In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first of the three movie adaptations of Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, director Niels Arden Oplev shows, in brutal, cauterising detail the rape of his female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), by her newly appointed legal guardian. It was a deeply uncomfortable scene – Rapace’s screams were piercing – but it made clear why Salander despised the state apparatus and would charge forward, whatever the odds, when physically confronted. She was at war.
The incident is revisited in the trilogy’s final installment, Daniel Alfredson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, when Salander’s unexpected recording of the incident is played in court. This time the focus is on those judging her, and they are rightly shocked and sickened. That choice – to go for the reaction, to show sincerity at a remove, to be proper and conservative – sums up why the subsequent sequels have failed to match the original work. They lack the illuminative, biting detail of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; these movies are not at war with anyone.
Blockbusters they may be, but Larsson’s books are occasionally daft in their plotting and open to rampant manipulation to further the suspense. It’s clear now that Oplev made a sturdy film that took the best of his assigned title and magnified it, while Alfredson has made a television mini-series (the new film picks up where the last one ended) that faithfully, and thus futilely, sticks to the text.
Oplev enjoyed a crucial advantage, in that Salander and her unlikely ally, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), were thrown together by the cold case they were exhuming. The friction, both intellectual and physical, between them was played with grace by the leads, but they’re barely in the same scene in either sequel. Part of what gets you through both films is that you want to see them reunited, or reignited as it may be, but it’s a long haul through a legal case this time to get to what is essentially a muted coda.
Those who felt thematically attuned to how Salander’s youth had been destroyed by the supposedly benign Swedish state, may be piqued by the plot’s move towards hiving off those behind her torment – who sheltered her father, an amoral and violent Soviet defector – into a rogue group operating without official sanction. While Blomkvist works to the point of obsession (and his journalistic ethics) to aid Salander, in the end it is the now righteous state that strikes the death blow against Salander’s opponents. As vindications go this is a little too clean, and if it happened in an American release it would be mocked as fantasy.
Recovering from gunshot wounds and jailed, Noomi Rapace achieves most of her performance as Salander with her unyielding gaze. (Bonus: with one side of her shaved during emergency surgery, she’s a dead ringer for Human League vocalist Phil Oakey circa 'Don’t You Want Me’). But the mechanics of the plot, with Blomkvist’s sister Annika (Annika Hallin) defending her while his magazine, Millennium, prepares an issue-long expose of the crimes against, leaves Salander comparatively inert. Yes, she fronts court in a spiky S&M influenced collar, but the punk rock look used to be the least compelling thing about the character.
More than anything, however, it all just plays out as somewhat perfunctory. When the pace flags, Alfredson cuts to the hulking Ronald Niedermann (Micke Spreitz), who is wandering about Sweden killing extras and brooding on Salander, while plot turns too often rely on either knowledge of the books, or the Swedish government’s structure – 'Constitutional Defence’ sounds like a civil liberties group, but it’s actually a powerful law enforcement agency.
These Swedish adaptations have had their day, and only fans of the books and completists will get any measure of nourishment from it. The world has moved on: if there’s a topical story now about the fabric of Swedish life and possible malfeasance by official figures, it’s in the actions and extradition of Wikileaks supremo Julian Assange.
