The real title of this movie is  Män som hatar kvinnor which translates to Men Who Hate Women but it is known in the US as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  It’s based on the book of the same name that I reviewed yesterday.

 

The plot is that disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired by an old industrialist to solve a 40 year old murder.  Along the way he partners up with an odd hacker by the name of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace).  Together they discover something far worse than originally thought.

 

This film adaptation is very close to the book with a few exceptions.  Certain things are changed, mostly I figure for time purposes.  You can’t get into the same level of detail and the medium of film doesn’t allow for certain things you’d get in a novel so some plot points were changed but the outcomes were all the same, basically they just found shorter ways of getting there.

 

There was one complaint that I had about the film.  Mainly that the characters didn’t seem as deep, Lisbeth Salander specifically seemed very different, more normal and less quirky than in the book.  Although her portrayal by Noomi Rapace was done pretty well.  There was a good chemistry between her and Michael Nyqvist who played Blomkvist and you see this during the scenes where they really team up together.

 

The direction by Niels Arden Oplev was good, although I thought he maybe could have done more with this.  Overall though I have few complaints and the movie was very enjoyable.  As always I think you will enjoy it more if you didn’t read the book beforehand.  One other problem I had was the subtitles were horrible.  It was like a computer translation that was very word specific and have context in mind.

 

This is a movie I would recommend to most everyone who enjoys a good mystery story.  Unfortunately it’s only available in Region 2 dvd.