The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

rating: ****

the story: The focus shifts squarely to Lisbeth Salander.

review: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy became a full-fledged literary phenomenon a decade ago, a Swedish sensation that made its way to Americans with the first entry becoming known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is the name it went by for the 2011 Hollywood adaptation headlined by director David Fincher and actors Rooney Mara as Lisbeth and Daniel Craig, then still at the height of his 007 fame, as crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  Arguably Craig's Blomvist was the lead character in the movie.  Hollywood, unlike Sweden, never adapted the rest of the trilogy, which heavily swings the attention toward Salander, as with the later books written by David Lagercrantz, the first of which Girl in the Spider's Web adapts.  With popular phenomenons, you never know exactly what audiences are responding to.  I naturally assumed everyone else gravitated to Salander as an ultimately sympathetic figure, but now it seems attention was gained over morbid curiosity.  If more fans had been like me, Girl in the Spider's Web would've been received quite differently.

As it is, the second Hollywood Salander movie landed as a dud.  It's not because of the movie.  Blomkvist, as in the books, take a clear backseat to Salander this time, cast as with much of the film without a star in mind.  Lisbeth Salander is herself once again played by a relative unknown, a would-be star-making role for Claire Foy (as it more or less failed to be for Mara as well, somehow).  The biggest name in the cast is actually Stephen Merchant, who wears a number of creative hats, playing the guy who creates the program celebrated hacker Salander spends the movie trying to protect, as well as his son, while she battles her evil twin sister. 

The movie, as with its cast, seeks to present an authentic version of Sweden, moreso than its 2011 predecessor, and as such feels far more European than Hollywood.  It's otherwise a fairly standard stylish thriller, except that it centers on Lisbeth Salander.  The movie pivots but doesn't dwell on her real world mystique, hinging on all the familiar elements but more or less expecting audiences to care as much about Salander as they did a decade ago.  Clearly a miscalculation.  The trailer, featuring a hostile Salander attacking a man suspended upside down, didn't sell the story so much as the hope that Salander remained an icon, an archetypal feminist for a feminist age.  But I think she ended up seeing too hostile, too alienating.  This is a character who became increasingly humanized and sympathetic, as I said, in later book appearances.  I cried reading Larsson's final entry, when the justice system finally acknowledges her, vindicating her. 

But we don't really live in a world where we easily accept iconoclasts, rebels like Lisbeth Salander, and ironically a movie that celebrates her as her own worthy lead character ends up rejected, just as Salander was always envisioned by Larsson in his fictional tales, as just another eccentric outsider.  But she is compelling, and she is worth celebrating, and Girl in the Spider's Web does an excellent job conveying that, as well as her infinitely complicated family history.  Even heroes have sibling rivalry issues. 

Bottom line, this is a movie that will remind you of what made Lisbeth Salander so memorable to begin with.  You just have to remember that she was memorable, in and of herself, in the best possible way.