Z/Web

Director: David Fincher

I liked the book and the Swedish film and I wasn’t sure how I felt about an American remake. I worried it might just be a competent version without adding anything new, but in the end it does enough I think it’s just a little better than than original film.

It’s definitely easier to understand what’s going on (and that nothing to do with the fact that original is subtitled). The book is incredibly complicated and this film does a great job making all that plot understandable. It is loyal to the source material for the most part, though they changed a few things for the better. I’ll spoil things slightly by mentioning two examples I liked.

One was having the girl’s original guardian not die, but have a stroke, so there are a couple of extra scenes with two of them later in the film. I thought the actor who played her guardian, despite not having a single line in the film, had one of the best performances. All we saw was his stiff, stroke-paralyzed body, unable to convey emotion, yet somehow he did. Amazing. Another change for the better was inclusion of a follow-up scene with the scummy lawyer in an elevator where Lisbeth reminds him of his promises and leaves him shuddering in terror. I felt like both the book and the first film dropped the lawyer story a little too easily so this quick follow-up was perfect (especially her final line to “stop looking at tattoo-removal websites”).

The film makes a few other changes that are not so good. I didn’t like that Lisbeth didn’t set fire to the car (it just blows up on its own). It’s a minor detail but key to her character and I don’t know why they changed it. Even more baffling is her asking Mikael for permission to kill the bad guy. That struck me as utterly out of character and I don’t know why that was in there.

Other “improvements” are more murky. I liked that they included some of the ending elements from the book that weren’t in the first movie (the stealing of the money, tracking down what happened to Harriet, etc.), but some aspects of how they accomplished all of that felt awkward and forced. They don’t ruin the movie but are simply different.

One sort of strange decision is that though the film is still set in Sweden (I had thought they were going to change to the U.S.), everyone in the film speaks English but with Swedish accents. This seems unnatural but worse than that, it makes some of the characters difficult to understand. With such an elaborate and complicated plot, understanding dialog is critical, and this works against that. It’s not a problem all the time, but on occasion it’s troublesome.

But overall I was very impressed by the whole production: the direction, sets, and script were all first-rate, and the performances were fantastic (especially Daniel Craig who was a perfect Mikael) and I thought Rooney Mara was great in a tough role (even more so considering how great Noomi Rapace was in the Swedish version). They fixed a few flaws in the original film but added a few others, so in some ways this is a wash (and I’d have no issues with someone preferring the Swedish movie), but overall I enjoyed this one more. It was just clearer and easier to understand. I thought I might be bored having both read the book and seen the other movie, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. They came very close to making it perfect.

(There still are flaws from the book that made it into the film, in particular the whole mess with the numbers and Bible verses, which still makes no sense. I was especially frustrated by how close they came to fixing the awkward link between the verses and the murders. They set it up perfectly with the cop mentioning the Rebecca murder, but since he didn’t actually reveal the unusual way she was killed, there was no way Mikael could connect the verses with Rebecca’s murder, yet he does so anyway in a skip of logic.)