the girl who was in three movies

[calimac]

Years ago I saw the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I found a pretty unsatisfactory thriller, mostly because the title character is fairly superfluous to the plot, which is about a (male) journalist who's hired to investigate a 40-year-old missing-girl mystery. Girl with the d.t. is supposed to be a brilliant computer hacker, so journalist hires her as his assistant. But she's also under legal guardianship for reasons dimly alluded to concerning her past, and her guardians physically and sexually abuse her until she takes revenge. More bothersome to me was the scene where the villain, to threaten the hero, murders the stray cat the hero has taken in and leaves it on his doorstep.

I've been told, more than once, that the original Swedish movie was much better. So when I saw that it, and two sequels, were on Amazon prime, I decided to watch them, and that's been occupying my late-night hours when I'm too tired to edit papers but not enough to fall asleep, up to and including noting DST kicking in on the clock in my computer task bar.

These are not dubbed, but subtitled; it was interesting to discover that I know a little Swedish (just a little, enough to catch a few words here and there). And yes, the first movie is better than the remake: the acting and directing is crisper, the girl is more incisive a character, the plot holes are not so holey, and there's no dead cat.

The sequels, not so satisfactory. Especially because, even though the first movie's mystery has been entirely solved and dropped, and the story is now all about revealing girl with the d.t.'s past, she's superfluous to it again. Worse, as a result of a couple rolls in the hay she had with him in the first movie, the journalist is now pining after her, though she's no longer interested. Though his infatuation takes the form of turning all crusading-journalist on behalf of her legal problems, so she has to be grateful, what?

In #2, The Girl Who Played With Fire, her previously cloudy past is revealed, but his and her attempts to do something about it do not intersect. In the whole course of the movie, she sends him two e-mails and then they meet under dire circumstances about two minutes before the end. The title of most improbable scene in this movie must be shared between the one where the villains literally bury her alive and she digs her way out of the grave after they've gone away, and the scene where she sees on her security-cam feed that the journalist has found her keys and broken into her apartment (which she's not currently using because she's on the run, but he doesn't know that) and it doesn't bother her.

In #3, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, all her troubles turn out to be to silence her as a witness for a nefarious long-term plot hatched by a government agency so secret even the Prime Minister doesn't know about it. But she has nothing to do with unraveling this; all her hacker skills have gone away, and she spends nearly the entire movie recovering in hospital from the climax of the previous movie and then in court being tried for it. All the investigation is done by the journalist and a host of others. Finally, at the very end, she's released from custody and ties up the last remaining dangling plot thread with some dazzling action worthy of the first movie, although its only hack is when she calls directory assistance. Then the journalist shows up at her door to tell her what she's just done, and then finally goes away and leaves her alone.

Comments

[matrixmann]

I think for the Millennium trilogy (as those movies and their original books are called), one needs to be a bit acquainted with the wheelings and dealings of the already deceased author of the books who were the base for these movies. There is a strong background of researching and dragging old Nazi connections in Sweden into the light of the public (I guess, also government corruption in general too). Such which, on average, are way more involved in sick crimes, especially such of sexual nature and especially against children, than they always like to admit officially.

So, these movies are best seen through the lens of what life is like in Sweden and what things are issues in Sweden. Not just through the lens of "another good or bad movie", what Hollywood tried to do with their compulsive remake (that is rather unrelated to something from the reality).

Ah, yeah, by the way, the Millennium saga is even unfinished in its book form until today because the author died in between. There supposedly are notes and manuscrips of what a couple of further books would have been like, but they are incomplete.
So... who knows what he had once planned ahead. Mabye he had envisioned some more content for the character Lisbeth Salander. And this all would have been a series lasting for much longer.

[calimac]

What part of there actually being Nazis (in the movie it's Soviets) and child sexual abuse requires that the main character spend the whole story trapped in custody, while everything is being done for her by some guy with the unrequited sweets for her? That's what made this movie problematic for me.

[matrixmann]

Ah, this may result in a bit longer comment... I hope you don't mind?

At least during the first movie, as far as I remember (it's been a couple of years since I've seen them all three), at first they went off to research about a case of murder in a, seemingly, wealthy family, which slowly but surely turns out to be pretty rotten on the inside in many ways. And, wasn't it that the killer was actually someone who only learned his behavior patterns of raping and killing young girls/women from his father? So to say, an intergenerational thing going on and on?
And, not with the hard knock of a baseball bat, I think there were some hints in there which pointed at this broken wealthy family having once been Nazi sympathizers. Not all members, but there was a red line leading through it. (Err, maybe this is a part which is a bit hard to understand to Americans: It was so common for wealthy industrial moguls at the time to support the Nazis in different countries, like nothing. - Maybe Larsson picked a real world example from Sweden to design this plot, which maybe is relatively unknown outside of Sweden. That's why it seems so off track...)

Journalist Blomqist worked for a magazine which was left-leaning and dealt with far-right structures from the times of the Reich Nazis being still active in the present-day Sweden (much like Larsson in the reality).
I think it was in beginning of the movie that "his" magazine lost a court case against some wealthy mogul. (What that exactly was about, I can't remember and can't reconstruct by reading about the plot somewhere else. Maybe it even wasn't that clearly disclosed in there anyway.)
So, it might be that he accepted the case to research the dead girl's case because of having run into troubles with a previous one and simply needing "a new job" (if that wasn't disclosed in more detail).
Ah, and by someone approaching to him to do such a research and hoping that he could find out anything (like "if not you, who else will find anything?"), it strongly implies that journalist Blomqvist must have been designed to be someone with a name in the branch. - So, with people not being unable to privately reach out to him or to not be able to find out what he's doing at the moment in his job. (That must have been how Salander stumbled over him.)

As the case proceeded and Salander added to the plot, it was the most easy to understand why, over time: Because such cases like that in the first movie reminded her of her own fate of being an abuse survivor. She was doing what a former survivor might do (might, not must) - try to help to make that kind of abuse vanish from the earth. It was a personal matter to her, and so a personal matter to aid as someone dealt with such a case, as best as she could, to uncover the truth.

I think a final point that made Blomqvist connect to her, in a sense of "suspecting there is something strange going on with her mentally", was the end of the first movie where she let the murderer burn in his crashed car, and Blomqvist found out about it. Which actually would have been a crime, but he did not report that because the guy who died as a pig in a humanly way, he didn't regard him as so much worth to be saved himself.

In movie number two, their fates mixed up again through some other subject that made it into the hands of Blomqvist. Not really by intention, but more by accident (if I recall correctly).
But that time, also by the progress of the events, it grew to be about her, not about pursuing another person's case. Through drawing the line before that Blomqvist formed an emotional connection to her, I think this explaines at least his behavior to follow her thread. Like "I wanna find out what's it about with her".

What the custody thing is about in this plot - I fear, for that one would have be a bit acquainted with the regulations and laws that Sweden offers. To me, this context is also foreign with me being German.

At least, I can tell that far: She ended up in there because, as a teenage girl, she once set fire on her abusive father after he, once again, mistreated her mother.
Due to Lisbeth's father being a former Soviet agent, which actually shouldn't even exist, this was a problem in this case and it should never come to surface. - Just as it is in the reality when people are involved in a case who actually shouldn't exist or who follow activities that are important to someone in state structures. If they commit crap, this is always being covered up by law and the legal system, so that the country does not have to admit "we foster, equip and protect criminals - because they do some dirty work for us in return, if we demand it".
I don't know if I caught it that exactly and correctly, but I think there also were some connections of her father into the system itself, people who then ultimately ended up in control of Lisbeth's life since she was a teen up to the present day.
In other words: Her being trapped in custody wasn't an accident, it was also, in parts, her father's revenge on her and the "revenge" of his buddies in higher offices for what she had done. On the sideline, an action to prevent her from ever releasing the info into the world that Sweden had taken a former Soviet agent in and let him work for them instead.
Somehow, as an intermezzo and "break" of this systematic, for an amount of time, she became the case of a legal guardian who treated her well and fair - as that guy became ill and close to dying, they had the chance to gain back control over her, and that's when the whole custody circumstance was being used in an abusive manner over her.

In the third movie, as far as I remember, it's mainly about this complex - about people working in state structures and even the secret service covering up what they had once done in getting Zalachenko to switch sides.
That for, Lisbeth as well as her father must be silenced for all times. First they try achieving that via killing both, but that only succeeds with Zalachenko. And Lisbeth's under too much surveillance and protection then to be able to easily get a hand on her.
So they conduct a different plan to get rid of her - and that is to get her locked up and being declared "insane" and "a danger to the public", so nobody would ever lend an ear to whatever she might be saying.
Due to the "plot" or "trap" or whatever you wanna call it that her father helped in creating to make her officially a suspect of those past murders she was wanted for, there was an official possibility to achieve this. (While simultaneously needing to prevent anything to surface that points at Zalachenko's involvement in the murder cases that the court holds against his daughter.)
That is the plan these people from within the state structures aim for.

So, long story short: Why Lisbeth was in custody all the time is because she had a father who was an agent that changed sides and that nobody ever was supposed to know about.
Due to him being an abusive and violent person, this plan to keep his existence secret failed. One of the people he kept hurting over and over again faught back against him and so he couldn't be hidden in some backwood land anymore.
The solution - that Sweden's laws seem to have offered back then - was: Get her perception officially put into question and her every possible action under watch.

Blomqvist, I think, got stuck on her case because, on one hand, in a human way he emphathized with her, on the other, her help as well as her personal case fell into the spectrum of things that he dealt with as a professional journalist. And while getting more and more involved in her personal case, strange and dangerous things that also affected his life kicked in, so it became a personal matter to him too to get Lisbeth's case turned in her favor. Both from human reasons as well as what he thinks is right and what is wrong. - Corrupted people in government who live their own life beyond law clearly don't belong to that. (This applied to the several killings committed by such people in the cases he investigated on in his profession as well as all the sexual abuse and this issue of owning child pornography that applied to the guy in court which was supposed to judge over Lisbeth's sanity.)

I guess, a subject that maybe Stieg Larsson wanted to hint at with his fictional stories: How many abusive and violent people work inside the depths of the Swedish state, past and present, for who knows how long already. The threads of this kind of people go way back into history, ranging into a very widespread level - from politicians to rich people from the country's important economic branches to people who are in a lesser high office, but who have control to fully legally destroy other peoples' lives if they want. They can be found everywhere and nobody ever seriously dared to take them out of their positions to hold them accountable for their deeds.
And, at its worst, they're even very interconnected - each one protects the other one, unless it becomes necessary to dispose of one of them, so one's own shit doesn't surface.

Phew, it's all a bit scattered, I admit...
As said, it's been a long time since I've seen the movies - and, in fact, I have my troubles imagining what it is like looking at such a film from a foreign country if you don't have any background knowledge about European countries, about life circumstances there and their respective histories.

[calimac]

You're explaining to me the plots and character motivations of the movies, which I probably know better than you can remember them at this point, because I've just seen all the movies and you haven't seen them in a while.

But none of that has anything to do with answering my question, which is, not why do the villains want to silence Lisbeth, or how that relates to historical events in Sweden, but from a storytelling point of view, why does the principal character of the trilogy spend almost the whole of the third movie trapped offstage? Since she never does get locked up by the villains again, this is not required by their motives or anything else.

You offered to explain the meaning of the movies, but while that's nice to have, I didn't really need that. My criticism of the second and third movies' deficiencies was on the storytelling level, not the plot level. (The first movie was indeed about Nazis, but I wasn't criticizing that one. The second and third movies have no Nazis, they have a Soviet defector.) That was what I was seeking an explanation for, and I thought I said so explicitly.

[matrixmann]

Okay, I'll admit, I got carried away...

One question I could pose here is: Maybe it's not Lisbeth who's supposed to be the main character in the center here, but journalist Blomqvist?
At least his work is being protrayed in an active manner in all three movies and, as the third one ends, one can be sure he also continues to play an important role in the plot universe the three movies build up to tell.
In this point it's too bad that the author of the books already died, so you can't tell who of these two main figures would continue to play a lead role. Maybe also Lisbeth's character would drop into the background because her horrible life story had been told now, so what to add new to that still? Those are points that are hard to tell what the author still had in mind intended for the further progress of what happens with those characters...

I guess, much easier to answer it is for the screentime in the third movie.
Here the situation is that Lisbeth's fallen into the hands of the legal system because she had gotten critically wounded during the fight with her father. So she needed to be taken to the hospital, and there they detained her.
Things would progress now towards the court case about the supposed murder of 3 people from movie number 2.
So to say, the formal pathway would progress now, except for a few interferences (like the assassination attempt). Not that much action going on, or it would become pretty unrealistic.
The ball noticeably lies on Blomqvist's end in movie number 3, so... that makes it somewhat logical that he's the more acting plot driver here. Lisbeth's powers to do something about the fate that threatens her are very limited here.

Two is a bit harder to judge.
In number 1, Blomqvist clearly was intended to be the main acting character and Lisbeth appears like somebody who added herself to the story on own behalf from the unknown, so her role appears as more of a helper to him during his investigations. Some mysterious helper that came out of the blue. Like a secondary role.
And in the end, it was mainly about Blomqvist's case clearing up. Salander could head off with some millions she stole.

In Two, whereas, it appears like an accident at all, to me, that the paths of the two cross again. Like something that would normally be pretty unrealistic.
On an artistic base, I could say... maybe here was the intention first to just further progress with Blomqvist's "life as usual" - him getting pointed at a new case of research for his magazine - and then with Lisbeth's each of the two on their own.
That's why the plotlines have been knit rather parallel of each other, but the moments they really meet are rare and short. An element forcing the stories of the two to cross again is as it turns out one of the dead people from Blomqvist's plotline of investigation is Lisbeth's currently acting legal guardian. So that makes it inevitable for him to not head after her and find her. (In fact, the way she let the perpetrator guy die in the first movie, it could have very well been the case that she had become a serial killer, acting out wishes for revenge on people of a certain type. With her lifestyle of stealing money via hacking and then going on travels in disguise...)

One thing I have to mention here is: Maybe the TV-series version of telling the plot offers more material on why also Lisbeth shows that kind of trust towards the journalist while she otherwise appears as distrustful against a lot of people.
'Cause the movies are like shortened-down versions of a TV mini series that became so successful that they decided to bring it to the cinemas as movie versions.
But, as it may be obvious in that aspect, a series has more space and screen time to show more details. Maybe some details shown in that explain some actions better, more conclusively.
The TV series version of the plot, admittedly, I've never seen. I've only seen glimpses of it in a comparison against each other. And from that I know, the amount of material is indeed larger in the series version.
So it could be, this material is something that is a bit missing in this story to fully grasp it or say "okay, now I get the shift".

[calimac]

Again you are mixing up plot with storytelling. You are offering plot reasons - why a thing might logically happen within the fictional world that the movie depicts - for a storytelling question - why the author/screenwriters chose to write it that way.

Regardless of what logical internal reasons are presented - and these are coherent tales which don't raise the "why did this character do that thing?" question very often - to have a story in which your principal characters barely connect (#2) or the one who ought to be the center of the action muted and helpless for the entire movie (#3) is bad storytelling. Either make the story work differently, or write it from a different angle so that it isn't a problem. What if it were a legal procedural story told from Annika's point of view, for instance?

As for Lisbeth not being the principal character, don't be silly. Look at the titles. The Girl With. The Girl Who. The Girl Who. Who is that, if not Lisbeth? Even to the extent that it's Mikael's story, it's his story of his connection with Lisbeth. Don't isolate her and kick her offstage. That's bad storytelling.

[matrixmann]

If being told from the angles of other people then Salander and Blomqvist, it would be an outsider's position who doesn't have the knowledge of the complete story to this point. So, content-wise, this wouldn't be possible.
Or you'd have a lot of repition necessary to let that person find out the previous plot. (At least the necessary bits to understand.)
And, perhaps that's important, those character's judgment of the whole matter would result in something different. This seems to be not what the author/screenwriters wanted.
It was intended to be a story in the style of "Blomqvist carries a camera on his shoulder, showing us his view" and the same for Salander.

What you call "bad storytelling", I'd rather tend to see it as a means like if you have a character who's present the whole time silently, passively, but it isn't physically present much of the time. Even though while that being so, it's relevant to the story, maybe even drives the story in a subtle way. I don't know what they might call that formally...
It's a means of telling a story lesser straight forward.
According to the psychological dynamics laid out, I wouldn't see a problem here because Salander, as a character, is designed to be rather distant, not really seeking the intersection unless a subject catches her focus. She acts a lot on her own behalf without asking someone else over methods and appropriation.

And, about the "hacking skills missing", I don't really find them so much missing in part two.
Yes, it drops a bit into the background because she's stolen herself that money and can live of something as she wants to, it's not a skill depictured so unconditionally necessary for survival, so in that environment it may not have the same kind of significance.
(At all it hasn't been disclosed at any point in the story how she acquired those skills at all and of what nature they actually truly are. E. g. had she learned to be a programmer or such thing? It's only mentioned that she had worked for a firm. Nothing more explicit.)
- That applies as long as she lived outside of Sweden under a false identity. Back in Sweden, there's some more to be seen of that again because it becomes necessary.

In movie 3 I'll agree on this, but I see there isn't really an environment for the character to actively use these skills in.
She received a cell-phone that had been smuggled in by someone else, that's all most of the time. The only thing this background becomes noticeable again is as she asks a friend from the firm the she had worked for to go look for material speaking against the credibility of the guy in court who is supposed to judge her mental state. And that because she can't do it herself.

At all, that the point of telling the story from her point of view in the present day events in movie number 3 isn't that strongly present, I'd see a good reason for that because plot-wise she's in the situation now that she actually didn't want to be in: Caught up and detained.
That causes a sort of mental paralyzation, shock, in her character for an amount of time - up to the point in jail where she starts doing some sports in her cell. That's like a breaking point of finally realizing the whole situation and understanding the fact that either she starts to fight for her freedom or she's definitely going to lose it forever.
From that point, the character becomes more active again.

I'll admit there's a noticeable shift in story and style to tell it from movie number 1 to number 2. The reasons for this aren't really explained by the story content itself.
Now you can speculate... maybe it became solid to the author of the books that he's going to work some more with these characters? Let them solve a couple of cases? Something that maybe wasn't so clear as writing the first story that contained the two.
So that's why from number 2 on the style changed, designed it more like a story to tell that slowly unfolds itself.
Also, it was perhaps clear then that the author wants to focus on these two main characters and not add more to it or maybe even drop one of them.

At least, style-wise, from 1 to 2, admittedly there's this noticeable gap such which one usally experiences with movies which it hadn't been clear about, at the time they were shot, that there's going to be a sequel. So they were shot as a work that persists as a one-time thing.
Then it became manifest there's going to be a sequel and the plot and character development was shifted to a more long-term style (that maybe even lasts longer than just one sequel) - both to say something, but also to keep the reader/viewer entertained with these characters for longer.

[calimac]

You're still treating both the events of the story and the manner in which it's told as if they're immutable. They are not. This is fiction. If either a story event or a storytelling angle doesn't work, it can be changed at the author's command.

I only gave Annika's perspective as an example, but plenty of good trial stories have been told from the lawyer's point of view. There's even 12 Angry Men which is from the jury's point of view and there are no other characters, but it's a great story. The same events told with the boy on trial for murder as the main character would be a very different kind of story.

Same goes for a story with, as you suggest, a passive central character. There are such stories, but they're not action-adventure thrillers with the central character trying desperately to clear themselves.

You become reduced to claiming the author intended the effects I'm criticizing. Deliberately choosing bad storytelling techniques is no excuse.

[matrixmann]

Hm... I guess, my trouble is I don't get it what disturbs you about the way the story's told because I think it's fine. Maybe not free from plotholes or technical discrepancies (the scene of her digging herself out of the self-made grave of her father and half-brother made for her is such one - pretty unrealistic, especially for someone who is wounded), but following it those two paths I find it way more interesting than if it had been a simple movie about a little outstanding court case seen from someone of the perspective who can only witness it as a court case.
If it had been protrayed as this - would there be much point to watch it? Because there had been a couple other movies before like this.

The last interpretation that I can leave behind here is: I guess the author of the books wanted it to be larger than just a court case. He wanted to show something else.

And... at all, what one can't deny is: It's no popcorn content, you've got to pay a lot attention to what happens, so that you understand why suddenly this or that happens or is even possible.
It's not a series of movies to watch just for entertainment.


(If I may have misbehaved here, I'm sorry for that...)