Jeremy’s Tophunder №80: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

8 min readMay 27, 2020

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the more frustrating movies on my list. There are so many minor adjustments that could have each made the movie 1% better. It’s still a good movie that I really like (clearly, it made the list), but it absolutely could have been better. I’ll address my biggest concerns one at a time with a few lingering questions that come up every time I watch the movie. There are a few spoilers here and there, so fair warning.

1. Does this movie have to be set in Sweden?

It’s an obnoxious super nit-pick, I know, but it always kind of throws me off when we have Daniel Craig (British, speaking normally), Rooney Mara (American with a Swedish accent), Christopher Plummer (Canadian with a Swedish accent), Stellan Skarsgard (Swedish, speaking normally), plus a few other random actors who are some combination of English, Dutch, and American, some of whom are attempting Swedish accents, some of whom aren’t. It’s a little all over the place.

Would it be that hard to adapt the story to be based in North America or the UK? Would anything be noticeably different if this were set in rural Canada? At least then we could just have everyone speaking normally. Director David Fincher and writer Steven Zaillian both wanted to maintain Sweden as the setting, which I understand in order to stay true to the book. But there isn’t much that is unique to Sweden in the story. I admire the commitment that some of the actors had to their accent, but in a way, it also serves to highlight those actors that didn’t even attempt an accent at all.

2. Do Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander have to hook up?

Again, if we’re staying true to the book, I suppose they do. But I never really bought it. Neither one of them seems to be the type that the other would be interested in, and there isn’t really build-up to it. It just kind of happens out of nowhere. It seems a bit shoehorned in. It doesn’t do a ton to move the plot along in any way that a platonic relationship wouldn’t. Sure, it serves as fuel for the movie’s final scene, when Lisbeth (Mara) goes to give Mikael (Craig) a gift, only to realize that Mikael is back together with whatever Robin Wright’s character’s name is, and Lisbeth throws the gift away and drives off.

Apparently in the book, Mikael also hooks up with Cecilia Vanger, which kind of makes it more believable (if the idea is that Mikael is a womanizer who will sleep with anyone), but based on how the movie is arranged, the Mikael/Lisbeth sexual relationship just isn’t sold very well. If they want to keep it, they need to do a better job of convincing me that it makes sense.

3. Do we need to accelerate the pacing in the last half-hour of the movie?

This is the big one.

The last 30 minutes or so feel -very- rushed, and a little out of place. The climax of the movie has already come and gone — they found out who the serial killer was and located Harriet. In reality, I had totally forgot about Christopher Plummer promising Daniel Craig the evidence that would vindicate him in his libel case against the other Swedish business magnate, so it didn’t seem all that important to me that the evidence turned out to be not so great either. Then all of a sudden Lisbeth is disguising herself and traveling all over Europe to steal money from the guy because she had hacked his bank information? And all of this happens in the span of, like, 15 minutes?

This stuff doesn’t seem -that- important. Sure, it wraps everything up in a nice bow, but it takes what had been a really well-paced movie and suddenly switches it into overdrive to introduce a whole new plot point and then resolve it right away.

It brings up an interesting idea — could those elements have been left out of the movie entirely? There was obviously a plan to turn the entire series into a trilogy of movies. Could these two kind of out of place plot points been saved, to open the next movie? There’s plenty of precedent for movies adapted from a series of books to re-arrange certain parts of the story to make it flow better as a movie, and I think that’s what I would have preferred here. I think it’s a much more satisfying ending to have Harriet re-connect with Henrik and roll credits.

Granted, we’re nine years later, and it certainly seems like the principles aren’t that interested in continuing the series. They put together a sequel/re-boot hybrid in 2018 that went nowhere (it was a commercial and critical flop), which certainly sucks, because Dragon Tattoo did reasonably well at the box office and was well-received by critics, but somehow the next movie was dead on arrival. So knowing that, do I still want to cut the last 20 minutes of the movie? Actually, kind of. They just seem a little forced.

There’s an interesting video that describes how the movie was broken into 5 acts, instead of the usual 3-act structure, and the basic argument is that Fincher and Zaillian subvert the normal checklist of what a screenplay should look like, and end up with a better movie because of it. The video certainly brings up some interesting ideas, but I’m not sure I agree — a traditional three-act structure probably would have made the movie flow more coherently. And if they really had their heart set on stretching things out to five acts, then I’d expect them to take more time in the two stretches that feel rushed (Mikael and Lisbeth hooking up, and Lisbeth stealing money from Wennerstrom).

I knew I was going to like this movie as soon as I saw the trailer. The first trailer. To this day, I think it’s the best trailer I’ve ever seen.

There was a rumor that circulated that the studio cut a trailer that David Fincher hated, and he cut this trailer himself to replace it. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but I really want it to be, and this trailer certainly seems like it’s one that Fincher would make. There’s no plot or exposition, just random shots cut together out of chronological order, all of them the same length, in time with the music (a cover of “Immigrant Song” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, with vocals from Karen O). No story. Just mood.

And I did like the movie. Some scenes are certainly hard to watch — in one, Lisbeth is the victim of a pretty brutal rape at the hands of her case worker — but even those scenes are handled perfectly by Fincher. He’s a brilliant director, perhaps my favorite working right now. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo seemed like another film in a long line of films that should have been directed by David Fincher or not allowed to exist at all, like Seven and Fight Club and Zodiac. Fincher can handle any type of story (probably his two best movies overall are The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which aren’t all that sinister in tone), but there’s something about him at the helm of a dark, brooding mystery that just feels right. It’s the perfect marriage of director and subject.

It really is disappointing that the series didn’t continue. Fincher transitioned to working more in T.V. (House of Cards, Mindhunter), the script never quite came together, and the studio eventually moved on to their re-boot. That director, Fede Alvarez, wanted an entirely new cast in order to pursue his own interpretation of the story, which ultimately flopped. It was never satisfying, because the strength of Dragon Tattoo was very clearly wrapped up in Fincher and his production team, and Rooney Mara’s performance as Lisbeth Salander. It just felt like a wasted opportunity to go back to the well and not bring any of the tools that worked the first time around.

But while it’s disappointing and confusing that the series ended after just one movie, the one that they got turned out really well. It’s beautifully shot, very well acted, and the first two hours or so are brilliantly paced. Yes, the movie has flaws, but just about every movie does. I think Dragon Tattoo’s flaws are more easily fixable than a lot of other movies, but I think it’s more positive than negative when you consider that the mis-steps are mostly small and insignificant. I wouldn’t have approached the movie any differently, I would have just made slightly different choices. It’s not my favorite David Fincher movie, but it’s once that I always enjoy watching, and it lands at №80 on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall