*WARNING - There are spoilers from this point on so STOP here if you don't want your viewing of the movie ruined.*
I finally watched this movie, obviously. You can read the book review here. I'd like to be able to say that for once I watched a movie of a book and the movie matched the book perfectly. While this film managed to stick pretty closely to the novel, it failed on several major points.
First, I really liked the opening montage. It was all done in a thick, black oily looking substance that could only be ink, pointing to Mikael Blomkvist's occupation as a journalist. There were computer images intertwined throughout, linking to Lisbeth Salandar, hacker extraordinaire. It reminded me a bit of the opening of some Bond movies.
Second, the music in this movie matched perfectly the action and the characters. It wasn't done by Danny Elfman (The Simpsons) or Hans Zimmer (Gladiator and Pirates of the Carribean) or John Williams (Star Wars) but by two people I'd never heard of, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Kudos gentlemen!
Third, and this is the spoiler part, the deviations from the book. The movie had Harriet Vanger, the subject of the thirty-year mystery, posing as Anita Vanger but then had Anita conveniently dead in a car crash several years before. Boo hiss. I wanted to see the movie makers put Mikael on a sheep station in Australia. I wanted to meet Harriet's over-protective son and to see that whole confrontation scene on the big screen. But no, the director and screenplay writer conspired against the readers and deprived us of that by trying to substitute an unacceptable deviation from the book.
The second major deviation was in the scene concerning Martin Vanger's death. In the book, Lisbeth finds Vanger torturing Blomkvist, whacks Martin with a golf club and then follows him as he's trying to get away by car. Further down the road, away from Hedestad, Lisbeth watches Vanger crash his car into an on-coming truck. In the movie, Martin drives off the road after trying to slam into Lisbeth on her motorcycle and then crashes into a petrol tank, which then conveniently explodes. I realize this was played out at the bridge, the same bridge where a car and truck crashed thirty years earlier and directed all attention away from the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. So, I get the connection the director was trying to make with the past. However, All the director, David Fincher, would have had to do was add a 60-120 seconds more of chase scene and then, viola, the book is followed. Although I will say that particular chase scene was well done - filmed from the wood looking at the unlit, deserted road and all you could see were the headlights of Martin's car and the headlight of Lisbeth's cycle zooming through the dark. However, that does not make up for the change.
The third deviation was that fact that when Lisbeth disguised herself and went globetrotting, bank-hopping and stealing, she used two disguises, not just the one the film showed. Rooney Mara, as an actress, whose leather and mohawk Lisbeth disguised herself as blonde Irene Nesser the socialite, struck me by just how well Irene carried her purse which was quite different from how Lisbeth slung her backpack around. A good actress pays attention to the little things to make the character(s) memorable. Again, this little thing does not make up for the change.
I understand, that in the interest of time, budget, availability of shooting locales, resources, union contracts, etc., a movie script can't always follow the book exactly, however that doesn't mean I have to like it. And I always wonder how the author feels about it. For example, I knew that Suzanne Collins helped write the script for Hunger Games, so I felt a certain safety, comfortable that she would not let the movie venture too far from the book but if it did, I was confident that her guiding hand was there. Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the other two Girl books), died unexpectedly, leaving his father and brother to war over his literary estate with his "common-law" wife, so I guess we will never know what he thinks of these changes.
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