All the fascinating detail of the novel is gone

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2014)

Yes, it's a powerful movie (and immensely long). However, only in a prose work can you convey the mass of detail required by this complex story: the magazine Millennium, the reasons for Blomqvist's fate, his relationship with the married publisher, his journey north, his relationship with a tangled very wealthy family, his investigation of its background and the fate of a teenage-girl member, his discovery of satanism, his relationship with Lizbeth, and so on. It's a complex story told in hundreds of pages by its author (with many hundreds more pages in the two follow-ups) before his death. The movie is a pale shadow, with only a few brutal passages between Lizbeth and her cruel social worker, and Blomqvist and the Nazi. There's a couple of pretty explicit sex scenes between Blomqvist and Lizbeth and that's it. It's a sketch of the novel, even if it remains a powerful picture and worth seeing.