Movie rant: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
[INSERT STANDARD SPOILER-WARNING HERE! 
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A good solid episode of an above average crime TV-series …
That’s the feeling I was left with after having watched Millennium 3
- and this is by no means bad!
It just means that the movie adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s third and final book about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist is … well, not more than it is:
A collection of scenes – competently done, perfectly inoffensive, sometimes even entertaining scenes. All of these scenes make out the necessary, but not necessarily captivating, story about Lisbeth Salander’s recovery (from several bullet wounds), trial, redemption and her (somewhat limited) personal development as regards her relations to other people. ‘Other people’ is of course Mikael Blomkvist – a man who is willing to walk the line for her.
(Well, they screwed up that last bit somewhat up at the end of the movie. But I’ll get back to that below.)
Capitalism breeds … big screen movies made from TV-screen footage
Unlike the first movie adaptation – (of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - or Men Who Hate Women as it is titled in Sweden and many other countries) – and just like its predecessor – The Girl Who Played With Fire – Millennium 3 was never meant to be a big screen production. It was meant to be a TV-series. It was recorded as a TV-series. It will presumably air this month on Swedish television as a TV-series; although I’ll be d****d if I know where and when. (If anyone has info on this I’d be grateful.)
Anyway, as the well-known story goes: The first movie sold through the roof, just like the books. And then that ever-predictable human capacity for wanting more prompted a quick decision amongst the producers: ‘Hey, why don’t we make two more movies out of the TV-series footage that we have, get them the hell out in cinemas and earn more C-A-S-H?!’ (They probably thought about that for a looong time! )
All perfectly standard business routine.
… I mean, it would be pretty naïve to assume that all of the people now in charge of propelling Stieg Larsson’s legacy into a mass consumer product, such as a big screen movie, are in it for the sake of, say, feminism or because they have a particular penchant for journalistic idealism or … even because they really adore the character of Lisbeth Salander. No, they are of course in it for the money, first and foremost – and a number of other reasons mostly to do with furthering their career – whether as an actor or producer or whatever.
All of this the late Stieg Larsson would be the first to tell you. And accept, I believe.
Larsson was many things but he was definitely not naïve. He also recognised that necessity can make for strange bedfellows, like when he has Mikael Blomkvist, renowned corporate basher in the media, work for a big corporation in order to clear up the mystery about Harriet Vanger in the first book.
So Millennium is a pure product of the capitalism so despised by Larsson, at least in his younger days, that he in the late 1970′s willed all of his material possessions to the local Umeå branch of the Swedish Communist Party – right before he went to Eritrea to teach a people’s guerilla how to ‘fight their oppressors’. (A will which – as you all probably haven’t avoided hearing – was unfortunately not legal under Swedish law, since Stieg Larsson wrote it without witnesses and official stamps.)
Mind you, the ‘let’s get some more bucks’-approach to Millennium 2 and 3 is not what in itself would translate into bad movies. And it hasn’t.
But it hasn’t made for some very good movies either.
Let me try to explain …
The Girl Who Stumbled Through A Grainy Somewhat Patched Together-Movie
It seems to me that the rush to patch something together from what was meant to be just a TV-series has resulted in some stupid storytelling mistakes that could have been avoided.
Also, it seems to me that nobody really bothered trying to spiff up the image-side with some of the latest digital techniques, although in this day and age that should have been relatively easy – shouldn’t it?
I mean, am I the only one who thought that Fire was a bit grainy and Hornet - well, in some scenes – especially that woodland walk between Blomkvist and the retired civil servant – it almost looked like they were walking in fog! What happened? Why did the film quality have to drop so much, just because it was made for TV first? And why couldn’t something have been done about it before it went into the cinemas? If you can clear up and restore and shoot extra scenes for 30-year old Star Wars-films … what about cleaning up a brand-spanking new Swedish 2008 TV-film a bit?
Well, what do I know.
It just annoyed me that the cinematic experience dropped from film 1 to film 2 and 3 the way it did.
Other casualties of an edit-rush-job:
Some minor, but rather needless, mistakes
For example …
- Police officer Hans Faste suddenly – without explanation – becoming leader of the police investigation, and siding with the public investigator, Ekström, at press briefings and interrogations of Lisbeth – instead of the jovial but take-no-crap Jan Bublanski.
- Same Bublanski inexplicably returning later just before the crack down on the bad guys in the Section.
- Also it is never explained properly how the normal Swedish police suddenly become involved in SÄPO and Figuerola’s secret investigation of the Section.
- And I could swear I saw Dragan Armanskij, standing with the back to the camera at one of Edklinth’s briefings to his SÄPO-teams – even though there is no mention in the rest of the movie of Milton Security’s involvement in unravelling the whole conspiracy.
- Miriam Wu is also strangely absent from the third movie, after it was established in Fire (and the books) that she is about the only person that Lisbeth really cares about.
- Lastly, why is Lisbeth’s big blonde half-brother, Ronald Niedermann, so bent on chasing Lisbeth to her death. In the movie we get absolutely no explanation for that and I fear it was cut out as well. Dumb. It really is another ‘duh’ that the movie could have been without, and Niedermann’s lack of motivation takes away a lot of the drama from the final showdown between him and Salander.
“Your character motivation – where is it?! Tell, me or … “
Plusses: The not-so-convoluted conspiracy
Speaking of which … Hornet the movie gives us the essentials of the bloated conspiracy plot in Larsson’s book – and actually does it quite well!
Yes, it’s time for the positive stuff. Read on …
You see, one of the strengths of the movie is that the big number of irrelevant subplots (which surely would have been culled, had Larsson lived long enough to discuss it further with his editor) - get trimmed down to a nice little story-package by director Daniel Alfredsson.
Good handiwork there, Al: Now we can actually understand what the conspiracy is about and there are no unnecessary distractions!
I was especially glad to see the time-wasting subplot about Erika changing jobs to work for another newspaper – and starting to receive threat mails from some random staff-member – being rescheduled as – logically:
Erika staying at Millennium and receiving death threats from … voila! … the real bad guys in the Section!
Obvious plot-development! But Larsson didn’t think of it in the book …
Well, maybe the explanation is – heretical as it may sound – that Larsson was ‘only’ a brilliant debut fiction author in terms of three things:
1) His capacity for idea-development and
2) Original character-creation (Lisbeth, Lisbeth, Lisbeth!) and
3) Cooking up a weird but totally compelling mix of Swedish crime-realism and what feels mostly like a mix between a Tarantino and a Rocky-film, as in Fire.
But … he was not perfect.
For example, he wasn’t particularly good at controlling runaway subplots and a truckload of characters.
And Alfredsson spotted this and other weaknesses in Hornet and did away with many of them. It was something which he had to out of necessity (the movie length), of course, but it also makes for a straighter, more understandable story.
Other good cuts:
- The self-indulgent subplot about Mikael’s affair with Monica Figuerola (a Larsson darling-character if there ever was one)
- The somewhat illogical involvement of Milton Security in the SÄPO-investigation.
- The recruitment of several members of Hacker Republic and their journey to Sweden in order to gain access to compromising material from Peter Teleborian’s computers. In the movie Alfredsson just lets good old ‘Plague’ do this job. (And why couldn’t he have done so in the book, Stieg?)
Perfomance ups and downs
Mikael Nyqvist received some flak both from Swedish and Danish reviewers for a seemingly tired and ‘wooden’ characterisation of Mikael Blomkvist. I have to agree with them. There’s not much passion in Nyqvist’s version of Blomkvist in Millennium 3. He is a stone cold fish during his conflict with Erika about whether or not to print Millennium the magazine with compromising revelations about the conspirators or let Erika face continued death threats. He is single-mindedly devoted to Lisbeth’s cause, nothing else. (It’s a wonder that Erika forgives him in the end.) An experienced actor like Nyqvist should’ve made more from this role, despite weaknesses in the script. Some of it could of course be attributable to cutting out key scenes from the TV-series but I doubt it. Nyqvist just isn’t ‘in the mood’ any more, it seems and that doesn’t boost the enjoyment of the film.
Noomi’s performance as Lisbeth Salander, however, is once again flawless, but she doesn’t have much to do during the movie except staring glassy-eyed and aloof at her prosecutors. So she really isn’t carrying the movie in the same way she did Fire.
The real honour for a tour-de-force-movie-saver-performance this time must go to super-creepy psychiatrist Peter Teleborian, portrayed by Anders Ahlbom. Everything about Teleborian is so superior, smug and doctor-resque and still so believable that it gave me goose-bumps. He’s actually a much more threatening villain than the half-dead cold warriors in the Section, because somehow, I feel, we could all become victim of a Doctor Peter Teleborian; a man so convinced of his own medical superiority and so in love with the powerful position his own profession gives him, that he is capable of putting you away for a very long time and never will listen to a word you say. And no one is going to stop him.
Brrr …
Final grumblings:
That final scene – God, it made me cringe my toes: Blomkvist seeking out Lisbeth at her home in Fiskargatan, after the trial is over; Lisbeth saying awkwardly thank you and then … closing the door on him!!
This change to Larsson’s book misses the point of Lisbeth’s character development and Lisbeth and Mikael’s relation throughout Fire and Hornet with, oh, say, about 3 million miles!!
I’ll tell you about it another day, but I think there’s been enough ranting for now.
*
So! … and despite all the grumbling … heeeres’s the
FINAL VERDICT
3 stars out of 5.
Could’ve been worse.
(But it could also have been better.)
“Can I go home and have some pizza now?!”
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That link
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest at IMDB
