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 before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.

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 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 critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.

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 Reznor² was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 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?”

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 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 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.

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.

I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara), 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.

In Niels Arden Oplev’s 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.

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.

She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things. 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.

Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s film (co-starring Daniel Craig) 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 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, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.

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 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 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), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red. 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 in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.

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 essay comparing all the sex she has.

But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.

YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:

• It’s bleak, disgusting, savage and beautiful all at once
• It’s very nicely paced
• The acting is superb, and it contains predominantly European/Swedish actors!
• It doesn’t feel very Americanised, product placement aside (why do I suddenly want an Epsom printer?)
• LISBETH LISBETH SHE’S AMAZING LISBETH I LOVE YOU LISBETH
• I literally do not have the words for how perfect Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ethereal, terrifying soundtrack is

YOU SHOULD SEE THE ORIGINAL BECAUSE:

• It plumbs into the mechanics of the story with more depth
• Lisbeth has more dialogue, particularly showing her social politics
• The sex scenes (as opposed to the sexual assault scenes), particularly between Erika and Mikael, are more loving and personable
• You get more backstory to the characters in general
• It’s a lot less bleak and disgusting-feeling than the remake (although the endless shots of dead women’s faces at the end is horrendous)

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THESE FILMS BECAUSE:

• I am not joking when I say that, between them, both films contain two of the most personally painful rape scenes I have ever seen (Rape 1 is worse in the original, Rape 2 is worse in the remake, but that’s obviously completely subjective!)
• A cat is mangled in the remake (but not the original)
• Seriously, it’s actually quite horrible in its violence, both portrayed and alluded to, so steer clear if that ain’t your bag
1. Did you know they’re making a Hollywood remake of Troll Hunter? I know, I know, I set everyone around me on fire, too. It’s okay. It’s a natural reaction.
2. I would crawl through fire to get to this man’s trousers.
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I’ll admit, in the wake of previous supposedly Made For Sarah-style films being crushing disappointments (no, I’m still not talking to you, Zack Snyder, after The Incident), I was readying myself for another angry rant in the general direction of the internet. I went into Cowboys and Aliens with low hopes: I wanted cowboys, and I wanted aliens. I got them and they were great.

The cowboy film has always been an exploration of maleness – often specifically white American maleness – pitching “good” masculinity (cowboys) versus “bad” (indians and bandits). There’s often an additional trope which sets masculinity against the untamed natural environment. Alien/monster films focus on our fear of “others” and “outsiders” that we cannot understand or control. Often that other is a frightening idea in our midst, like in District 9 (post-colonial or immigration-related concerns), or 28 Days Later (medical experimentation, unchecked human aggression).

So, with that in mind, Cowboys and Aliens should tell us what American masculinity does in the face of “the other”. Without referencing anything, we can probably conclude that it shoots at it. This is very true.

Except…

… The casting of Daniel Craig AKA that most English of Englishmen, James Bond, as the lead in this action romp seems a little out of kilter. His physical masculinity is present – of this we are in no doubt – but there are nice little moments in which traditional tropes of agressive masculinity are turned slightly around such as the focus on groups, teams and families succeeding rather than the usual “one man against the world”.

I am probably going into too much analysis for what is overall a pleasing action romp. The full spoiler-tastic plot can be found here on the wiki page, but in brief: there are some cowboys, some aliens, stuff explodes. Daniel Craig takes his shirt off quite a bit, Olivia Wilde is hot, mysterious and gunslinging whilst Harrison Ford plays himself. He is the original Space Cowboy, after all.

I did say brief. You can find some more things plus interesting interviews with cast and crew over at the Huffington Post.

What I hadn’t realised, though it is forehead smackingly obvious in hindsight, was that the orignal public outing for this was in comic book format from an idea by Scott Rosenberg, who took a long time to actually sell the concept as a film. No idea why it was such a hard sell; stranger things have happened at the cinema, after all.

The film works. I sat, rapt, as the spectacle unfolded. And spectacle is the right word – action films are about watching Stuff Happening Then Exploding but with enough interesting character and plot elements to lead you through it, without distracting from the important explosions. Otherwise we’ll just be watching a Michael Bay film.



Cowboys and Aliens

A female gunslinger, albeit from very, very far out of town, is certainly a very welcome presence. I’m still in two minds over how I feel about that. It’s good to get female characters into what is usually a very male-dominated genre. Cowboy films are pretty much just that – about cowBOYS.

So let’s look at the boys – there’s a lot of discussion of “being a man” in the film, and the male characters all come of age in different ways, usually through their relationship to each other as father/son types or in their relationship to guns and how big they are. Paging Dr Freud, anyone? As an analysis of maleness it’s not the most subtle.

But then this film isn’t very subtle. Or indeed, subtle at all. The aliens are evil and very “alien” – they have no characterisation and are just the enemy marauding to Planet Earth in search of gold (geddit?). The “baddie” of the film is very clearly avarice. Almost every act of plunder is directly and swiftly punished. The “good” characters are those that express noble qualities of caring for others above themselves and in an interesting turn of events – total self-sacrifice.

The “community conquers all” theme runs strong. The assembled cast must learn to put aside their differences – criminals and lawmen, cowboys and indians, Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford who have a couple of amusing testosterone-offs during the film – in order to fight the common enemy. Now, all of this, well-handled, would be corny but more than good enough for what is essentially a Spaghetti Western crossed with Independence Day. Hey, I don’t need introspection; I liked Thor.

Talking about masculinity and how it is handled in films should be as important for feminists as counting female characters and their agency. Speaking of which, I was pleased to note that the female lead didn’t need rescuing any more times than Daniel Craig, and she’s the only one who knows what’s going on, plus she actually saves the day in the end.

However, there are precious few other female characters, as is the sad case with Westerns – when will we get more cowgirls, when? The only other speaking female characters are a prostitute and a wife, both of whom are damsels eventually in distress. It would have been nice for there to be a human heroine for Craig’s character to riff off (to quote the person I went to the cinema with, “I knew she was too beautiful to be real!”) rather than a space alien on a mission of vengeance. Though maybe she was still a female space alien. I’m choosing to believe she was.

Another lump in the plot stew is the presentation of the Native American characters- the usual “other” to the cowboy, replaced in this film by the aliens. They team up with the cowboys to Save The Day – and frankly, there is a lot of schmaltz and hokum surrounding the entire thing, from their mystical powers that help Daniel Craig’s amnesiac character remember crucial plot points to the fact that Harrison Ford grows as a person by realising his “adopted” Native American son is better than his current one… just before he dies in his arms.

So it’s a film that stereotypes men, women, cowboys and indians. It probably stereotypes the aliens too, but they don’t actually speak so much as growl so it’s hard to tell. It’s silly, it’s schmaltzy… but that’s also why it’s fun. This film does not take itself seriously, and I liked that. Other people didn’t. Many standard clichés of cowboy films are presented, which half made me groan and half made me smile because I wanted them to be there. I was certainly glad that it was a cowboy film with aliens in it rather than an alien film with cowboys in it – I like watching the lone gunman walk into the bar, drink a whisky then get into a fight. If you went to the cinema with an I-Spy Cowboy Films checklist, you would not be lacking many ticks on your sheet.

I’m wondering whether I’m being a Bad Feminist in liking the film despite these flaws. Or do Daniel Craig’s abs just cancel everything out? I believe the original plot did have a man-and-woman cowboy duo hunting down aliens together, which would have absolutely sold it for me. Not sure how the original stood on the Native American characters, though…

Go see this film if:

• You like cowboys and you like aliens
• You like seeing Daniel Craig getting into fights and taking his top off
• ‘Splosions!

Don’t go see this film if:

• You want something that reveals inner, hidden truths about the social pysche.
• Or any kind of subtlety or nuance.
• At all.
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