Sunday, November 11, 2018

The Girl in the Spider's Web

I am a huge fan of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (I've read all three books multiple times) so I was very intrigued by a new novel involving the antisocial hacker Lisbeth Salander called The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz.  I didn't initially like it because I was constantly comparing it to the first three books which probably wasn't very fair of me.  I decided that if I saw the movie adaptation I would try to judge it on its own merits rather than compare it to David Fincher's moody and atmospheric adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  My Dad and I decided to see it yesterday and we both thought it was a pretty good thriller.  Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) has become a sort of avenging angel for battered women when she is asked by a former NSA agent named Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) to steal a computer program that he designed, which can access nuclear codes around the world, because he's having second thoughts about its use.  Stealing the program is a simple job for Salander but it attracts the attention of the NSA, who send Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) to Stockholm to retrieve it, and it also attracts the attention of a Russian gang known as the Spiders, who bomb Salander's apartment to steal it from her.  She enlists the help of Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) to discover who is behind this gang and ultimately must confront her own past to get the program back.  This is not the dark and psychologically complex murder mystery that the original is but, in my opinion, it is not meant to be.  It is meant to be an action thriller and on that level it succeeds.  The car chases, explosions, and fight scenes are fantastic and Foy delivers a kick-ass performance.  The screenplay deviates quite a bit from the source material, especially in regards to Lisbeth’s backstory, but I think it improves upon an meandering and overly technical story.  It is quite entertaining and I really enjoyed it.  This movie might not be what you are expecting if you are a fan of the original trilogy, but if you can appreciate it for what it is, I highly recommend it

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