Girl with a Dragon Tattoo (2009)

1 Comment | Trackback | Permalink | March 28th, 2010

It takes a certain amount of science, a whole lot of violence, a kick ass female protagonist, guns (of course) and show stopping action to produce a crime thriller that both draws the viewer into the plot and steers through an epic course of unexpected danger. Millions have read Steig Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, and now the first book in the series “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has been made into feature length movie, underscoring just how popular and influential the books are worldwide. With the other two books already filmed and on their way to theatres in the near future, the popularity of this series indicates the easy translation from words to action, and how much support there is for the trilogy.

The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, released in 2009, is directed by Niels Arden Oplev and is entirely in Swedish. While there are talks of a Hollywood english remake (no surprises there), the Swedish movie has proven to be a hit success, drawing thousands to its release around the world. Several highlights do distinguish the movie from previous crime thrillers, however the overlong sequences, clichés and glossed over details make the entire movie quite tiresome to watch.

In a relatively derivative start to the film, investigative journalist Michael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired to uncover the whereabouts of Henrik Vanger’s (Sven-Bertil Taube) great niece, Harriet (Ewa Fröling).  Through a turn of events, professional hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) manages to uncover more evidence through her skills, and forming a rather odd team they both race to discover just what happened to Harriet and who was responsible for her disappearance.

While the pairing of Lisbeth and Michael forms a dynamic but formulaic feature of the classic detective/investigative drama, it is the little details in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo that really holds this film back. One of the most obvious and outstanding ones is the fact that Lisbeth, and seemingly all the other people in the film use Apple MACs. There’s really nothing wrong with macs at all, but in this film the product placement is so clear and so absurd that it is at times extremely hard to get fully immersed into the story when you can see Lisbeth “hacking” Blomkvist’s own macbook using generic and completely implausible code. In fact, the film makes hacking look so EASY, it seems all you need to know to be a professional hacker is to type in “access Blomkivsts’ laptop” into a generic linux-esque program, and voila! – she is now freely able to surf the contents of said laptop. Well done, Lisbeth.

Not only this, the use of iPhoto to alter the contrast and brightness of the photos key in uncovering the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance really brings this film down into a whole new level of amateurishness. This was certainly not the professional and crafty duo portrayed in Larsson’s novel! Perhaps it is just the aversion to Apple products in general that makes the film so hard to understand how exactly they came about the conclusion of the events. In this way, it is probably just as well the novels work and describe what happens so much better than in the movie!

The ease at which they seem to come together in deciphering the case is a huge let down in terms of audience participation as well. In a rather convoluted mish mash string of events, the pacing of their discoveries alongside the total ease at which they find significant points relating to the case really draws the movie out unnecessarily. Tiring ever so fast, it is any wonder people can even be bothered attempting to figure out what actually happened! Michael Nyqvist is thoroughly disinteresting as Blomkvist, and gives a rather dire and uninspired portrayal contrastive against the wonderfully acted Lisbeth.

Despite the poor pacing and attention to detail, one of the revelations of the movie is without a doubt the lead actress, Noomi Rapace. If attaining all the facial piercings for the role isn’t enough to show how committed she is to the series, her acting as a strong hardcore, angsty woman translates to the screen with a tenacity that seems to attract all attention on her disregarding the woeful script. While the character does call for generic emo/hardcore subgenre-esque clothes, hair and customary black makeup and pants, Rapace seems to have a knack for portraying the strength and determination of Lisbeth, which really works well against the grain of the other typical archetypes in the movie.

In a rape scene that is disturbing as well as added shock value, Rapace pulls off the scene extremely well, particularly exemplifying the emotion and helplessness in her situation. It is in fact, Rapace in particular that saves this movie from total disaster – too bad the script wasn’t any better in portraying the strength of Larsson’s work!

For cinematic lovers of crime drama and thrillers, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is a must watch – if only because it is based on one of the best crime trilogies in literary fiction, and it does contain a strong female protagonist which is often hard to come by. Despite these features however, the screenplay and lack of chemistry between Blomkvist and Lisbeth really brings the film down, and it is definitely the little details that prevent audiences from fully suspending their disbelief for two hours. For a film in its genre, it is no doubt one that compared to other crime thrillers such as Tell No One, a critically accalaimed French film by Guillaume Canet. Girl with a Dragon Tattoo isn’t a total disaster – just one which could do with several major improvements. With the next two films in the series wrapping up post production, it is any wonder if the interest will be there to continue watching, or to just go back to reading the books!

~ Jakki posted at 3:57 pm

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