The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Review

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev
Starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist

As Kodos and Kang would say: “Holy Fleurking Schnit!”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo freakin’ rips it and does so in an art-house, intelligent way.

It’s a wonderful juxtaposition when a film can take it’s time, but never feel slow; build character without grinding to a halt; maintain suspense without lowering itself to the lowest common denominator; and keep you engaged and guessing throughout.

Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a reporter (remember them?) who actually does investigate stories rather than just releasing press kits, but gets set up for a fall from one of his corporate targets. Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander, an ex-con working for a security firm who has been hired to check out Blomkvist. Salander is complex, has a dark past, is unpredictable … and has a dragon tattoo.

Despite his guilty conviction of libel, Blomkvist is hired to investigate a 40 year old murder. The man employing Blomkvist is industrialist Henrik Vagner, trying to solve the mystery of who killed his beloved niece. Vagner is convinced that the perpetrator is someone within his own family as he is sent a yearly birthday token from the killer simply to torture him. Of course, Vagner’s suspicions are all speculation as no one knows exactly what happened 40 years ago and it’s Blomkvist who’s been brought in, in one last attempt to decipher a case that has stumped investigators for decades.

Lisbeth Salander develops an interest in Blomkvist while investigating him on behalf of Vagner and keeps tabs on him after the assignment is done. Thus, she is dragged into the case as well when she cracks a code that was in the victim’s diary. Allowing herself to get drawn in, she teams up with Blomkvist to investigate the murder together. Since I loathe reviews that do nothing but rehash the plot and in the process give away nearly the entire movie, the plot summary is going to have to stop right here … oooh, intrigued?

You should be. This movie pulls together all the elements of the story without letting the ball ever hit the floor. The film makers and actors deserve high praise for creating a film that runs nearly two and a half hours but feels considerably shorter.

Perhaps most exciting of all is that a new cinematic character, Lisbeth Salander, has been unleashed upon the public. Tough as nails, smart as a whip, beautiful but not pretty, Salander is easy to root for even though you’re not quite sure what’s going on inside her mind. Congratulations to Noomi Rapace for so successfully realizing this intriguing figure; oh, and make sure you see this movie before the inevitably lousy American version hits the screens.

Point of Interest: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first movie based on a series of books written by Stieg Larsson called the Millennium Trilogy. The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest are the last two. The story behind these books is as fascinating as the books themselves. Larsson was an investigative journalist/activist who probed extreme right and racist organizations and had to live the last several years of his life under death threats. The Millennium books were found and published after his passing and have become a world-wide phenomenon. I have yet to read the books myself (I’ll start after seeing the Played with Fire film) but based on this movie, I’m looking forward to diving in. I would love to hear any comments from people who have read the books to hear whether you think they did a good job with the adaptation.