Girl with the Dragon Tatoo - In English!

America hates subtitles, which I assume is the reasoning behind this English language version of a book that has already been made into a film (only 3 years ago) in its original Swedish. Rather than cast a group of unknown Swedish actors, David Fincher's English language version casts a number of extremely well-known non-Swedish actors (plus 1 Swedish one) and gets them to put on slightly odd Scandinavian-inflected accents. Everyone apart from Daniel Craig of course, who I presume is considered too famous to be forced to do a silly accent.

It appears I was somewhat remiss on my blog in the past and failed to write anything about the Swedish versions of these films, all of which I have watched within the last 2 years. I thought the first one was very good, the second pretty good and the third very boring. The story of the first installment is that of Mikael Blomkvist, investigative reporter, who is hired to investigate the 40-year-old murder of a wealthy businessman's (Henrik Vanger) niece Harriet. Blomkvist is enticed into taking the case because Vanger offers him information on Hans-Erik Wennerström, whom recently sued Blomkvist for printing libel about him. Vanger had previously employed a young hacker / tech expert Lisbeth Salander to do a background check on Blomkvist, a woman with a dark history who lives on the fringes of society, constantly one step away from institutionalisation.

The film follows the independent stories of Salander and Blomkvist until they are brought together when the latter requests an assistant to help him in his research. As the mystery deepens, Salander's sometimes blunt approach towards data mining and alternative life style choices point the pair towards a surprising and disturbing conclusion.

The most enjoyable part about this story is the central mystery, i.e. working out just what happened to Harriet Vanger and what secrets her family are hiding. There's some stuff about Sweden's Nazi past, a strong theme against violence towards women and some ultra-violence including a couple of scenes of sexual nature that deserve the 18 certificate. Obviously the film is setting up part 2, and so spends a flabby 15 minutes at the end opening up new threads in a story arc that isn't really that interesting. The relationship between the two main characters is a central theme, but I thought it made more sense in the Swedish version, in which the guy playing Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) isn't an international sex symbol. Given their casting I assume the main characters aren't meant to be overtly sexualised, rather that they're Swedish and so are socially adjusted to be more promiscuous than most.

Overall, as enjoyable as this adaptation is (and it is a good film), it seems slightly superfluous given that a perfectly good original language version came out only a few years back. Just like the Trent Reznor version of 'Immigrant Song' that plays through the film's intro sequence. Rooney Mara is excellent as Salander though, and if the film makes a lot of money I see no reason why we wont eventually see parts 2 and 3 in English in the next few years.