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Original title: Män som hatar kvinnor
Sweden/Denmark/Germany: Niels Arden Oplev, 2009

Note: a big thank you to Nick for setting me up with English subtitles, which are not included on the Norwegian BD version I watched. The film will receive a UK theatrical release in March, and an English-friendly BD will likely not be too far behind it.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most obvious choice for a big screen adaptation, for the simple reason that it's hardly the most cinematic of stories. There are only two or three genuine action scenes, and for the most part the story is about a guy working his way through page after page of evidence relating to a non-incident that took place forty years ago. This did, it must be said, result in a very engaging mystery novel, albeit one with some significant problems. Books and films are different media, though, and the success of a story in one doesn't necessarily translate into a success in the other. If I were in charge of adapting Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I'd be inclined to suggest that it would be most at home on the small screen as a miniseries.

Indeed, that's precisely what would have ended up happening to the two follow-ups to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - had it not been for the unprecedented international success of the novels. Thrown into production and shot for television on a small budget, they were hastily upgraded for the big screen, leaving The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the odd one out: a lengthy and slickly produced affair that, while suffering from and in certain cases amplifying the same problems as its source material, has a certain classiness that elevates a routine murder-mystery thriller into something more than the sum of its parts.

The plot focuses on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, Blomkvist has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago. Along the say, he teams up with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a wild child with a deeply disturbing past, who has spent most of her life rebelling against the various institutions into whose care she has been placed and is a living, breathing illustration of the phrase "damaged goods". Together, the unlikely pair set out to find out what really happened to Harriet and which of the numerous insalubrious members of the Vanger clan was responsible.

Larsson's novel, an imposing 550-page doorstop, has been pared down quite admirably to a less daunting 152 minutes by screenwriters Eric Kress and Jens Fischer, who do a decent job of excising the various mundane observations in which Larsson was apt to indulge and compressing or combining various events to make the story more succinct. This is particularly true of Blomkvist's early investigations into each and every member of the Vanger family, where several generations of history are reduced in the film to a brief montage of photographs charting various key events of the past century. Likewise, Kress and Fischer make the wise decision to bring Blomkvist and Salander together earlier in the narrative, rightly realising that the rather stodgy central mystery becomes more interesting when it is attacked concurrently by the two mismatched amateur detectives. A lot of it is still Blomkvist and Salander sitting in front of computer screens and occasionally venturing outside to talk to witnesses, but it gets from Point A to Point B far more quickly and with less irrelevant waffle than the novel. Where appropriate, significant events have also been shifted around to give them more narrative relevance. This is particularly true of a shocking revelation about Harriet, which was revealed in the novel when there were a good 200 pages still to go, but is here held back until the final 15 minutes, greatly lessening the sense of anticlimax. Likewise, Blomkvist's prison sentence, which in the novel occurred at an arbitrary point and served as little more than a distraction, has been shifted to a more dramatically appropriate point in the narrative and is now actually used to facilitate Blomkvist's character arc. That said, it's an extremely faithful adaptation indeed, maintaining virtually every plot development and generally only compressing and reordering events rather than altering them completely. (They even maintain the excessive product placement for Apple computers, although at least they refrain from listing the system specifications and hard drive capacity of each model they encounter.)

Niels Arden Oplev's direction is by no stretch of the imagination stylish, and he is hampered by the fact that he is saddled with a plot that provides few opportunities to do anything genuinely exciting with the camera, but the film has a polished, lavish appearance in spite of its staticity. He is also aided by an excellent performance by Noomi Rapace as Salander. Prior to seeing this film, I'd never heard of Rapace before, and I now find myself wondering why she isn't better known because she embodies the character so perfectly that I can't imagine anyone else playing her. True, she looks like an adult woman, whereas the Salander of the novel is repeatedly mistaken for an adolescent, but that facet is not exactly vital to the plot or characterisation anyway. Michael Nyqvist is less impressive as Blomkvist, although I'm inclined to go easy on him as he doesn't exactly have the world's most dynamic character to work with: the Blomkvist of the film is as dry and unremarkable as his counterpart in the novel. At least, though, this out of shape, humourless, middle-aged journalist doesn't spend the film's duration bedding everything with a pulse and a vagina, as he does in the novel, which gives him considerably more credibility.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is ultimately hampered by what it is: a faithful adaptation of a novel about a guy who sits around and doesn't do very much except read and talk. It does a fine job of bringing Larsson's characters and world to life, but it fails to expand them beyond what they were on the page. Essentially, it's very well-made. When someone describes a film in that way, it's usually a sure fire sign that they appreciated the technical craftsmanship but didn't engage with it on any level. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has more going for it than that, but it feels remarkably small-screen in its scope.

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UK: Guy Hamilton, 1973

Live and Let Die: in which James Bond discovers that every single black person in the world really is out to get him, and that they're all secretly communicating with each other by radio, tracking the whereabouts of this "honky" (as they like to call him) as he traipses from Harlem to New Orleans to the Caribbean, threatening to put an end to their murderous, heroin-dealing ways. And yes, it does include the line "Get me a make on a white pimpmobile!"

What follows is a dully plotted, convoluted and (yes, you guessed it) far too long romp which sees Roger Moore, in his first outing as Commander Bond, doing his best to immitate Sean Connery without actually being Sean Connery. My dislike of Moore in the role is no secret (Connery, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig are my top three, though I'm never quite sure in what order), but he's far from the worst thing about this film. (That would be Gloria Hendry. Good grief!) In fact, I'm rather inclined to go easy on him, given that, despite this being his first Bond film, he at no point comes across as an imposter. His banter with M and Moneypenny is spot on, and it's fairly clear that, here at least, he's playing the same character embodied so successfully by Connery. If memory serves me correctly, he would make the character more his own later, much to the series' detriment. Unfortunately, the puerile humour that would in many ways come to define his tenure as the character (whether fairly or not) has already begun to creep in at this stage, exemplified in a tortuously drawn-out boat chase sequence featuring a loud-mouthed local sheriff, who doesn't seem to have got the memo telling him he's supposed to be in a spy movie rather than a broad comedy.

Of all the Bonds I've seen of late, this is by far my least favourite. It's not without its merits - the uncanny atmosphere, particularly apparent in the first half, is pleasingly sinister and unlike anything in the rest of the series, and if Jane Seymour isn't the best Bond girl of all time she's at least easy on the eyes and far less annoying than the aforementioned Gloria Hendry - but it drags like nothing on earth, and for a film in which Bond has a near-death experience with alligators and screws a clairvoyant virgin, thereby robbing her of her fortune-telling powers (don't ask me how that works), is surprisingly forgettable.

PS. I noticed that the actor playing Felix Leiter in this film is the same one who'd go on to portray him in Licence to Kill - a nice bit of continuity for a character who has been recast more times than Bond himself.

PPS. Interesting note about Moore: he is largely considered to have stuck with the role well past his prime. Conversely, I think he looks too young in this film.

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USA: Shane Acker, 2009

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Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/Poland: Lars von Trier, 2009

The thing about a film like Antichrist is that, unless you were in the fortunate position of having viewed it at its premiere, every man and his dog will have expressed an opinion on it by the time you get around to seeing it, whether or not they actually saw it themselves. As such, I wonder to what extent my lukewarm reaction to it stemmed from having unrealistic expectations. Like just about everyone else, I knew all about "that scene" before going in (if, by some remarkable twist of fate, you don't know what "that scene" refers to, I'm not going to ruin it for you here), so its shock factor was dulled to a certain degree (it's still a squirmer, though). What I did realise was that "that scene", and the fifteen or so minutes surrounding it, were atypically arresting. The rest of the film is plodding and dreary, with powerful (or should that be unrestrained?) performances and some striking cinematography failing to liven it up. At times, von Trier seriously overestimates his viewers' (or at least this particular viewer's) suspension of disbelief, with a scene in which a fox talks to Willem Dafoe eliciting gales of derisive laughter.

In his Kermode Uncut blog, Mark Kermode cites Andrzej Zulawski's Possession as the spiritual forerunner of Antichrist, which I'm inclined to agree with, with the caveat that Possession is the better movie. It's far more gung-ho in its balls-to-the-wall weirdness, and while its performances are similarly hysterical, nothing Charlotte Gainsbourg does in Antichrist can hold a candle to Isabelle Adjani's subway station meltdown.

Antichrist, or rather the ideas behind it, are interesting enough, and the aforementioned fifteen minutes, which combine cringe-inducing gore with nail-biting tension, make it worth viewing, but on the whole I was a little let down. Kermode claims that no-one reacts to this film with indifference. Well, I respectfully disagree. There's always one, I suppose.

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Italy: Dario Argento, 1977

(Watched with commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman)

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USA: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2009

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UK/Italy/France: Saul Dibb, 2008

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UK/USA: Anthony Minghella, 2006

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UK: Peter Hunt, 1969

On Her Majesty's Secret Service can lay reasonable claim to being the odd one out in the official series of James Bond films (by which I mean everything from Dr. No in 1962 through Quantum of Solace in 2008, discounting the 1967 Casino Royale produced by Charles K. Feldman and the 1983 Sean Connery vehicle Never Say Never Again). That's not just because it was George Lazenby's sole outing as Agent 007: tonally, it is more or less completely out of step with its counterparts. Because so much of what makes it unique in the Bond canon hinges on how it ends, it goes without saying that major spoilers are contained herein.

This is, of course, the one in which Bond falls in love for real (like, for real for real) and decides to give up his philandering ways, only for happiness to be cruelly snatched from him at the last moment in the form of a well-aimed bullet to his bride's brain. "Wait a minute," you say, "Bond gets married?" Yes, he does, and it's actually almost convincing. Almost.

The iconoclast in me absolutely loves this. What better way to shake things up than to take one of the key foundations of the franchise (Bond's lack of commitment to anything but his job) and obliterate it?

If there is a problem with the scenario it's that at no point did I really understand why Bond had fallen for Tracy (Diana Rigg), or she him. She initially enters the picture as an enigma, rash and aloof in a way that mirror's Bond's own personality... Okay, now that I've written that, I can perhaps begin to understand what they saw in one another, but the film does a poor job of conveying it. Rather than earning a mutual respect for one another in the way that Bond and Vesper Lynd do in Casino Royale, which felt organic to the plot, here writer Richard Maibum and director Peter Hunt give us the cop-out of all cop-outs: a luvvy-duvvy montage in which Bond and Tracy walk on the beach, ride horses and visit the zoo, all set to Louis Armstrong's dulcet tones. Given Bond's track record as a serial fornicator who treats women as playthings, it's asking an awful lot of the audience to buy into the notion that he could genuinely fall in love with someone, and far more care should have been taken to selling the idea than is in evidence here.

On the other hand, it's difficult to deny that, as Tracy, Diana Rigg has a certain appeal. While I would rank Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) and Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) above her in my Bond girl chart, she has a ballsiness that is refreshingly out of step with the conventions of cinema of the time and, when captured by Blofeld, actually has the wits to play for time and ultimately takes matters into her own hands rather than waiting to be rescued. True, she is forced to sit out most of the action-packed climax after daddy dearest wallops her unconscious, but that's still far more than those useless damsels Honey Ryder or Tatiana Romanova ever got to do. Furthermore, she comes across as aloof rather than the spoiled brat that I suspect she would have been played as by many other actresses.

Before being cast as Bond, George Lazenby had only appeared in commercials and was, it would seem, hired solely because he looked so good in action. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, or how much Lazenby's performance of the stunts has to do with it, but the fight scenes have a verve not previously seen in the Bond films. Kicks and punches are delivered at a frenetic pace, and the physicality is highly believable in spite of some ill-judged speed-up techniques and over the top sound effects. Likewise, the extensive ski chase sequences in the film's second half feature among the best stunt work I've seen in the series, and even if it probably isn't actually Lazenby in even half the shots, it's not an issue. And then of course there are the more tender moments. Lazenby brings to the role a vulnerability that the previous Bond, and indeed the next one, simply didn't possess. At no point in any of the Connery films do I ever believe him to be scared, angry or upset: his Bond has an aloofness that allows him to flit from one hair-raising situation to the next with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and an amused smirk. In terms of expressing his emotions, Lazenby may be a far cry from Timothy Dalton's simmering rage, but his reactions to the events around him are considerably more human than those of his predecessor. I don't think it would be overstating the case if I were to say that Connery couldn't have played this Bond, or at the very least he wouldn't have been remotely believable in the more heartfelt scenes. (That said, I suspect he and Moore would both have done fine with the extended sequence in which the character infiltrates Blofeld's institute under the guise of genealogist Sir Hilary Bray and sets about seducing a gaggle of sex-starved girls.)

It's just a shame, therefore, that in every other respect Lazenby is pretty lousy. Every other Bond (even, I'll grudgingly admit, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan) has a certain something that Lazenby lacks: it's hard to put it into words, but I think James Gray describes it best in his review when he states that "[w]hen he enters a room attention is not immediately drawn to him as it should be, and in the relatively few scenes in which he is in the background it is very easy for him to fade away, just another face in the crowd." He smirks as much as Connery and Moore put together, but something about it seems insincere and forced. His delivery of the one-liners is also problematic. His "Bond, James Bond" just doesn't sound remotely right, and puns like "He's branched off" and "He had a lot of guts" hang in the air like a bad smell. (To say nothing of "This never happened to the other fellow," a daft piece of fourth wall breaking that is also patently nonsense, since the continuity established later on makes it clear that he is "the other fellow".) Had he had the opportunity to play the character for longer, I don't doubt that he would have grown into the role and eventually convinced people as the character, but I don't lament his premature departure from the series as I do Timothy Dalton. Put it this way: I don't believe the world was unfairly denied a brilliant Bond. Then again, his departure left the door open for Roger Moore...

Lazenby is far from the only problem, though. The pacing as a whole suffers, with the bloated two and a half hour running time making it feel unnecessarily drawn out at times. On the whole, the second half of the films flows far better than the first, with the stretch involving Bond's arrival at the Piz Gloria through to his unmasking by Blofeld dragging by far the most. Maibum and Hunt also make the mistake of allowing Tracy to drop out of the picture completely for a lengthy stretch, which is a problem because she is by far the most important element in the film, far more to than Blofeld or his plan for world domination. On the music front, Barry's score is a fine piece of work, darker in tone and less catchy than its predecessors but more satisfying as a whole, but the "music library" feel of Dr. No and From Russia with Love returns with a vengeance, with segments of Monty Norman's Bond theme being jarringly cut in at seemingly inopportune moments. The worst example of this is at the very end, where the sombre mood of the final scene is suddenly interrupted by the jaunty, upbeat theme blaring out over the end credits. It's the cinematic equivalent of a clown tooting a horn in your face at a funeral.

I suspect that the veteran Bond fans are going to tear me to shreds for this, but in my opinion Casino Royale is a much stronger working of the "Bond's one true love" idea than this. That's not just because Daniel Craig and Eva Green are better actors than George Lazenby and Diana Rigg (although Rigg is no slouch) - the whole concept and the manner in which it develops seem better thought out as a whole in the 2006 film. (Of course, it's also hard to avoid the fact that, in the rebooted Bond timeline, Bond's loss of Vesper leaves a lasting impression on the character that carries over into the next film. I've not seen On Her Majesty's Secret Service's immediate successor, Diamonds are Forever, but I'm led to believe it completely ignores the death of Tracy and reverts Bond back to type.) Neither On Her Majesty's Secret Service nor George Lazenby are, in my estimation, the misunderstood gems that some claim them to be, but nor are they the train wrecks that others would have you believe.

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USA/Canada/Germany/France: Jaume Collet-Serra, 2009

As yet another take on the venerable "scary child" branch of the horror genre, Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan has a handful of aces up its sleep, primarily believable performances by Vera Farmiga as a recently bereaved mother who adopts a creepily precocious young girl and Isabelle Fuhrman as that girl. There is of course little that you wouldn't find in recent movies in the same vein such as Godsend and the remake of The Omen, but the performances, and Collet-Serra's knack for creating an eerily foreboding atmosphere, lift it above its stable-mates. The usual problems with these films, most notably characters acting in a completely bone-headed manner and refusing to see what's right in front of their noses, are readily apparent, but you can argue that this merely goes with the territory. It's definitely not, in my opinion, "the horror film of the year" (as the quote on the front cover from The Times would have you believe), but it's streets ahead of The Unborn or My Bloody Valentine 3D, which make up the arse-end of the genre's output for 2009. Even the unusual length for a genre picture of this sort (over two hours) is not the bummer it could so easily have been, with the director's decision to take things slow and build up the characters in the first half paying dividends in the second, as everything slowly unravels.

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