The Girl in the Spider’s Web Review

After a seven-year hiatus everyone’s favourite Goth hacker is back with Sony trying to reignite the Millennium series.

Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is a renounced hacker who uses her skills to hurt men who hurt women. She has become an underground figure who women see as a saviour. Lisbeth is approached by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), a British software engineer who made the Firefall programme and asks the hacker to steal it from the NSA. The programme allows users to control any missile system, including nuclear weapons. But when Lisbeth steals the programme she gets attacked by armed men who steal her laptop. This leads to Salander facing off against the NSA, Swedish authorities and a criminal syndicate linked to her past.

This film has been in development hell for years. After the success of the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fans were wanting to see the subsequent novels adaptation. However, director David Fincher moved onto other projects and Daniel Craig demanded too much money so Sony decided to reboot the series with a new cast and creative team. They skip ahead to adapting The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and went straight to the fourth novel.

The original Millennium trilogy was a publishing sensation because of its complex mysteries that had a feminist twist. The Swedish film adaptations as well the David Fincher film were highly regarded thrillers. The film adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web is basically turning Lisbeth Salander into James Bond. The film discards most of the novel’s plot and changed the personalities of some of the characters. In the novel Lisbeth hacked the NSA to find out about evidence of criminal activity whilst Balder developed a revolutionary AI programme. This is a film that treats hacking like it could allow someone to do anything and Lisbeth seems like psychic, predicting events before they happen.

The previous films and novels in the Millennium series were hard-hitting, looking at dark themes like rape, sex-trafficking, torture, and child abuse. The Girl in the Spider’s Web does not have this edge due to it being more action-orientated. Lisbeth’s backstory with her father is changed – in the novels Lisbeth’s father raped and beat her mother, so she attempts to kill him when she was a child. This led to her being placed in a psychiatric ward because her father was a Russian defecator protected by the Swedish version of MI5. In the opening scenes of the film Lisbeth simply runs away.

Sony themselves have said that the rebooted vision of the Millennium series was more James Bond. The plot involving the Firefall programme could have been the MacGuffin in a Bond or Mission Impossible film. The plots in the original films were more grounded – they were a historical disappearance case, an investigation of sex trafficking, and a conspiracy within the Swedish security services. The film Skyfall acts as an influence on The Girl in the Spider’s Web– both films focus on hacking, Bond and Lisbeth are suffering from unresolved issues in their past and their climaxes were similar.

Many of the characters’ personalities were changed in the film. In the novels Blomkvist speculates that Lisbeth was autistic and both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara captured this – especially Mara whose version of the character doesn’t look at anyone and always seemed distant. Foy’s version of the character is softer, not as vengeful as in the novels, or socially distant.  In The Girl in the Spider’s Web novel it was suggested she cared for Balder’s son, August (Christopher Convery) because she sees a lot of similarities with the boy.

Balder in the novel was arrogant, but in the film he was more nerdy and paranoid and takes anxiety pills to keep going. Edwin Needham (LaKeith Stanfield) was a gang member who becomes a skilled hacker and was so good at his job at the NSA that he could tell his boss to ‘fuck off’ without repercussions. In the film he was simply a professional spy.

Other film franchises based on popular thriller novels have deviated from the source material. The Bond films adapted the novels out of order and the Bourne Trilogy was a loose adaptation of the Robert Ludlum novels. So The Girl in the Spider’s Web shouldn’t be criticized for making changes – especially due to the fact that fans are not so keen on David Lagercrantz’s continuation. The film elevates the stakes and the screenwriters focused on Lisbeth’s relationship with her sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks). Lisbeth’s father presence still lingers despite his death and her sister ended up rebuilding his criminal empire. But due to the focus on Lisbeth, Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) was pushed to the periphery. Plus the use of August in the film made The Girl in the Spider’s Web use a plot element from Mercury Rising.

Fede Álvarez took over the franchise from David Fincher and he is clearly a director with potential. The Girl in the Spider’s Web is visually striking, using lots of whites and reds. Many scenes were greatly crafted like Lisbeth and Blomkvist looking at each other from two opposite buildings. The car chases are well handled and the most impressive fight scene was when Lisbeth had to fight off a load of men in gas marks. Álvarez came from a horror background and it shows with certain segments – it is violent and were horror-influenced moments like the use of a PVC vacuum suit.

Fans who wanted a loyal adaptation of the Millennium series will be disappointed but as a standalone film it’s an entertaining thriller.