So, I'm probably the only person in the world who hasn't read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (or wanted to, frankly), since it's like the bookfad of the past year or so. I call a "bookfad" any of those books that become bestsellers beyond their actual merit as works of fiction -- like the whole "Twilight" series (which people far and wide criticize as being terribly written, but it hardly seems to matter).
I saw the Swedish original movie was in a discount bin (figuring that they were trying to piggyback on the whole American remake of it being out), and so I watched it, and was bored by the movie. It's packaged as a crime thriller, but I'd call it a crime un-thriller, honestly. It was about the slowest-paced "thriller" I've ever seen, and at something like 2.5 hours, it took a long time to mosey where it was going.
Didn't think the characters were particularly well-drawn, and the one people seem to love, "Lisbeth," was even more boring to me. Surly wunderkind neo-goth, hairy-armpitted, overmuscled, photographic memory-having, motorcycle-riding computer hacker chick? Okay. I wasn't terribly convinced by the character, didn't find her particularly compelling.
And given the obvious themes of the movie, I did some background reading on this whole bookfad, and I guess the late writer's back story was something about how he saw some girl getting gang-raped a long time ago, and did nothing to stop it, felt guilt about it, and crafted this character (who was, allegedly, her namesake) as a way of atoning for his failure to do anything in the real world. Which is very writerly, of course, but I think it is also lame, in that the character is just hard to swallow (pun intended).
She's like the perfect girlfriend for Hellboy, honestly -- there's that same kind of arc between those characters. A disagreeable superbeing who has a bone to pick with the universe. It's so clear that the writer loved this character, without there being anything particular about her to love.
Obviously, it's the movie I'm critiquing, here, but many reviews I've read of the book point to the bad writing and the poorly-drawn characters, so it looks like they translated that well in the screenplay. But, where bookfads are concerned, it doesn't actually matter. Nothing matters, because people are buying it, regardless.
There were a couple of reasonably good scenes in the movie, but it was largely a snooze for me. I found myself getting fidgety and bored watching it, and even some of the "outrageous" scenes were kind of rote to me.
Now, one could claim that Lisbeth's militant neo-feminism might have been off-putting to me, except that it's just not so. I just didn't find the story terribly striking, didn't find the mystery so mysterious, and, following my general rules of thumb regarding suspense movies, was able to figure out who the killer was with ridiculous ease. All of the components of it didn't coalesce for me.
I read somewhere that the title of the original book was something like "Men Who Hate Women" -- and those themes are very apparent, which makes me think that the book is maybe for Women Who Hate Men Who Hate Women or something like that, which probably accounts for its success. But at least in the movie, following the character's progression, she's a flat line -- she starts out bad, she ends up bad (oh, with a whisker of feeling for another character in the story, but she still comes off as one badly damaged Pop-Tart).
Again, with bookfads (and the accompanying movies they inevitably inspire), actual criticism of them as books is ultimately meaningless. Adherents might say I should read the books and decide for myself, but the concept just doesn't compel me, and I've read enough reviews that rip on the writing to make me think it's not worth my time -- life's too short for bad writing. But I certainly watched the movie thinking "Wait, so THIS is what people are spurting about?? THIS??" and feeling ever more chagrin that this is what passes for edginess with the mainstream.
It's like the pop culture equivalent of a bunch of barnyard animals calling out in fear and awe from behind the fencing because somebody spraypainted a fox on the side of the barn. Oooh!
