find it curious that the most cinematic of the three novels (the Hollywood action fest style novel) dropped so much from it including some of the action scenes... where was the brilliant three handed foot chase sequence when Blomkvist is trying to find Slander for example? It was strange looking down at my watch and finding only about 20 minutes of The Girl Who Played With Fire had passed but we were already maybe two thirds of the way through the novel when the big, shock death of two of the characters was already upon us. All of the characters suffered from severe cutting due to length of time (they’re quite thick tomes) but the director certainly managed to pull it all together and sew all the selected highlights together to make a pretty comprehendible and watchable movie. Well done to him for that. And you got to meet Blomkvist’s sister who represent’s Salander at her trial in the third book... for most of the third novel Salander is recovering from the events depicted at the end of this movie in hospital under police arrest and the remainder of the book is taken up with her trial and then an action sequence where she faces off against her Robert Shaw-like Bondian henchman brother (as he is depicted in the movie... a less lethal and more clever version of the character than that in the novels)... and you want to see how that fight turns out :-) Hope they do it like the novel!

Actually, I thought the amount of damage inflicted on Salander in the movie version of The Girl Who Played With Fire was a little toned down compared to the novel. I wonder how many of the movie audience realised she’s been shot in the head. That she survives in the book after you have already had to give up on the character and accept her as dead is quite a tightrope of credible writing to balance on... like Lucy in the Scarpetta novels, she is only the second character I can think of off the top of my head who has survived a bullet in the head (Patricia Cornwell did her character one better by having the near fatal shot handily remove a certainly fatal brain tumour which was growing in the head of her character... thus curing her rather than killing her). I think perhaps I’m being a little harsh here because if the excellent Noomi Rapace had played her totally as the at-deaths-door-can-barely-move-vengeful-ghost-spirit she becomes at the close of the second novel... it might have stretched the ability of the audience to continue to buy into the character.

Actually, I think I’ve said enough here... I’m probably being a little over harsh on the movie but it’s only because I enjoyed the novels so much. The Girl Who Played With Fire is a really great thriller and it’s bound to be better than the US remake of it which we’re all going to have inflicted on us in a couple of years time. If you’ve seen the first movie and liked it... rush to your cinema to see this one too. It’s well worth your time if thrillers and larger than life genre characters are your thing. And certainly better than any other crime thriller playing at the cinema at the moment I would guess.