Music Box Films | 2009 | 155 mins. | Not Rated/R
Based on the novel of the same name by Swedish author Steig Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first book in his Millennium Trilogy. Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, and made with a budget of $13 million, the film was first released in Sweden on February 25, 2009. By August 2009, it had been sold to 25 countries outside Scandinavia, most of them planning a release in 2010, and had been seen by more than 6 million people in the countries where it was already released; to date, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo taken in over $100 million in box office receipts.
Anyone who’s had the good fortune to read Larsson’s novel, will quickly realize the film is fairly faithful adaptation. Expertly crafted by a director who clearly knows what to do behind a camera, and a screenplay (written by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg) that doesn’t drift to far from the source material, what emerges is one of the more gripping thrillers to hit the screen in the last twenty years.
The Millennium Trilogy revolves around two characters. The first is Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist loosely based on Larsson himself. As Dragon Tattoo opens, Blomkvist’s career has just been ruined by an adverse judgment in a court case over an exposé that he authored for Millennium magazine. The subject of the article, a wealthy industrialist named Wennerström (Stefan Sauk), sued and won, and the Swedish court has imposed a fine and a three-month prison term. For its own protection, the magazine forces Blomkvist to take a leave of absence. His future looks bleak.
As he waits in limbo, a Swedish industrialist named Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) hires him to try to learn what happened to a 16-year-old niece whom he treated like his own daughter. The niece disappeared some forty years earlier, and the police have hit a series of dead ends. Despite those who may think Henrik should just get on with his life, he wants to find out what happened to the girl for his own piece of mind. Accepting the job, Blomkvist is given countless boxes of information to sort through and study, the most helpful being a video taken of Harriet (Ewa Fröling) watching a parade shortly before she disappeared, and a photo of her standing in the window of a building, taken from far away.These are all things that would make legendary filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock proud, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also adds its own twist—the femme fatale is a computer hacker who works for a firm that specializes in surveillance, and she’s been hacking into Blomkvist’s work because something about that earlier court case just didn’t seem right to her.
Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is the 24-year-old “girl” of the title. The narrative goes back and forth from Blomkvist’s world to hers. As Blomkvist investigates, Salander has numerous run-ins with hoods and a guardian who constantly abuses her. Apparently, all of this is pretty typically for her and she seems resigned to it. There are several violent rape scenes in the film, which carries an R rating for “disturbing violent content, including rape, grisly images, sexual material, nudity and language.”
Both striking and slightly standoffish in her appearance—she has multiple piercings and tattoos—Lisbeth remains a mysterious figure throughout. Even as she volunteers to help Blomkvist and sends along clues she’s uncovered, she signs her email “WASP.” Even after he locates Lisbeh and invites her to help him with the case and they draw closer to each other, she remains guarded. So in truth, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo presents two mysteries: What really happened to Harriet, and who, really, is Lisbeth? All of that is complicated by a family so ruthless that anyone of them could be a suspect in Harriet’s disappearance.
Although The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first in a trilogy of films, it’s complete and self-sufficient. Oplev and his t screenwriters borrowed enough material from Larsson’s second novel to provide viewers a sense of closure and a convenient resting point. Music Box is releasing the remaining two films in America later this year, but Oplev did not direct them and neither achieved Dragon Tattoo’s success. However, Dragon Tattoo stands on its own as a remarkable achievement in storytelling: compelling, intense, contemporary, and old-fashioned in a way Hitchcock himself, likely would have appreciated.
Music Box sent a screener disc for review, so the final product will likely be better but, overall, the disc performs very well. The anamorphic image looks nice, with good colors and fairly deep blacks. A little grain hampers the overall effect, but it isn’t too noticeable. The sound suffers a little. Here, we have a stereo mix, but the commercial release may be different. There are no extras here; but the commercial release will include Interviews With Director Niels Arden Oplev and Star Noomi Rapace; Featurette: The Vanger Family Tree.
*Because I received a screener as opposed to a commercial copy, I will only rate the Film Value.
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