Z/Web

After reading the book, I wanted to watch the Swedish film. I’d heard good things about it but wasn’t really sure how well it would translate. It turns out to work just fine. It’s a terrific film, beautifully shot and written. They do change some things from the book. Some of the things are clearly for simplicities’ sake, but other aspects are baffling. One change which I didn’t like is the way the main journalist character discovers the hacker Salander. In the book it was a believable mistake she made, which made sense. In the film, she actually sends him an apparently traceable email, which is just ridiculous and destroys the credibility of her hacker character as being intelligent and competent. But other changes are actually better in the film. The biggest is the ending. While the book only hints at Salander’s sketchy past, the film shows us a flashback and links that with her actions at the end. At first I didn’t like what she was doing because it was so different from the book, but the link actually tied everything together and in the end, I liked the film version of that aspect better than the book. I was curious how the film would handle some of the book’s edgier aspects. Some parts they dropped (like the extramarital love affairs), but they did keep a lot of sex and violence and some of the scenes are more disturbing in the film than the book. (Just a warning if you’re squeamish. It’s one thing ton read about a brutal rape. It’s quite another to watch it.) Overall, this is a terrific adaptation and now have trouble imagining how the Hollywood remake can be any better.