A 2h30min trailer

Rating: 4/10 (3 March 2020)

Reading through the reviews for some clues, one can quickly realize that many of them come from an audience that has encountered the story either by reading the novel or watching the older Swedish film. I have done none of them. This adaptation is my only encounter.
To me, it felt like a trailer to a novel, rather than a compelling or intriguing thriller. There was just too much of everything at once. Uncles, sisters, nephews, business partners, paper cutouts, maps, computer searches, code lines, pinned photos, location changes. It soon became just a big mash of hell-knows-who-did-what-where-when-why. Characters are presented in sequence so fast that you don't even get to sample their personalities or their relation to the subject matter. Apart from Mikael and Lisbeth, everyone else seems two-dimensional and just another generic piece in the puzzle.
This movie should have been a TV series. The pace picks up too fast in the middle for anyone not familiar with the novel to care. It ends up being a Game of Thrones season in 150 minutes.