The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Saw the movie “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I have to say that I liked it and the opening credits are particularly amazing.

The casting works and Daniel Craig as Blomkvist works particularly well. There are, obviously, characters I pictured differently. I imagined Bjurman more uptight and less sleazy, I saw Erika Berger more like Joely Richardson than Robin Wright (who probably fit Cecilia Vanger better), Dirch Frode lacked a certain likableness but it was done on purpose and the casting of Stellan Skarsgård as Martin Vanger felt like a very big spoiler to anyone who doesn’t know the plot but is familiar with the type of characters he’s played in the past.

The movie follows the book pretty well, despite occasional simplifications, including the ending of the mystery storyline. The largest difference, however, is that, since we don’t have access to Salander’s thoughts, she’s a lot harder to like in the movie. It’s hard enough to relate to her in the book but here it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on her. They tried to fix that by giving away some details Mikael doesn’t find out until book two but I’m not sure it’s enough.

As expected, the violent scenes are a lot more disturbing on film despite being quite somewhat down – the more sadistic details in the book would probably be going too far on film and I personally did not miss them but by eliminating obvious references to sadism and hatred towards women they subtly changed the point the author was trying to make with the book, especially considering the fact that the original title of the book is “Men who hate women”.