The Girl in the Spider's Web
This inherits the same problems from Fincher’s film, and adds new ones. The cast gets better because they lost budget, so they get the best European actors to cameo, plus Lakeith Stansfield as NSA Seal Team 6.
This also shrinks the scope, it’s all about Lisbeth’s personal story. I would bet the book is not so trite.
Lisbeth is not only a ninja hacker that gets her way through perfidy and dirty tricks. She’s also a Commando, adept in CQC against dudes with thrice her weight, marksmanship, stunt driving, you name it. She loses plenty of bouts, though.
Like the last time, it is set in Stockholm with people talking English with accents, this is truly jarring. As it was probably filmed in Babelsberg, the bit parts are all Germany’s elite actors: Vicky Krieps, leads from Babylon Berlin, and that’s just who I recognised.
The plot is all about Lisbeth’s mafioso family, her paedophile dad, and her sister who did not rebel when Stockholm Syndrome took over. She even remained as the head of the family business, a ruthless Godmother.
Another more corporate hacker creates a bypass for the world’s nuclear communication systems, a way to turn that specific laptop into a nuclear football for all countries. I see a nuclear silo in Portugal and Spain, somebody did not bother to do their research and just spread out missile icons around the world. Anyway, he hires Lisbeth to steal it, so he can destroy it.
The NSA dude races to Europe to recapture that software, but it seems a personal quest, he doesn’t use the considerable official resources. The head of the Swedish intelligence hires Lisbeth’s sister organisation to steal it back from her, but she uses official resources to hinder others.
Mikael Bloomkvist is just dragged around so he can write the story in the end. But Lisbeth nags him about being work-oriented, the married woman he is fucking in the office does too, so he deletes the document in the end. He might have a backup somewhere.
The corporate hacker has an autistic son who holds the prime number pattern to unlock the McGuffin, so when he is murdered in a bathroom, the son is taken by the bad guys. Lisbeth is drugged, framed for the murder, but then takes a little meth to wake up and rescue the boy. She loses him again eventually.
The showdown is on their family estate. Seems like the walls are made of plywood, since the NSA dude covers her with a 50 cal sniper from a ridge nearby. Lisbeth deletes the program, gets the boy to his mother in San Francisco, and still has time to burn the house down. All this while being stuck for a while in a gimp suit.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.