Review: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
Jan. 2nd, 2012 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdeb"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a murder mystery set mostly in a quaint town in Sweden. The plot makes sense, and the mystery is fair--you are told that the villain is among a certain set of people near the beginning of the story and that is, indeed, the case.
As with many mysteries, the real story isn't about the mystery as much as it is about the characters investigating it. And here is where this movie gets different. First of all, there are two investigators, and they have not met. Second, they are not happy, witty characters stumbling upon a case. One is someone who thinks his life has just been ruined. He's a workaholic who can no longer practice his career. The other character is someone whose life is so rough that it makes his look cushy in comparison.
It is not the case that the entire world in which the movie is set is horrible, like with "Thelma and Louise" (where virtually every male is a rapist), but the movie shows that your own part of the world can be horrible anyway. Can a happy ending erase the horrors that some people have to face? Perhaps not. So, this movie is sort of like a war movie, and not at all cartoonish. But the bad guys don't always win--it's not all bleakness with no hope.
I have now seen both the Swedish and the American movies by this name and they are both very well done and gripping. I would recommend either one unless I have already scared you off. (Oh, there is also lots of nudity, and it's not all the happy fun kind.)
The best thing about the American version is that the pacing is perfect. You go back and forth between the main two characters, and both stories are interesting. Also, there is a lot more talking than in the Swedish version. So you get much better verbal communication, which I love, and it's easier to know what's going on with the characters and the plot. Robin says the electronics are also perfect--the hacker has just the sort of computer a hacker would have during that period, and uses just the sort of software a hacker would use. People have cell phones, as they would have had in that period, and they are just the right cell phones for that period, not smart phones. They get around plot needs by not having a cell phone tower on the remote island, which is much more believable than the investigators not having cell phones.
However, one of the main characters is a hero in the American version. In the Swedish version, she also does amazing heroic things, but she is broken in many ways, which is much more realistic. I also prefer that in the Swedish version, it's the person with more resources who wishes there was more to the relationship, which seems more fair to me. Also, in the Swedish version, you get to hear Swedish. I found Swedish to be a very interesting language. It's Germanic, like much of English, so you can often guess which spoken Swedish word goes with which subtitled English word, and that turned out to be oddly fun. I feel that any problems with pacing were more than made up for by getting to listen to Swedish.
I've not (yet) read the book, so I can't compare.
As with many mysteries, the real story isn't about the mystery as much as it is about the characters investigating it. And here is where this movie gets different. First of all, there are two investigators, and they have not met. Second, they are not happy, witty characters stumbling upon a case. One is someone who thinks his life has just been ruined. He's a workaholic who can no longer practice his career. The other character is someone whose life is so rough that it makes his look cushy in comparison.
It is not the case that the entire world in which the movie is set is horrible, like with "Thelma and Louise" (where virtually every male is a rapist), but the movie shows that your own part of the world can be horrible anyway. Can a happy ending erase the horrors that some people have to face? Perhaps not. So, this movie is sort of like a war movie, and not at all cartoonish. But the bad guys don't always win--it's not all bleakness with no hope.
I have now seen both the Swedish and the American movies by this name and they are both very well done and gripping. I would recommend either one unless I have already scared you off. (Oh, there is also lots of nudity, and it's not all the happy fun kind.)
The best thing about the American version is that the pacing is perfect. You go back and forth between the main two characters, and both stories are interesting. Also, there is a lot more talking than in the Swedish version. So you get much better verbal communication, which I love, and it's easier to know what's going on with the characters and the plot. Robin says the electronics are also perfect--the hacker has just the sort of computer a hacker would have during that period, and uses just the sort of software a hacker would use. People have cell phones, as they would have had in that period, and they are just the right cell phones for that period, not smart phones. They get around plot needs by not having a cell phone tower on the remote island, which is much more believable than the investigators not having cell phones.
However, one of the main characters is a hero in the American version. In the Swedish version, she also does amazing heroic things, but she is broken in many ways, which is much more realistic. I also prefer that in the Swedish version, it's the person with more resources who wishes there was more to the relationship, which seems more fair to me. Also, in the Swedish version, you get to hear Swedish. I found Swedish to be a very interesting language. It's Germanic, like much of English, so you can often guess which spoken Swedish word goes with which subtitled English word, and that turned out to be oddly fun. I feel that any problems with pacing were more than made up for by getting to listen to Swedish.
I've not (yet) read the book, so I can't compare.