The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

[calimac]

Do not see this movie. Just don't.

It's not just the rape scenes, or the torture scenes, or even the plot holes so big you could drive a car through them, quite literally.

The final straw is when the villain, apparently just to show how villainous he is - for he doesn't seem to have any better reason - kills a cat.

That's just wrong.

Meow.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I saw the Swedish version, Män som hatar kvinnor, on DVD a couple of months before the American version, and I think it's perceptibly better, partly in plot but especially in characterization. (If you're curious enough to want more details, I wrote about it for Troynovant (http://www.troynovant.com) as "On a Screen, Darkly.") The Swedish version doesn't have gratuitous cat killing, either.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting review, and raises all sorts of important questions about screen adaptations. The one that most interests me comes in at the penultimate paragraph, where you write of the subplots. To this viewer who knows the story only from the American film, they don't look like subplots. In fact, I spent much of the first half wondering, "If this is the story of Mikhael investigating the niece's disappearance, then why is Lisbeth still in it?" to which "But she's the title character" would not be an adequate answer. Her grotesque travails in this section seemed irrelevant to the storyline even after she rejoined it, and even their thematic relevance (alluded to in the Swedish title, which I did not then know) was not brought out or made clear.

I have since learned that at least one of the inane plot holes in the story did not exist in the Swedish film or in the book but was introduced into the second movie, but I remain puzzled by many others, including the one I allude to in my post.