Lisbeth Salander awaits her trial.
As Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) sits recovering in a hospital bed, her nemesis is also recovering just down the corridor. The police are waiting for her recovery, however, ready for her trial under the charge of attempted murder.
Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is determined to prove Salander's innocence, dedicating an entire issue of Millennium to ensure justice prevails. As he digs deeper into the the mystery he begins to piece together a picture involving a forty year Government cover up.
In my family the wait from watching The Girl Who Played With Fire appeared to be excruciating. After watching that film on the Monday, we sat down to watch The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest to conclude the Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.
Much like the book, the finale picks up right where its predecessor left off. Unlike the previous films in the trilogy, this film focuses less on Salander - she lies cooped up in hospital and prison - and prefers to satisfy all of those unanswered questions left by the other films. For the first two films in the trilogy, this tactic would have failed, as they relied heavily on the unique aspects of Rapace's character.
The storyline retains the gripping political background, introducing a whole range of characters in the police, and security service personnel who may be difficult to keep track of. Despite having read the books previously, even I found that it was difficult to track these characters too, as the official pronunciation of their names differed from my reading. Turns out, my Swedish accent isn't up to much.
This film is certainly up to scratch with The Girl Who Played With Fire, and provides a fitting end to the series. Book readers may not be satisfied with the Erika Berger sub-plot being completely removed and parts of it being integrated into the Millennium plot, but it was always going to be a tall order to put Larsson's words into a sub-3-hour film.
3 stars
I was interested to see what you thought of this one, because the reviews I've read of the book suggest that it mostly reiterated old information and didn't serve as much of a finale. You apparently thought differently.
ReplyDeleteThe books are excellent. I'm not sure why those reviews would suggest that the books reiterate old information, there are a whole host of new characters introduced in the third book (the Section and those investigating the Section, especially).
DeleteIt does answer many of the outstanding questions, and in order to do this it inevitably has to go over some of the old material again, but nothing excessive,