I’ve now watched the last two in the movie series based on Stieg Larsson’s novels, the Millennium series. I was not an admirer of the first of the movies, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo. (I reviewed it here.) I wasn’t able to find my way toward believing that the female protagonist Salander could come to anything worthwhile. Retribution doesn’t get us anywhere. Hasn’t anybody figured that out yet? Or, wait, is that the point of the movie? It had not occurred to me it was as I'd watch the first movie of the trilogy. Nor had it dawned on me in the second. And then there were three.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest focuses much less on the individual Liz Salander and much more on breaking up the secret police and bringing down the henchman who’s left a number of dead and wounded in his wake. I finally got the notion the author of the story would really have us side with Salander's whole generation, not just Salander. Wait, no, not only side with but empathize.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest focuses much less on the individual Liz Salander and much more on breaking up the secret police and bringing down the henchman who’s left a number of dead and wounded in his wake. I finally got the notion the author of the story would really have us side with Salander's whole generation, not just Salander. Wait, no, not only side with but empathize.
It took removing Salander from most of the third movie, putting her in a hospital bed, from where thanks to her attending physician and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist she can continue to hack into a few computers from her mobile device to keep up with the developments in the murder cases in which she is the accused. (Blomkvist has slipped the mini computer to Salander through the physician and with it a solicitation for her autobiography that will be useful during her upcoming murder trial.)
At the end of the second movie Salander had been beaten up and buried alive, you see, but at the beginning of the third she was whisked away by helicopter to hospital. Unable to terrorize more male perps herself under those conditions, and given to the quiet of her hospital room where she resolves to recover—we see her, solitary, performing therapeutic exercise—she is far less edgy, hard, and caffeinated than at any prior point in the three movies. She couldn’t be more of a victim of all that is wrong with the world than when she is recuperating from near death in her hospital gown, nor more like a near adolescent than when she is seen sitting on the edge of the hospital bed scarfing down a pizza ordered by her physician after she complained about hospital food.
I realized then that for all the super woman power with which her maker Stieg Larsson endowed her, Salander is really just a kid born of a corrupt union between a post-cold war Soviet Union gangster immigrant and the Swedish secret police, the likes of which altogether run a prostitution ring that exploits and often enough subsequently disposes of young eastern European women. They may as well be abusing their own daughters. And the worst of them is, as there is nothing more terrifying, aside from Salander herself, than her arch-rival, her stepbrother, a gargantuan man with a congenital neuropathic disorder that prevents him from feeling pain. No one can destroy this son of Salander’s father except Salander herself.
She is a girl who can take care of herself alright, this Liz Salander, with a little help from her friends. As for the rest of Larsson's characters, especially the writers at Millennium, and Blomqvist in particular, they fight for her but also for the redemption of the whole of society that has delivered its children unto evil.
