No spoilers!
This was my birthday present this year, I got to choose a movie.I met up with Angel and Adam in Fenton after I got off work. There wasn’t a big crowd at the cine-plex, Thursday I guess, being a light night.
I’d read the book earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, the entire trilogy actually. It was long ago enough that I couldn’t recall exactly at what point in the epic trilogy storyline each of the three books started or ended. I easily recalled events, characters and plots, but not the exact chronology. Adam and Angel had not read any of the books. I was really curious about what they might think of it.
Another thing that I should point out, I only see movies in a theater rarely, one per year or less. It takes a really, really potentially good movie to get me to sit in a theater for several hours. Most movies I’m willing to wait for the pay-per-view or DVD. That way I can pause, replay, set the volume, etc. I really don’t like theaters.
That being said. . .
The opening credits/theme was James Bond-ish, bold music, a slime covered woman dancing seductively, not really relevant to the story at all, stylish, but too long. By this time we’d already suffered through several ads, a half dozen previews, and various warnings about cell phone usage. I wanted to get on with it. (Where’s fast-forward when you really need it?)
The movie’s actual opening scenes set the time and place well, Sweden, winter, cold, dark. The two protagonists, Lisbeth and Mikael don’t interact with each other for nearly the first hour of the movie. We follow them individually though. This is in line with the book. We quickly gather that Lisbeth is a troubled, damaged, but a brilliant freak abused by just about every man that has ever been part of her life. She has a certain moral code, but it’s one of her own making, and one that is certainly honed from a very rough life.
Mikael steps aside from his co-publisher role at Millennium Magazine after a scandal involving stories he wrote about a wealthy industrialist. We’re told he was set up, deliberately given bad information, but public trust in journalism is fickle. Another damaged, vulnerable hero. This part is covered very, very quickly and not in depth. The book had the luxury of explaining it in more understandable detail.
He is hired by an old, retired industrialist, a foe of the one that messed up Mikael’s career. The plot is laid out. A teenage member of the wealthy Vanger family went missing several decades prior, the old man suspects someone in the family killed her and disposed of her body while they were living on or visiting the isolated island compound that day. The Vangers are a completely dysfunctional lot, former Nazi’s and sons/daughters of Nazis and all hermits, nags, wife-beaters and asses. Completely unlikable people.
This is essentially a locked room mystery as the girl disappeared while the island was even more isolated than usual due to a truck accident that blocked the only bridge to the mainland for much of the day of her disappearance.
Meanwhile Lisbeth’s social worker/guardian suffers a stroke, and her case is handed over to a cruel, abusive bureaucrat. In short time he forces Lisbeth to perform increasingly cruel and violent sex acts in exchange for her allowance.
Here’s the next thing you need to know. Though this storyline is in synch with the book, the book’s description of these acts is tempered by brevity. The book leaves the reader to imagine most of it. The movie SHOWS us the acts in graphic detail. If you are at all squeamish about nudity and sexual violence on the screen, you will definitely squirm during these scenes. And there’s more than one of them.
Personally I think this could have been handled much, much better. This was too overt, too violent. The point could have been made with a lot less flesh and blood. I’m pretty liberal minded about this sort of thing, but even for me much of it was simply awkward, gratuitous, and worse, just plain unnecessary.
What took several chapters in the book, Vanger telling the story of his damaged family, one by one, took up only a few minutes in the movie. I don’t know how they could have done it much differently though, the cast of characters in the book is nearly as cumbersome as that in ‘War and Peace’. Add to that the names being Scandinavian, Germanic, etc. the poor, typical American brain doesn’t quite grasp them all as well as if they were Smiths, Jones, etc. I found that in the book there were several names with peculiar dots and lines over some of the letters that I could not even mentally pronounce. I asked Angel about this segment and she said she eventually tuned it all out, finding it impossible to keep up with all the names and who was the son/daughter of whom.
In all though, the movie doesn’t stray much from the book. The visuals are all stunning, the musical score very good, if not quirky. Some of the background narrative, as I pointed out earlier, is sped up to a dizzying, confusing pace. Even though the movie is nearly three hours along, a lot is left out, or incomplete in context, by necessity. (in the book we know more about the golf club that Lisbeth uses as a weapon.) The book was very detailed and precise. In the book there were several plot line distractions to keep the reader from guessing the outcome. Some of these, like the whole Nazi story line, were trimmed in the screenplay to the point where it probably could have been left out altogether in the movie. Novels, especially good ones, do not adapt very well to the big screen. Short stories and novellas work much better. Fewer characters, fewer subplots, etc. In this case this movie could have completely done without several family members. The last twenty minutes or so, dealing solely with the destruction of the industrialist that disgraced Mikael, could have been taken out and left for a sequel. As this movie goes we find out who the bad guy is and what happens to him, which is what we are actually led to care about, well before the movie ends. As I recall in the book, these two plots were more parallel, with both ending at about the same point at the end of the book, I could be wrong. But the movie deals primarily, with only a few exceptions, with the missing girl, then comes back to the industrialist only after that plot line is complete.
Summary:
I absolutely loved this movie. The things I point out, like the gratuitous sex, only actually take up a small fraction of it and can be put into that perspective. The rushing through of certain areas is completely tolerable, if you’ve read the book.
So that’s what I recommend. Read the book first, then you can enjoy the ride without fretting the details as to which mumbled line of thick-accented dialog is crucial and which isn’t. Reading the book will NOT spoil this movie. The movie actually takes you there, puts you in the cold dark Nordic air, the damp back alleys, the torture pit. It gives you credible, believable face and voice to the characters, as the casting in this thing was absolutely dead-on.
Angel and Adam said they enjoyed it, but I got the impression they didn't quite catch some of the nuances, the bits that made the book a superstar. I couldn't get them to say much bad about it at all, except for the slight discomfort as mom, dad and son sat together during some really, really graphic sex scenes. Angel was pleased to find out that there are plans to bring the rest of the trilogy to the big screen. She's got a dark side that she pretty much keeps to herself, but she does enjoy a good dark story about really evil people. She scares me sometimes.
Though with certain caveats, I recommend it. It's the best movie I've seen in a theater this year. Okay, it was also the only movie I sat through in a theater this year, but still I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it would be just as good on a living room flatscreen , three hours is a really long time without an 'intermission'.
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