An excellent adaptation

Rating: 10/10 (3 September 2011)

The Millennium Trilogy has become a publishing sensation, selling millions of around the world and made its author Stieg Larsson a household name after his death. A film adaptation was always going to be in high demand and the Swedish version is to make a feature film of the first novel and TV adaptation of the other two novels and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the most successful Swedish films to date.
Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a journalist who has been sued for libel and sentenced to three months in prison. With his reputation in tatters a major industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) hires him to investigate an old mystery, the disappearance of 16-year-old great-niece Harriet (Julia Sporre). What makes the mystery even deeper is that it happened on an island that had no access to the mainland, no body was ever found and the Vanger family is distrustful, hateful bunch, so murder seems likes the only explanation. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is a skilled private investigator and a computer hacker and she has a very dark and troubled pass. A sadistic lawyer, Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) has control over her finances and Lisbeth has to find a way to neutralise him. Both Blomkvist and Salander are brought together and investigate what happen to Harriet, finding that something much bigger has been going on.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a great novel, a real page turner making the reader really wanting to find out what happens next. Niels Arden Oplev and his writing team really a really great job at adapting the novel. If you are a complete purist you will never be happy with film adaptation but The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not cut much out, only a few subplots and change a few elements to avoid the film being over loaded with characters. The only changes that really cause any problems are the offer to Blomkvist for him to take what is a seemingly thankless job, his relationship of his daughter and his distrust of religion and some elements involving the business of Millennium which becomes important later in the series. But these are fairly minor and the film does a good job at getting round these issues.
Oplev certainly made a stylist thriller and for a film that is 2 hours, 20 minutes long, he made sure that his adaptation was a tense, fast pace affair. Scenes of particular note are when Lisbeth are with Bjurman, where you could cut the tension with a knife because of the strong interplay by Rapace and Andersson and Oplev handling behind the camera. This is a dark moody film, filled with great acting throughout. The cast really fitted their roles being very much like their counterparts in the book. Anderson was particularly creepy as Bjurman and Rapace had a lot of fight in her as Lisbeth. Nyqvist made a really good Blomkvist and I want to see what The actors in the Hollywood version have a lot to live up to. Oplev made sure that his version is very hard hitting film but so is the book and Larrson did not hold back. Everything worked in this film, the music, the editing, the cinematography and art direction. It is a well made adaptation.
One criticism I have of the books is that I find some of Larrson's characterisation of some of his villains. In The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo it was very complex and believable about how sadists, rapists and serial killers are like, but later on Larrson goes for big conspiracy theories about big business and Security Services and most of the bad guys are hate women, blaming them for all their problems. There is also Larrson's politics, pretty much everyone good is centre-left, no one is even mildly conservative and Larrson has a real disrespect for the centre-right. I have same problem with Tom Clancy who idealises Ronald Regan and most the Republican party and vigilantes and anyone who is a Democrat or a peace activist or supports anything the Republicans disagrees with is a someone who wants to hold back or destroy America and the West: rant over!