The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010) dir. Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube, Lena Endre, Peter Haber

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Since the discussion of the first Tattoo movie in relationship to the new film comes up all the time for me, why not repost my original review of the Niels Arden Oplev version. For the Fincher version, click HERE.

The success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books is widely known – a European phenomenon, which over this past year has finally broken in North America. All three films based on the three books, including The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have already been shot, completed and released abroad to mega box office success. So, for once, North America has been left as the ‘last to know’ about these stories.

Not much has been made of the success of its North American theatrical release yet, but it’s an achievement. Considering the ‘in and out and get to the DVD release’ pattern of most films these days, its 13 weeks in release in a modest number of theatres is remarkable. Though it's only garnered a modest $7.3 million dollar take, the distributors and exhibiters seemed to have hit the sweet spot of its release – just enough theatres for it to maintain a solid word of mouth momentum and profitability, and a precedent for how smaller films can have lasting power in the cinema.

As for the movie, it’s just as remarkable. It’s a thrilling slice of Euro-pulp and a heavily plotted investigative, serial killer, feminist melodrama. Slick production value, salacious subject matter and an instantly iconic performance by Noomi Rapace make this the guilty pleasure of the year – a truly epic and inspired piece of airport trash.

Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a shamed investigative political journalist who has found himself sentenced to prison for apparently slandering a prominent politician publicly in his latest article. At his worst moment he receives a call from an even more prominent Swedish businessman, Henrik Vanger, who wants to hire Mikael to investigate the murder of his niece from 1966. With six months of freedom before having to serve his sentence and without a job, Mikael accepts the offer and soon becomes embroiled in a complex and sordid 40-year-old trail of family squabbles, neo-Nazism tendencies, gruesome sexual fetishes and grisly murder.

Meanwhile, a young 24-year-old tattooed and pierced goth chick, Lisbeth Salander (Noomie Rapace), the anti-social yet brilliant investigator who hacked into Blomkqvist’s computer on behalf of Vanger, is on her own path of adventure. Out of the blue she’s been told her guardianship (she's still being recognized as a youth) has been transferred to an especially slimy attorney. He turns out to be a masochist who subjects Lisbeth to humiliating sexual torture. That is, until she turns the tables and exacts some sweet revenge against him. After this escapade she joins up with Blomkvist to help solve the 40-year-old cold case.

This rather quick synopsis only scratches the surface of hair-raising peculiarities that make up this narrative. Particularly gruesome is the lengthy build-up to Lisbeth’s history. We don’t know much about her, but her physical appearance suggests a rebellious attitude and a hardened emotional exterior due to some trauma in the past. When the despicable court-appointed guardian enters her life her character is taken to the extreme. The actions of the guardian don’t make much sense logically, but it reinforces with severity Larsson’s pervasive theme of misogyny. The film successfully teases us with flashbacks to Lisbeth as a child and the death of her father via a lit match and some gasoline – a history we just might see fleshed out in The Girl Who Played With Fire.

As a serial killer genre film, director Oplev hits all the right buttons stylistically to entrap us in the complex web of evidence, back story, politics and the delightfully bad deeds of his killer. There’s a lot of procedural information thrown at us, but it’s expertly revealed like peeling the layers of an onion to provide maximum tension. If anything, the final reveals don’t quite elevate its shock value to anything higher than what we saw happen to Lisbeth at the beginning. And the rather sappy reunion that happens in the denouement is a tad too soft for this otherwise darkly cynical film.

Unfortunately, looking ahead to the other films, it appears the director Niels Arden Oplev directed only the first film and another director helmed the last two. In a few months we’ll see if the other two meet the expectations satisfied by Tattoo.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) dir. David Fincher
Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Stellan Skarsgaard, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright

***½

By Alan Bacchus

I don't think we should consider this picture a remake of the original, but considering the close proximity of the Niels Arden Oplev version, let's call the Swedish version a trial run of sorts for this film adaptation. The fact is the first film was pretty good, a decent adaptation the novel visualized with a David Fincher-like style – a grisly crime procedural told with a slow-burning, cold tone and precise visual compositions. Well, now we have the real thing, the real David Fincher at the helm of the 'American version', a film not all that dissimilar from Oplev's but with the full and authentic Fincher experience.

Fans of the book (or the first movie) that feared the Americans would 'Hollywoodize' these universally loved 'Swedish' stories can relax. Fincher has dutifully honoured Stieg Larsson and his Swedish heritage by making this as Swedish as possible. Not only is the film set in Sweden, it was shot there and co-produced by Yellow Bird, the producers of the Swedish films. Other than the lead players, Fincher populates most of the supporting roles with real Swedes. Hell, even Robin Wright does a decent Swedish accent!

The story is the same with few changes from the original (note: I have not read the book). Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist for Millennium magazine who has recently been indicted for libel for a scathing article on a high profile financial tycoon. At this lowest moment of his life, he gets a call from Henrik Vanger, an even more powerful corporate tycoon who offers Mikael a job – to investigate the murder of his beloved niece, Harriet, who, after disappearing in 1965, has been tormented by her killer with flowers each year on his birthday.

Holed up in an icy cold estate up north, Mikael systematically goes through all the old evidence, but the most intriguing aspect of the case is the tempestuous Vanger family, one of whom must be the killer. Vanger's siblings, nieces and nephews are portrayed as a motley crew of spoiled aristocrats sequestered from regular working class life. Mikael's investigation hits its stride when he employs a goth super hacker and the person after whom the film is named – the tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander. Though suffering from psychological damage from a life abused by men, she's created a stone cold kickass feminist attitude that allows her to get what she wants. By the end, the secrets of the case are revealed in traditional pot boiler plotting, including a dramatic confession by the killer at the end. But it's the tease of Salander's back story and Mikael's connection to the Vangers and his professional issues with the magazine that enrich the experience.

Noomi Rapace was a brilliant Lisbeth Salander, and Rooney Mara does a fine job keeping up with her. Her expressionless composure and physical attributes (piercings, tats, goth attire) create an imposing first impression, but Rooney adequately shows us the deep-rooted pain and fear from her years of emotional torture. Fincher plays out her character as I imagine Larsson had intended, as a superhero of sorts, not someone to replicate some kind of realist character portrait, but someone to root for and stimulate us like an aggressive martyr fueled by revenge. The back story of Salander, as mentioned, is perfectly teased to us, but by proxy Harriet Vanger's story we assume is also Lisbeth's.

Daniel Craig is curiously cast perhaps because he's a better looking version of Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish blonde with a poxy face who played Mikael in the original film. Craig embodies the intellectual and political savvy of Blomkvist with aplomb. He's not glorified with sexual allure like in the Bond films. Craig's attractiveness comes from his ability to analyze the minutiae of data and evidence.

As expected, Fincher plays out the procedural aspects of the story with a wicked sense of pace. Under the tough but moody sounds of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, he makes the 158-minute running time fly by without notice.

Unlike the first film, Fincher ambitiously extends the narrative beyond its natural ending for another 20 minutes to close off the plotting of Blomkvist's legal troubles and to some degree his relationship with Salander. It's a tightly plotted montage sequence, the kind that normally exists in the second act to compress time, and by all rights as a denouement it shouldn't be there. But this all works simply because of Larsson's intriguing pulp narrative, rich with multi-generational back stories and strong themes of feminism under Fincher's singular and unwavering vision and filmmaking skills.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010) dir. Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace and Lena Endre

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Instead of ramping up for a thrilling intense finale to the now-revered Millenium Trilogy the series fizzles out with barely a whimper. Daniel Alfredsson is back as director, a considerable step down in vision from Niels Arden Oplev’s stylishly cool The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Like the second film Alfredsson’s direction so annoyingly pedestrian it feels more like a television miniseries than a feature film.

But who knows, perhaps Dragon Tattoo went over budget and the producer’s felt they needed to keep the production at a minimum. After all, by then the American remake rights had been sold, they knew a far superior version would be made, with considerable higher budget and prestige. So what’s the point in spending an arm a leg on these second. With the fan base firmly established from the books and the first film, why not just coast on these successes crank out two more movies at minimal cost, rake in the money and wait for the royalties on the Fincher versions. In interviews Orplev has said the schedule constraints of the second and third movies was the deciding factor not to continue with the series, so between the lines this theory might have some truth.

Well for what it’s worth, Hornet’s Nest is better than The Girl Who Played With Fire.FThis story starts immediately after Fire and continues the story like one film split into two. With Lisbeth Salander in custody after attempting to kill her father, Michael Blomquist and the gang at Millenium Magazine scramble to gather evidence to help in the prosecution against her. We become privy to the secret government agency which brought her father Zalachenko over from Russia and arranged Salander’s incarceration in the mental hospital in her youth. All the details of Salander’s past come to light in adequate though uninspired fashion both in the trial and in the investigation leading up to it.

It’s mostly undramatic as there’s very little to reveal than we already knew or deduced. The only scene to take home is Blomquist’s fight with the Serbian assassins sent to kill him in the restaurant. If anything I couldn’t help imagine what Fincher will do with this scene. Same with the offish Ronald Niedermann, the half brother of Salander who is invisible to any pain. His final confrontation with Salander is a Ridley Scott -stytle cat and mouse chase in an abandoned factory, an action scene which could have been embellished with verve by a director with even a hint of panache.

So with the Swedish version complete, it’s time for the Americans to do it better. It’s a shame the Swedes gave up trying after such a valiant and successful first attempt.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2010) dir. Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Michalis Koutsogiannakis

**

By Alan Bacchus

The sad realization that the film version of The Girl Who Played With Fire was going to suck set in early. The previous and highly successful Dragon Tattoo film was a marvellously trashy serial killer thriller featuring a dense but understandable narrative, complete in its own right but with enough backstory to tease us that another entry in the story could be just as good.

But, for some reason the producer hired another director to shoot Fire, and even the final episode, The Girl Who Kicked in the Hornet’s Nest. As the opening scene trotted along it was clear there was a different directorial hand at work. Under the eyes and ears of Niels Arden Oplev, the first film had style to burn, a cold and emotionally detached formalism which kept the audience on edge. In Fire under the artistic hand of Daniel Alfredson, it’s a dull uninspired ‘television look, some handheld photography marred by inconsistent look opposite to Oplev’s streamlined visuals.

As for the story, we’re back in the shoes of goth hacker Lisbeth Salander, whose hair is longer and more businesslike. She’s still blackmailing that sicko pederast parole officer who raped her in the previous movie. But when he turns up dead, suddenly she’s framed for murder and on the run from the police. Poor Lisbeth also gets framed for the murder of a couple of young journalists doing a story on sex trafficking, to be published by none other than Millenium Magazine. Enter Dragon Tattoo’s hero Mykael Blomkvyst who endeavours to track Lisbeth down and help her clear her name.

The link-ups to the previous film and the expansion of the Salander backstory are welcome, but we don’t sufficiently learn anything new about Lisbeth the character that we didn’t infer from the first film. We knew she had daddy issues, as seen by the grisly flashbacks to her burning her father with some gasoline and a match.

There’s a bunch of news characters, the most peculiar of which is this film’s heavy, a robotic henchmen characterized as an indestructible robotic beast not all that dissimilar from Jaws from the Bond franchise. A number of fight scenes with this oaf go on way too long, in particular a lengthy hand to hand combat with a muy thai boxer, the most inexplicably long fight scene since Roddy Piper and Keith David wrestled over a pair of sunglasses in They Live.

Other than the staid direction, Fire suffers mostly from the staleness of the material. Salander, Blomkvist and the three decades long serial killer was exciting. In Fire, the sex trafficking linkup with Salander’s backstory finds Salander is not as fresh.

Knowing that this Alfredson guy directed the last episode, my hype factor of Hornet’s Nest is very very low.