The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Book & Movie)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Book & Movie):  Stieg Larsson is the Swedish author who wrote the novel and its two sequels.  If you are anxiously awaiting his next novel, you're going to have a long wait. [1]  Hopefully something that you did know is that in 2012 they made a movie out of the novel.  The movie starred Daniel Craig. [2]  The novel starred whoever you pictured in your mind as the lead character.  Since I saw the movie before I read the book, Daniel Craig got the spot by default.

For the movie, the screenwriter stuck very close to the source material.  Which isn't always true. [3]  Which means that every scene in the movie is nearly identical to the same scene in the book.  [4]  What it doesn't mean is that everything that happened in the book is portrayed in the movie.  Large swaths of material [5] are left out of the movie.  But the movie doesn't suffer too badly for it as long as you are fine with missing out on a lot of the motivation and inner thoughts of the characters. [6] Also the bulk of the story line surrounding Blomkvist's trial and what happens later is completely missing.  Which is understandable as keeping it in would have made the movie twice as long.

Of course they could have saved some time by not expanding on the scene in which Salander beats up her social worker. [7]  Watching that scene in the movie just made me cringe.  When I started to get close to that part in the book, I was mentally gearing myself up for the worst, but the book was completely tame in comparison.

I must also admit that in the movie there were a couple of times in which several minutes were devoted to showing us all of the pictures that Blomkvist was sorting through.  I had no real problem with the pictures themselves, I just wish it had been a bit clearer what it was we were looking for.  The book does a much better job of that.

I'm looking forward to reading the second book in the trilogy and I believe that they are making a movie out of that as well . . . checking the Interweb . . . confirmed, but no dates mentioned as of yet.  I will probably try to see the movie when it comes out.  [8]

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo [Book] - A
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo [Movie] - B [9]

[1] - He's dead.
[2] - Yes, he's current James Bond.  Yes, he totally did jump out of a helicopter with the Queen of England during the Olympics. That really happened.
[3] - Lawnmower Man and Running Man to name two off of the top of my head.
[4] - Unless of course you have an over active imagination, in which case all bets are off.
[5] - Could make a really big dress.
[6] - Long scenes of people thinking don't make good cinema
[7] - Granted he had it coming.
[8] - I suspect the Pook will not as she found the first to be too off putting.
[9] - Yeah, I didn't need to see all that.