The Girl Who Played With Fire

Without a doubt, the Lisabeth Salander series, written by Stieg Larsson, deserves all of the praise and success that it has been receiving. They are well written, well put together, contain intriguing characters that you care about, and you can never go wrong with a good conspiracy theory. I said before when I watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, that it was going to be very difficult to bring these novels to life. I thought that Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg did a wonderful job with the screenplay. Director Niels Arden Oplev did an equally good job with bringing to life Lisabeth and Mikael Blomkvist. Because of their  exceptionally good job on the first movie, I was excited to see what they were going to do with The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second book in the trilogy.

Arcel and Heisterberg did not return for the second film. Director Oplev also did not return. Daniel Alfredson directed both The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. Ulf Ryberg took on the daunting task of adapting the second novel for the screen. What makes these novels so difficult to adapt, is the numerous points of view that Larsson gives you throughout the novel. He presents you with so much detail, and trying to determine what is important and what isn't is like looking for a needle in a haystack (yea I know Cliche, but a good cliche is needed every once in awhile). 

Ryberg did an OK job. Ryberg did a decent job of shifting through the many story lines and picking out what he thought to be the most essential to the story. Some of it he got right, some of it he didn't. 

The major thing that really was swept over, was the murders themselves. There was never any real evidence presented in the film that shows Lisabeth could have been the murderer, except for the fact that her fingerprints where on the gun. They never go into any reason why she would have been anywhere near the characters Dag and Mia, or what her motivation for killing them could have been. In the movie she never has any contact with the couple at all. This leaves a major hole in the story. 

Dag is the single link that brings Lisabeth and Mikael toward Zala, which is the real story. In the novel, Dag begins to research Zala before his death and brings him up to Mikael early on. Lisabeth learns about this through her amazing hacking abilities, and pays the couple a visit the night of their murder to discover what information that had on Zala. Ryberg almost completely passes over this.  Zala is only brought up in a quick 10 second phone call to Mikael right before went to Dag and Mia's apartment to find them murdered. There was no set up at all for what is supposed to be the main conflict of the entire Lisabeth Salander mystery. It felt like he was in such a rush to get into the mystery part of it, he forgot that the set up is sometimes more important than the reveal.

The novel also really gets into how the papers portray Lisabeth while she is under suspicion for these three murders. It shows how speculation becomes damaging and all consuming at times, and later on really begins to interfere with the police investigation. 

I thought that they did not show Mikael to be as good of a friend to Lisabeth as he was in the novels. He was always very careful never to tell anyone, anything about her without her permission first. In the movie, he seemed to be quick to give out some information about Salander that he had otherwise kept secret in the novel. The movie also did not show Armansky's desire to assist in proving that Salander is innocent. These things all become important in the third and final novel. 

 

All in all, I would say that this was an OK movie. It was not anything great. If you did not read the book, I think that you would be a bit lost at times. Like most books series that have been made into movies, this one did not feel like it was thought out. It was rushed and put together so that they could put it out while people still know what The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is. That being said, I still believe that the Swedish version of this film is going to be better and truer to the novels than the English versions in production right now. Rapace still did am amazing job as Salander, and to me she will always be Lisabeth. I would say that if you have read the novels, take a chance. If you haven't..... what the heck are you waiting for? WHAT PART OF INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!