The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The basics

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a bestselling book by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. He unfortunately died in 2004 before this book and the rest in this series (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest) were published in 2005, 2006 and 2007. The film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was made in 2009 and is a Crime/noir about investigation, death, rape, hacking and conspiracies.

What is this film about?

The film starts with a court case against one of the main characters Mikael Blomkvist, a middle aged journalist, who’s been writing an article involving damaging allegations against a billionaire. Mikael lost the case and he was given a prison sentence for 3 months which starts in 6 months. Also we get to meet private investigator Lisbeth Salander (the girl that has the dragon tattoo and is our other main character). She is a skinny, gothic, 20 odd year old woman who, from first sight, you can tell she has a very colourful history. She has been set the task to investigate Mikael and she does this by hacking in to his documents and in her personal opinion he is innocent and this triggers a personal interest in him.

In the 6 months of freedom that Mikael has he gets hired by ageing business man to try and solve the mystery of his missing niece that happened over 40 years ago. He was chosen for this due to his skills as a reporter and the fact that this girl was his babysitter for a time as well. As this goes on Lisbeth is following his progress through his documents whilst also taking care of her own problems with her new forceful guardian and his grip on her finances. As Mikael gets stuck on a clue he receives a very easy to trace email that solves this piece of the puzzle for him. I wonder who that could have been from?

My views on it

This film is a new age noir that will keep you guessing at every turn.  The structure, story and the characters are fantastically well written in a film that seems to involve every dark theme you can think of.

One of my favourite things about this film is that it really explores and takes to a new level the stereotypical character of the femme-fatal. Femme-fatal is a character mostly found in class noir films; a woman who is strong, dark, and sexy and manipulates men in to doing what she wants. Lisbeth is the new, grown up, bad ass version of this character that doesn’t rely on her charm or men’s stupidity to get her what she wants. She gets by with her intelligence, strength and her messed up history that somehow allows her to be darker and less caring.

The only problem with this film is that as the film goes on you start to get more interest in Lisbeth then the story line itself.  Because of this the resolution to the main story line isn’t as fulfilling as it should be. The later parts seem to be more of an intro to the next film rather than a conclusion to this one. 

Favourite Quote

Lisbeth Salander: [tattooing Bjurman] ‘I've never done this before. Hold still, or it'll get messy.’

Rating 4/5