2011’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo initially seemed to me to be a pointless endeavour. There was already a pretty good 2009 screen-version of the novel, and indeed of the whole of Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, so this seemed like a redundant attempt at making an English-language version of the movie for people who can’t read subtitles.
But actually David Fincher’s version is pretty good. The purported sequels never got made, but from what I recall of reading the novels and watching the 2009 adaptations, the first one was the best anyway so it’s perhaps serendipitous that the 2011 movie is a stand-alone affair.
The cast are all excellent as befits their collective reputations but, perhaps not surprisingly, it’s Rooney Mara who stands out as the eponymous anti-hero Lisbeth Salander.
Score for Christmasishness
I re-watched this in the belief that Christmas played quite a significant role in the narrative, but it doesn’t. At least not in this version. Perhaps it is more significant in the novel and in the 2009 Swedish-language adaptation, or maybe I just imagined it. Nonetheless Christmas does feature a little bit. The movie opens around the New Year and there are occasionally Christmas decorations in sight and the film rather more explicitly ends at Christmas time, with a Christmas gift symbolically bringing the narrative to a close though not in the cheeriest of ways. Added to that, there is a fair amount of snow throughout the film, which is largely irrelevant, but certainly gives the movie a wintery feel.
James Proclaims! 
6 responses to “The Seventh Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films – Door 4”
No, not the cheeriest film about. I hadn’t read nor seen anything about it though it was all over libraries, book sellers etc, the Scandi thing felt sort of flavour-of-the-month, but I liked this one. No happy ending/ever after when ‘The End’ comes up at the end. Well, it coulda been ‘Fin’ if they wanted to stick with the source material!
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From what I recall of the sequels, I don’t think things get very much cheerier after the end.
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They could have hung some tinsel from her piercings to make it a better fit for your opus magna!
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It was selfish of the filmmakers not to do that really.
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A rating of one! Lisbeth must have hacked you off. God Jul.
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I don’t blame Lisbeth really. But as Pete said above, a bit of tinsel wouldn’t have gone amiss.
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