Hollywood Remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Apparently Hollywood’s new version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo isn’t exactly setting the box office on fire.  The linked article has four theories about why audiences aren’t breaking down the door to see it.

My own completely uneducated guess isn’t included in their list:  Who needs the Hollywood remake when the original Swedish version was so good?  It had everything:  plot twists that keep getting deeper and more labyrinthine, real 3-dimensional characters that you care about, and some wicked fight scenes.

And most of all — for me anyway — the movie just felt like Sweden (I’ve never been there).  I’ve been to a lot of European countries but never Scandinavia; and I’ve always had a fascination for those countries.  And The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo really felt like an inside view of gritty day to day life in Stockholm.

Another movie I liked a lot, for the same reason, was Smilla’s Sense of Snow.  This was a Hollywood film (Gabriel Byrne and Julia Ormond) but as far as I know there was no original Danish version to compare it to.  It was a murder mystery that took place in Copenhagen.  No mermaid statues or Tivoli Gardens or gorgeous blondes with exotic accents; just the gritty underside of Copenhagen.

Anyway, here’s a link to the original Swedish version of all three films of Stieg Larsson’s  Millennium Trilogy:  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.  They’re well worth renting if you haven’t already seen them.

I usually hate movies with subtitles, but all three of these movies were so riveting, it didn’t matter.