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The Girl in the Reboot Cycle


The Girl in the Spider’s Web was published in 2015, written by David Lagercrantz, eight years after the late Stieg Larsson’s final completed novel in his Millennium series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, came out. Similarly, its American film adaptation, which released this past weekend, comes seven years after David Fincher’s interpretation of the original novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Both are a continuation of a series spearheaded by new authors trying to recapture what made the earlier instalments compelling and thrilling. I can’t speak to the book as I haven’t read it, but this new movie directed by Fede Alvarez has the bones of the grimness, violence, corruption, and luridness that characterized its preceding story, but little of the substance.
Computer hacker and vigilante Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) steals a highly dangerous computer program called Firefall back from the NSA for its creator (Stephen Merchant) to destroy. However a mysterious criminal syndicate attacks her home and takes it for themselves. Wanted for the theft and being pursued by both domestic authorities and an American security technician (LaKeith Stanfield), she reunites with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) to track down the organization now armed with nuclear power.
The plot isn’t too different from something you’d see in any Bond movie. It’s got a grittier veneer, but is just as predictable and uninteresting, relying on intrigue and action, both of which aren’t bad. There are a few very creative action beats and moments of real tension. However, the world feels separate from the one of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where the seedy underbelly of Copenhagen was more pronounced, and the crimes more visceral. In contrast to the often brutal realism of the earlier story, this one doesn’t feel very believable at all, again existing in more a conventional action movie universe where Salander’s hacking prowess is tantamount to a superpower. The biggest failing of The Girl in the Spider’s Web is the softening of its tone. What drew audiences to the Fincher film was its uncompromising bleakness and generally honest atmosphere. There are moments in this movie that live in that same darkness, but only moments.
One element the story seemed to have going for it though was the promise of an exploration into the background of Lisbeth Salander, giving the audience an understanding of the trauma that led to her becoming the sociopathic rebel who ruins the lives of men who abuse women. But what’s given isn’t much more than a glimpse at her childhood escape from the clutches of her abusive father. Even her relationship with her sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks), which is supposed to be a central hook of the movie and its driving focus, is underdeveloped and uninspired. It should also be borne in mind that for all the emphasis in the promotional work on Lisbeth avenging assaulted women, she does very little of that in this movie.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web, despite being a soft reboot, does little to acquaint new viewers with its characters and backstory. It’s hardly impossible to decipher the clear romantic history between Salander and Blomkvist, or the nature of Blomkvist’s exposés on their previous cases, but the movie makes no point in hiding it’s the fourth part of a series with pre-existing developments, relationships, and emotional baggage.
Claire Foy makes for a great Salander though. She’s not as extreme in her look as either Noomi Rapace or Rooney Mara, but not only is her Swedish accent surprisingly good, but she plays the characters’ nihilism and dispassionate attitude with skillful restraint. She exudes both the awesome power and the melancholy pathos of a woman who’s been horrifically abused most of her life barely batting an eye as she outsmarts and outmaneuvers the systems trying to bring her down. Gudnason is decent, though Blomkvist is really just along for the ride through this story, while Stanfield is an anomaly both as the American character on his own mission to recover Firefall, and just as a part of this movie. Stanfield’s performance strengths, as exceptional as they were in Sorry to Bother You, don’t fit in here. Sylvia Hoeks is going to be typecast as villains for the next decade, but she is good at them, even if her character here is largely flat. And Stephen Merchant isn’t bad, though he doesn’t even attempt a Swedish accent, making it slightly jarring to hear such a West Midlands dialect coming out of a character called Frans.
Foy’s performance, in addition to some effective sequences invigorate The Girl in the Spider’s Web, but it isn’t a memorable Lisbeth Salander outing. There’s a lot of effort and talent on screen, but it’s not put to great use. I’d be up for seeing Foy continue in this role, but if the scripts are going to be this tonally generic it would surely be a waste of her considerable capabilities.

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