Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Noomi Rapace, who reprises her role as Lisbeth Salander in this sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is far and away the strongest element of The Girl Who Played With Fire. While the first film in the so called Millennium Trilogy was a solid and gripping mystery, its successor is merely a pale reflection, resting entirely on the understated greatness of Rapace’s excellent performance.

There are some things here for fans of the first film or of the books each is based upon. The intrigue this time has more to do with Lisbeth’s past; those reoccurring flashbacks from the first film of a 12-year-old Salander lighting a man on fire are finally put into context and explained. Also, Lisbeth’s sadistic case worker, Bjurman, factors into the mysterious plot. This kind of continuity is comforting, and helps us to ignore the film's weaker direction and lazily uncreative photography. By picking up these threads from the previous film, the trilogy takes on the same familiar feeling of a serialized tv drama.

More on the lazy cinematography. Film blogger Todd Miro wrote an article at Into The Abyss about “one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry.” - The orange and teal color palette. He explains how it came about:

You see, flesh tones exist mostly in the orange range and when you look to the opposite end of the color wheel from that, where does one land?  Why looky here, we have our old friend Mr. Teal.  And anyone who has ever taken color theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate.  So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background.  I mean, people are really important, aren't they?

Now it seems this color theory has been exported to other countries, namely Sweden; The Girl Who Played With Fire suffers from this grading worse than any film I’ve seen, and makes the examples Miro highlights on his blog look subtle in comparison. In nearly every shot, the only two colors are orange and teal, regardless of location, mood, or what have you. Here are just a few examples from the film:

Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The original Swedish title of this intelligently flashy mystery film, Man Som Hatar Kvinnor, translates literally to Men Who Hate Women, and it is unfortunately quite apt. The horrors that the male villains perpetrate on their female victims are depicted with unforgiving vividness. These men hate women indeed.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo might have been just another competently slick European thriller were it not for the presence of Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the titular tattooed girl. Lisbeth is not your typical protagonist, as the feminist film blog Act Your Age notes:

Utilizing her technological prowess (a rare quality for female characters!), and at times resorting to revenge and physical violence, Lisbeth [....] aims to correct the wrongs inflicted on women by men in power.

With Lisbeth, Rapace expertly crafts a brooding, burningly intelligent performance that elevates the film to a more memorable place than it might otherwise have occupied. Though small of frame, she nonetheless fills the screen with a character that will remain crushingly silent for long periods of time until finally exploding into righteous, ferocious rage in response the afore mentioned misogynistic violence.

Providing a foil and unlikely partner for Lisbeth is investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist, who has been hired by a wealthy old business man to uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of his teenage niece 40 years prior. 

Once this pair teams up, the film unfolds at a breathless yet meticulous pace as Lisbeth and Mikael piece together a string of decades-old murder cases that are somehow tied to the old man's vanished niece. The investigation is rather standard mystery fare, complete with panning close-ups of grisly crime scene photos and not a few research montages. Two things that save the film from feeling too ordinary are the thrill of the chase, and the always fascinating Rapace. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first in a trilogy, based on the books by Stieg Larsson, and it very much feels like it, the way characters are established and the partnership between Lisbeth and Mikael is set up. You will be left with a desire to immediately see the second installment in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, which has fortunately just opened in US theaters.