The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
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Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has been a big hit throughout EU over the last couple of years. I only heard about them last autumn but I didn’t really pay attention to them, as I prefer word-of-mouth recommendations to bestseller lists. I got more interested when I heard there was a movie trilogy based on these novels. What finally made me watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – first movie in the series – was Roger Ebert’s highly positive review.
Despite being a first installment in a trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells a self-contained story. It is an engaging and brutally dark thriller about family secrets, Nazis, pedophilia, rape, corrupted establishment and many other modern-day thriller elements that would make David Fincher proud. It reminded me a bit on Mathieu Kassovitz’s thriller Les rivières pourpres but I actually liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a lot more.
Main character – a radical journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist) – seems heavily inspired by Larsson’s own life and work. His somewhat reluctant partner in investigation is Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) who is someone fans of Suicide Girls are going to love: 20-something highly-intelligent hacker with goth/punk fashion style, tattoos to match and no social skills.
Together these two characters begin to unravel decades-old mysterious disappearance of a young heiress. This is where movie particularly shines. The movie presents their investigation as hours of exhausting research, false leads and confusing clues while nevertheless retaining tense atmosphere. Despite the movie lasting almost two hours, it never feels dull due to the sharply drawn characters and solid story.
All in all, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a solid thriller way better then standard Hollywood fare.
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Oliver
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