{"id":9252,"date":"2012-01-18T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T09:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=9252"},"modified":"2013-05-31T16:22:18","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:22:18","slug":"at-the-movies-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-oh-god-i-am-so-sorry-i-watched-the-remake-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2012\/01\/18\/at-the-movies-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-oh-god-i-am-so-sorry-i-watched-the-remake-first\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Movies: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Oh God I Am So Sorry I Watched The Remake First"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, by the way? There’s spoilers in this, too, if, like me, you were\/are a complete Millenium Trilogy virgin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve turned over different ways to start this review in my head, and really the best way I can think of is with an apology. I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I watched the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo<\/strong> before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own<\/em> revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

I am often ferociously anti-Americanised-remakes, as the remake trend can assume, on the part of their Western, English-speaking audience, a certain level of can’t-be-bothered-with-anything-not-in-their-own-language.1<\/a><\/sup> It also assumes that anything not English-language isn’t really worth seeing, and this is fully gross. That said, I avoided Stieg Larsson’s <\/strong>critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy<\/strong> until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.<\/p>\n

Rape scenes. That’s why. There’s some notoriously graphic sexual assault in these films. So I avoided them. I avoided them very well until I heard Trent Reznor<\/strong>2<\/a><\/sup> was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo<\/strong> and then, three days ago, I found myself with a spare few hours and a fiver in my pocket, and went, “Hey, I’ll go and see a film that I know will trigger the fuck out of me on my own! What could go wrong with that?”<\/p>\n

Nothing went wrong at all. I mean, yes, both rape scenes are absolutely atrocious and I actually felt sick and cried, and if you’re at all disturbed by the portrayal of sexual assault, stay the fuck<\/em> clear of this film, BUT I saw it again the next day and bought all three of the original Swedish films (well, the extended versions that were two-parters for televised release), and watched the original TGWTDT<\/strong> that very evening. I was going to, in fact, write a comparison piece on the films and talk about how the remake does things differently in terms of the plot and all that, but something magic happened when I went to see the film the first time around and I found myself incapable of doing so.<\/p>\n

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Everyone says it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight, and while that may be true of people you meet in the street, it’s totally possible to fall in love with a character the moment they appear in the story.<\/p>\n

I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace<\/strong>) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara<\/strong>), and how her character varies across the films, in part because of some very small design decisions. It’s also a good excuse for me to do some proper fanart of her. I fully accept that my opinion of Lisbeth was shaped by the version of her I saw first.<\/p>\n

In Niels Arden Oplev’s<\/strong> original films, Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is withdrawn and quite brusque, but perceptive and vengeful. She makes eye contact with people, she touches them, asks questions – she’s pretty easy to relate to, and in the however-many hours of sprawling investigative plot you get, she undergoes a lot of development, morphing beautifully from a quietly damaged, pained creature to this fully-fledged angel of justice. In the final scenes, where she hunts down killer Martin Vanger on her motorbike, she doesn’t ask for permission to do so; she just watches him burn to death, deaf to his pleas for mercy. It’s a beautiful scene. There’s steel in her eyes and mouth. It explicitly echoes her own setting alight of her father – a parallel only hinted at in the remake – and her associate Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is amazed and disgusted with her when he learns of her actions, which allows Lisbeth to give her gorgeous “Don’t make him into a victim” speech.<\/p>\n

Original Lisbeth is a human. Plenty of design decisions have lead to this: she has eyebrows, for a start, which do a lot to shape her face and give her expression. She has make-up that looks like a professional taught her how. She wears colours other than black. Her skin is unblemished, and her nails are short and neat. She carries herself with quiet pride, and her eyes are alive with Noomi Rapace’s trademark razor-sharp observational glare. Her hair lies flat a lot of the time.<\/p>\n

She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things<\/em>. And all this fleshes her out as a character in more explicit ways that a viewer can relate to – it’s easier to form an empathic bond with a character who has dialogue, obviously – but she’s a lot more human. And yes, I do actually count that as a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s<\/strong> film (co-starring Daniel Craig<\/strong>) is a tiny, vicious monster. She is easily the greatest thing about the film, with Rooney Mara effortlessly stealing every scene she so much as breathes on, but unlike Original Lisbeth, she starts out<\/em> as being so viscerally damaged, so visibly broken and so fucking furious with the world around her, that it feels as though she remains quiet just to barely contain the thrashing, clawing monster that she constantly keeps under skin. Where Original Lisbeth becomes more overtly monstrous, the character development with Remake Lisbeth is that she becomes more human<\/em>, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.<\/p>\n

Everything Remake Lisbeth does and says is carefully tailored to make her as cold as possible – fitting perfectly into what is visually an ice fucking cold<\/em> film, all in blue, black and white. “I have a high metabolism, I can’t put on weight,” she deadpans, as though she’s said it a thousand times before, when she’s asked when she last ate, even though that wasn’t the intention of the question. Her make-up is sloppily crayoned-on as if she simply couldn’t care less. She doesn’t<\/em> care. She prowls through the film as though everyone she meets couldn’t affect her life if their own lives depended on it, and if they tried, she’d literally bite them to death. Her eyes are wild, fiery and bestial. In the last shot of her face, when she watches Mikael walk off with his lover, Erika (the painfully hot Robin Wright<\/strong>), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red<\/em>. It really does feel as though in everything she does – including sex – Lisbeth performs only the very basics of what she needs to be received at all<\/em> in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.<\/p>\n

And that, my friends, is why I liked the remake better than the original: because Lisbeth is a werewolf. Also because she gets better consensual sex scenes and her revenge upon her rapist isn’t filmed to be a precise echo of her own rape. Perhaps I’ll write a second Lisbeth Salander Please Can I Be Your Friend Why Are You Biting Please Stop Biting Me<\/em> essay comparing all the sex she has.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.<\/p>\n

YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:<\/h3>\n