The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Swedish Version)

I've been meaning to watch the original version of 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' since I read the book by Steig Larsson and watched the American version with Daniel Craig. It's only today that I've actually had the chance to do that though.

It must be around 2 years since I read the book and found it interesting enough to go on to read the second book immediately after. It's only recently that I have revisited the 'Millennium series' to finally read the third book.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Swede Edition
(It's not called this but for my own benefit, let's pretend).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Swede Edition

So it starts off with Mikael Blomkvist (played by Swede edition's Michael Nyqvist) in court being sued for charges of libel against big gangster boss-man, Hans-Erik Wennerström. This is how I recall the book starting as well.

The story then splits focus to three different topics; the Wennerström affair, Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) and Blomlvist's journey from the time he appears in court until his actual imprisonment  which is a 6-month gap.

Without giving too much away, Salander, who has a tattoo of a dragon on her back (who would have thought it?) and works for a 'Milton Security', is hired to do some digging into Blomkvist's background. It is for the attention of Henrik Vanger, who believes Blomkvist, despite his most recent negative media attention, would be the perfect man for the job of finding out about what happened to his grand daughter who had disappeared 40 years previously.

When I was reading this story, I found it quite confusing to keep track of everything that was happening. Maybe it was because of the translated text keeping all of the Swedish names of characters and places, but I didn't have this problem with this Swedish audio / English-subbed version of the film.

In fact I found it easy to keep up with, and that it kept to the book very well, which a lot of films do not do. I found myself guessing what scenes should be coming next and what should happen in them. I was surprised that I couldn't really find any problems with the way the story was told.

It even felt as if I had seen the film before, which I technically have done but that wasn't as true to the book as this was. When we are first introduced to Hedestad in the film, it was as if the image of the island was plucked from an image that my imagination had created.

All of the settings in the film were a good match to the ones that I had in my head, and the casting was pretty spot-on to how I had imagined the characters to be. Blomkvist had to grow on me in the first five minutes of the film, but then I thought he was actually a lot better than Daniel Craig's hot-bodied portrayal. Salander on the other hand, who is actually beautiful, is not exactly how I had imagined her to be, as she is described as being very short, skinny and resembling a 15-year old boy in the book (if I remember correctly).

However, the story moves along at a good pace, there isn't much downtime and it stays true to the book, so it's fair to say that I recommend seeing this version of the film.

Not to say that I don't think the American version is bad, because it isn't.

And of course you should read the book.

And then after you've done that, maybe read the second book ('The Girl Who Played with Fire') and probably the third ('The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest').

As a side note, there are some scenes in all versions of 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' that could cause some distress, so tread with caution.

Elky :-)