Stieg Larsson?s Millennium Trilogy (the entire life work of the author who died young) is one of the foundations of Scandinavian crime fiction, and naturally it cannot escape a film adaptation, or even two. Already, David Fincher is shooting a Hollywood remake of the Swedish film with Daniel ?James Bond? Craig and Carey Mulligan from About a Girl. Perhaps it will be the first Hollywood remake that will be an improvement over the original, at least in so far as the screenplay writer cuts the unnecessarily long two-and-a-half hour European version down to size.
 |
Director Niels Arden Oplev seems to have wanted to film a series with several parts in the original. The thread of the tattooed girl?s past in a state orphanage is introduced in the tenth minute of the film and resolved by the fortieth, after which we hear nothing more about it. Bringing the story line further would certainly better explain the girl?s temperament and motivations. Instead, the viewer is left with no explanations. And that is not the film?s only problem.
In the film, the tattooed girl, Lisbeth, played by Noomi Rapace, is an anti-social, anarchist computer hacker who teams up with a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, played by Michael Nyqvist, to solve a murder that took place decades earlier. The murder, they find, is a series of murders, and a Nazi relative of aristocrat who hired the two to solve the case may be the murderer. The issue of racism brings a whole other element to the story, showing a society and its issues, and making it deeper than the ?usual? crime story.
That was how it was in the book, and that is how it should have been in the film. But, in spite of its 150-minute length, the film just doesn?t address these issues, which is particularly unfortunate considering Larsson?s criticism of radical right groups was the strength and passion of the novel.
