Not the Lisbeth Salander we know and love

Rating: 4/10 (26 September 2012)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is visually pleasing as you would expect from David Fincher. The music is very good if you like Trent Reznor's soundtracks, and I do. (However, the cover of Immigrant Song for the titles, not to mention the Bond visuals seemed totally inappropriate to me.)
From there though it all goes downhill rapidly. Every clue you need to work out pretty much the whole solution is given in the first 24 minutes and yes, I did check. So instead of giving the audience a satisfying puzzle to solve everything is signalled and removes any tension. There are plenty of other concessions for the hard of thinking too. For instance, all the suspects' houses are visible from Henrik's house and the chief suspect's house perches atop a cliff making it look like a modern version of Frankenstein's castle.
Although I like Daniel Craig's work, especially as Bond, he is wasted here and comes a poor second to Michael Nyqvist in the original film. The same is true of Rooney Mara who can't match Noomi Rapace's portrayal. All the important beats from the original film and book are mangled – Blomvkist's prison sentence is ignored, his relationship with Erika isn't explained, the dire straits that Millennium finds itself in is skated over, the importance of hacking is treated trivially, Plague isn't featured as Lisbeth's friend. And on and on it goes. Most fatally there is a failure to better explain Lisbeth's background and character. She seems like a subsidiary character in Fincher's version and she should be at least as important as Blomvkist. Often she comes over as rather weak here and the line "Can I kill him now?" would never be uttered by Lisbeth as conceived by Stieg Larsson.
I don't believe that movies should just follow the books they are based on but I do think they should keep to the spirit of the original characters. I'm always prepared to give remakes of foreign language films a chance but here, once again, it has turned out to be as pointless as I feared it would be.
Stick with the original