The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, which makes the notion of David Fincher so quickly remaking it pretty strange. Hopefully he’ll have the sense to do more with his adaptation than Matt Reeves did with his Let Me In redo. In both cases the Swedish version was already almost perfect, and while Fincher claims his is based on the book and not the already great Swedish movie, Matt Reeves claimed the same thing and that turned out to be absolutely untrue.
Yet as completely brilliant as Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was, the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is a huge letdown. Part of the problem is that the detective duo from the first film spends almost all of the second movie apart, working alone, ruining the dynamic between them which made the first movie so good. My hope is that the third and final film in the Millenium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, will correct this and put things back on track… but the new trailer for Hornet’s upcoming American release isn’t giving me a lot of hope.
Watch the trailer for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest below or in HD on Yahoo. I’ll see you afterward to talk a bit more about what we just saw.
Bear in mind that I’m approaching this as someone who hasn’t read the books (and is deliberately avoiding doing so until after I’ve seen this film), but to me this trailer makes it look like more of the same stuff from the second movie. Another story in which Mikael and Lisbeth spend the story apart, this time because apparently Lisbeth is going to prison. Worse they seem to be teasing the notion that like the second movie, this will be all about uncovering Lisbeth’s past… and frankly that was a disaster. The first movie worked because it revolved around a great murder mystery, and because Lisbeth was a mystery too. I don’t really want to know more about her. I want to see her and Mikael back together, playing detective, like Sherlock Holmes and a lesbian, slightly homicidal Watson.
I really hope that’s not what’s going on here, so if you’ve read the books, please offer me reassurances in the comments section below. In the meantime, as long as you're here check out the movie's first poster which, if you click it, will lead you to our complete Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest high-res image gallery.
