David Fincher’s latest movie is a crime thriller based off the Swedish “Millennium” trilogy books that we’re already adapted into films by Swedish filmmakers, however I have neither read the books nor seen the Swedish movies, so I can’t really comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation nor compare the two films, I did bring two friends with me who are fans of the book, I’ll share their views at the end of this post.
The protagonists of the film are Mikael Blomkvist (played by Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), both who are detective workers, but Mikael is for a newspaper Millennium, while Lisbeth rather scoops personal information, hacks peoples’ computers and so forth for her enterprise she works on.
Mikael’s motivation during the movie is in my opinion cut weirdly, you see it starts with him failing with an X objective, his reputation is damaged and thus the main storyline takes the central focus, but then this motivator comes back at the very end, it felt like the middle/main part of the movie doesn’t focus at all on Mikael’s motivations, but just reminds us at the very end that “hey, this man did this detective work and solved the mystery to gain Y objective to complete his X”. What I’m trying to say here and in general with this whole movie is that, I felt it was very weirdly cut. It cuts back and forth between Mikael and Lisbeth ongoing story, then they just meet up around the middle of the movie and the central crime mystery plot belongs to both of them. I guess what I ultimately mean is: this film has rather bad pacing, so much stuff going on, it seems very loose and less tight and focused.
I will say that all actors give a very good and dedicated performance, especially Rooney Mara on a very particular revenge scene for Lisbeth Salander, you can probably figure out what scene I’m talking about when you see the movie, and I was glad to see people cheer on that scene, even though it was a very brutal and violent scene.
My favorite aspect of the movie has to be the mystery itself resolving these murders and the disappearance and possible murder of this woman; it deals a lot with the Vanger family. The Vangers are just all looney tunes, from fascist Nazis to drunks to just being selfish bastardly people and only few possessing any good values, I loved seeing Mikael and Lisbeth uncovering the Vanger family secrets, great detective work.
The movie also has this rather “Return of the King” wrap up, where 30 minutes are dedicated to closing the character arcs’ of Mikael and Lisbeth, so the movie doesn’t end after the crime scene has been solved, but I was here mainly for the crime scene, and I don’t think I ever did get that invested on both Mikael and Lisbeth, again it comes back to the pacing as the story was moving forward continuously with barely any silent or slow scenes, unless you wish to count the dozen sex scenes, and only a few particular of those.
Overall, the actors give a great performance, the film portrays Sweden very accurately, the Vangers family backstory is intriguing and the music in the film is memorable. It’s just really the pacing (this movie is 2 hours 40 minutes or so long) that makes things cut from scene to scene bit unsatisfying.
What my 2 book fan friends (who have seen the original films too) one hated it, saying it had too much of its own made-up stuff, while the other said it was rather okay, while agreeing with me the pacing was off, but said the fans of the book can find this enjoyable.
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