The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

[chaddoli]

don't believe I said anything about a conspiracy - just noting she comes from money. a lot of money. which probably helped open a door or ten for her. that's all.

No shit. Being from a wealthy family has helped everyone everywhere from every time period. In the end, you still have to earn the parts you get. David Fincher doesn't cast anyone based on who their parents are. Yes, you're right, I'm sure it helped her get in the door at the beginning of her career. Who cares.

It will be impossible to do any better, which makes the film rather unnecessary in the first place.

I'm sorry to be antagonistic so early in the morning, and I haven't even seen the film, but excuse me? Are you David Fincher all of a sudden? "It will be impossible to do any better"? How do you know this exactly? Like I said, I haven't seen the movie or read the book, but I'm a lot more interested in whatever one of the best commercial filmmakers in the world does with the material (which looks to me like pretty standard conspiracy thriller stuff) than whoever directed the Swedish films. I thought The Social Network would teach people to stop underestimating Fincher once and for all.

[cdnchris]

While I don't know how she would do with a character like Salander, I will say she was very good in The Social Network, and turned a very small role into an incredibly memorable one. My understanding is Fincher wanted an unknown and I can only guess she impressed him during the making of that movie.

[ambrose]

Ryan Gilbey (of the New Statesman) on why he will not be watching any of the Stieg Larsson trilogy

[HistoryProf]

No shit. Being from a wealthy family has helped everyone everywhere from every time period. In the end, you still have to earn the parts you get. David Fincher doesn't cast anyone based on who their parents are. Yes, you're right, I'm sure it helped her get in the door at the beginning of her career. Who cares.

it was merely an observation. nothing more, nothing less. You needn't be so condescending about it.

Like I said, I haven't seen the movie or read the book, but I'm a lot more interested in whatever one of the best commercial filmmakers in the world does with the material (which looks to me like pretty standard conspiracy thriller stuff) than whoever directed the Swedish films.

that's fine...but you are clearly in no position to criticize the widespread consensus that Noomi Rapace took an incredibly complicated literary character and played it perfectly in a way that people around the world responded to with awe. I didn't think it was possible to portray that character on screen, but she did. You obviously only care about this because Fincher is making it, and while I like Fincher a lot, there is just no way the success of the Swedish film can be repeated with such incredible verisimilitude - if only because Mara will ALWAYS be compared to Rapace, who just about everyone agreed WAS Lisbeth Salander. Somehow she managed to become what everyone pictured as they read the books - which, incidentally, are far more than "standard conspiracy thriller stuff."

So i'm sorry if you felt I was impugning Mr. Fincher's talents. I was not. I was more lauding Ms. Rapace's and the enormous hurdle Mara faces in trying to play a character that someone else already has taken and made it their own. But again, someone who has neither read the books nor seen the movies can hardly understand that.

[swo17]

I didn't think it was possible to portray that character on screen, but [Noomi Rapace] did.

I believe Ms. Mara also intends to portray the character on screen.

[domino harvey]

In the words of Dale Gribble, that goes in my big book of So Theres

[Brian C]

By no means am I wanting to pile on here, but I'm really struggling to understand what Ms. Rapace's big accomplishment here is. Perhaps because I haven't read the books, I'm not able to fill in the blanks, such as they are, but to me Lisbeth comes across as someone so insular that there's really very little for Rapace to play. She has no apparent emotions other than anger, so she just needs to stare straight ahead with an angry look on her face, and let the costumes and makeup do the work for her. I don't see why Ms. Mara can't equal Rapace, and I suspect that a big part of her "success" is due to the fact that no one has seen her in anything else.

Anyway, I saw the third film a couple days ago, and I have to say, I thought the movies were pretty disgusting. They pretend to take sympathy for Lisbeth, but the first two films at least are really in love with seeing her getting raped/beaten, and even the third goes out of its way at the end to see her getting bloodied up a bit one last time. A lot of movies try to have it both ways in this respect - glorifying the things that they're pretending to denounce - and these are a particularly nasty case of such. How many lovingly made-up corpses do we see in the third? And mostly of people that aren't even characters in the film - they're just there for eye-candy.

And they're not even all that interesting in a narrative sense, just a jumble of John Grisham/Dan Brown cliches. Throughout the series we have Nazis, government conspiracies, invincible giant albino mutants, Soviet spies, serial killers, kiddie molesters, etc., all undone by plucky journalists and a bisexual goth-punk computer hacker who constantly make revelatory discoveries whenever they're at a computer, microfilm, etc. None of it is all that credible, even on its own terms -

Spoiler

seriously, Lisbeth is going to be charged with attempted murder after being shot three times and buried alive? Self-defense didn't cross the investigators' minds? -

and it's all made up to be as unpleasant as possible, most of the time just for the sake of it. The second film finds almost nothing for Mikael to do, while the third finds Lisbeth mostly passive.

I didn't care for them, is what I'm saying. And though I'm not a huge fan of Fincher, it's not hard for me to imagine that he can do a lot better.

[Jeff]

I'm with Brian here. I had fun watching the first film, and thought was pretty good for what it was, but found nothing to like about the second one, and have no plans to see the third. I thought Rapace gave a perfectly serviceable performance in what seems to me to be a pretty one-note role. I haven't read the books either, so maybe Rapace is quietly portraying facets to the character that would impress fans of the book, but that I'm not privy to. As a stand-alone film though, it seems to be an above-average potboiler murder mystery with plenty of room for improvement. I'll agree that a remake seems entirely unnecessary, and I sure wish Fincher was applying his prodigious talents to something less pulpy and hollow, but I have little doubt that his flair for dark and moody genre fare will result in something I'll find more satisfying than the Swedish film.

[Murdoch]

invincible giant albino mutants

My interest has now been piqued.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'm with Brian here. I had fun watching the first film, and thought was pretty good for what it was, but found nothing to like about the second one, and have no plans to see the third. I thought Rapace gave a perfectly serviceable performance in what seems to me to be a pretty one-note role. I haven't read the books either, so maybe Rapace is quietly portraying facets to the character that would impress fans of the book, but that I'm not privy to. As a stand-alone film though, it seems to be an above-average potboiler murder mystery with plenty of room for improvement. I'll agree that a remake seems entirely unnecessary, and I sure wish Fincher was applying his prodigious talents to something less pulpy and hollow, but I have little doubt that his flair for dark and moody genre fare will result in something I'll find more satisfying than the Swedish film.

And I'm with Jeff. I too saw the first one and liked it. 2nd one was a bit hard to get interested in so I stopped, which should give you a good estimate of my interest for the third one. I do agree with some of the more harsher criticism about how it inversely glorifies what it means to denounce. That much was as clear to me while I was watching it, so it was certainly something to be aware of going into the sequels, which may have diminished my interest before even watching the 2nd film.

The only potential point of interest for the remake for me is that James Horner is doing the music, who can score a thriller like nobody's business.

[HistoryProf]

I don't disagree with a lot of Brian's basic criticisms with the stories themselves - in particular the treatment of Salander. Perhaps it helps to remember the original Swedish title of the first book was "Men Who Hate Women" - and that Larsson was an anti-fascist writer who investigated neo-nazi groups for most of his life. I struggled to understand what precisely was the point of the incredible sadism in the books, but can't honestly answer the critique because I simply don't know what to make of it all.

I guess what I was trying to say about Rapace's performance is that if you have read the books, the character hardly seems like she could possibly be portrayed by a real person - there is so much detail to her and the experiences all so harsh that it's hard to imagine anyone taking it all on. Rapace did an incredible job translating the page to the screen. Now whether that content is meaningful is another question altogether.

What little I know of Swedish history centers on their own Spencerian fascination with eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a peculiar homegrown brand of nazi breeding protocols. There are definitely some strange skeletons in that closet, and I always had the sense Larsson was trying to unveil each and every one of them in these books. unfortunately, he died before they were read by anyone so we'll never really know. But elements like what brian spoilered above seem precisely the kind of thing he was using to comment on Swedish chauvinism. i.e. how quickly the cops bought the idea of her being a lesbian satanist psycho was all too common. Women are whores and objects to be used and abused. I have no idea what truth there is to these messages, but I think that's the central conceit behind it all.

[Mr Sausage]

If you want to know a bit more about the author and the context in which he wrote his books, Christopher Hitchens wrote an interesting piece for Vanity Fair on those very topics last year.

[jbeall]

I liked the third movie, and I'm not sure Lisbeth is all that passive. After all, she's the one who "kicked the hornet's nest," and there's a certain manipulation she engages in (as well as her willingness to sit through the rape video again w/the court). Anyway, given that Blomqvist was the heroic journalist (a la Larsson himself), it's not surprising that the third film unfolded as a major investigation, and at least it abandons the Lisbeth-as-007-agent conceit that made the second one IMHO the weakest of the three.

And is it me, or could you tell that Dr. Teleborian was evil because he was the only character using a HP laptop instead of a Mac? (I think Teleborian is an awesome name for a villain, even better than Vergerus.)

[R0lf]

Just saw the third one and found it extremely frustrating that the conspiracy side of the story was just a set up for another book/film that will never happen because the author died. Given the circumstances I think they could have at least tried not to leave the third movie on the cliffhanger they did.

[duck duck]

Is there an NTSC Blu of the extended version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that is not a part of a box set. That is the only one of the three I like.

[manicsounds]

All the extended TV versions come in the boxsets. I don't see anywhere where it's released on its own.

[R0lf]

Is there an NTSC Blu of the extended version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that is not a part of a box set. That is the only one of the three I like.

There are single Blu releases of all the extended movies in Australia.