Back in the late 2000s, I remember the attention “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and its obscure title received. David Fincher was the perfect director to bring Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel to the American big screen (there was a Swedish version in 2009).
Fincher does his best compressing the source material. Otherwise, the movie would have been best if it were a miniseries. While books are often more detailed than their adaptive movie counterparts, Larsson confuses the reader with many irrelevant characters and unneeded subplots, and Fincher at least attempts to streamline the story into an entertaining thriller.
The Vanger family consists of multiple branches of siblings, cousins, Nazis, and lies. You start “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” overwhelmed by the number of characters, but thankfully it narrows as I wasn’t sure if I’d be continuing the story, remaining a confused reader and viewer.
Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist who runs into trouble with a billionaire, while also receiving a job offer from Henrik Vanger to solve a cold case: the supposed murder of his grandniece. Blomkvist enlists the help of Lisbeth Salander after she impressed him with her research abilities into his life.
We also dive into Salander’s troubled past, growing up experiencing abuse and living in foster care. She also experiences this in the present as a 24-year-old. We see an especially gruesome rape scene at the hands of her guardian, Nils Bjurman. David Fincher does not hold back. It is difficult to watch, but also fits in with the violence that is committed throughout the entire story. We even see Salander’s payback to Bjurman, which included tasers and sodomy. We learn that Salander’s drive when focused on a task is to go all in, whether that be revenge or journalism investigation.
When we learn about Martin Vanger’s secret life as a rapist, torturer, and serial killer, it felt rushed in the movie. Yes, we learn that about his and Harriet’s abuse by their father, another serial killer, Gottfried Vanger. But in the book, it’s more fascinating to read the details of that abuse, as opposed to the movie where it is being described while Martin distracts us by holding Blomkvist hostage with a plastic bag on his face.
What the movie does differently is in the reveal, where we learn that Harriet is posing as her cousin Anita Vanger living in London. In the book, Anita helps Harriet escape but then goes off on her own, eventually ending up in Australia. I prefer the book’s storyline as it seems in the movie, Anita’s presence and role were discarded, whereas she is an important piece to Harriet’s escape.
After we learn that Harriet is alive and well, we go back to the subplot of Hans-Erik Wennerström and his downfall. However, in both the book and the movie, the events that transpired with the Vanger family already left us feeling exhausted. Reading the book, I simply did not care about Wennerström. The big mystery was already solved, and yet we still had what felt like another third act to go through. I would have preferred a summary of what happened behind the scenes, rather than go into detail of how Salander took down the billionaire.
With that ending, the movie is the lesser of two evils, as there wasn’t a drag with the montage of Salander going undercover in various costumes. Still, considering the almost 3-hour runtime, I would have preferred that whole subplot on the cutting room floor.