You know those Swedish books everyone has read and Swedish movies everyone has seen, and now there’s an American version of the same stuff? Yeah, I never did any of that, so I showed up for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo knowing nothing except what was in the previews, that an investigative journalist and a punk hacker join forces to solve a forty or fifty year old murder. I will add for the purposes of anyone who did come in like me with no idea of what was going on that said team-up, while natural and organic, took a good long while to accomplish, so it was kind of unsettling (from a story balance perspective) to watch Daniel Craig all embroiled in plot progression while this justifiably angry chick was just kind of living her life and developing her character and seemingly completely uninvolved with anything else in the other scenes.
The pay-off, of course, is that Lisbeth Salander is Incredibly Cool. So, totally worth it, just briefly unsettling. Speaking of unsettling things, I should mention every other part of the movie, because I assure you it does not pull any punches. You will see things nobody should really ought to see, and you will meet a spectacularly dysfunctional (yet entirely plausible, just like the eventual team-up was from earlier) family, and you will probably care about what happens to any and all of them. Which is part of why the “no punches pulled” part of the movie is even rougher than you think it is. And you will find that research can in fact have dramatic tension. You may find that Trent Reznor’s soundtrack, while every bit as meaningfully atmospheric as the act of filming a scene outside in Sweden is, sometimes drowns out the dialogue. So that’s unfortunate but it’s really the only thing I didn’t like. Rumor has it that the book is pretty hard to read, so I suppose I’ll just stick to the sequels.
One thing I wonder, though: are we meant to care that she has a dragon tattoo? Other than its existence, I could not find any underlying purpose for it, neither in subtext nor plain text alike. It’s cool if it was just an identifier, but I can’t help wondering. (Another thing I wonder is whether it is possible for a Swedish film to be non-bleak? Is it like a climate thing, or does the happy stuff just never get exported?)
I just found out that you did these reviews! (I probably wasn’t paying attention before?)
Anyway, I also didn’t see or read any other incarnation of this story before seeing this. I agree with a pretty much everything you said though. The only thing I will add is that I felt like it needed an editor. The film as a whole seemed roughly 30 minutes to long to me. That seems like a lot, so I might be exaggerating.
Also, the tattoo, I think, was a way to feel something besides what she was currently feeling (I’m not sure if this is a spoiler free zone?). That’s why the tattoo artist was written to tell her out loud and unironically that “this will hurt”. There may or may not have also been some reason that she wanted to memorialize that moment in her life? But I think it was more about the pain. At least that is how I took it.
Spoilers: as long as you announce them enough in advance that people can stop reading your comments, I don’t mind. Or rot13 is always welcome. Or if I have explicitly mentioned spoilers my own self.
Tattoo: That makes tons of sense, of course. I should not discount character significance just because it isn’t plot significance. (The other two titles threw me off a little there, in my defense.)
Reviews: please feel free to stay around!
The original title was something… Else, so it doesn’t really reflect a whole lot on the story that it is a dragon, other than possible symbolism. She has a lot of tattoos, and it mentions in the book that she usually gets them after some especially awful event. A coping mechanism for someone largely unable to cope.