Back in 2011, fellow film critic MovieBob, then publishing for The Escapist online magazine, concluded his review of the teen-angst driven sci-fi action film I Am Number Four with these words: "I can't say it's good, but I also can't say I didn't like it." This phrase best describes my experience with today's movie The Girl in the Spider's Web. While the general concept of the story, the main character, and the villain, are very intriguing and appealing to me personally, it is, unfortunately, not enough for me to overlook the film's central flaws, which I will elaborate on in a moment.
Based on the novel by David Lagercrantz (which itself is based on characters created initially by Steig Larsson) the story follows Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy), a professional hacker and avenging angel of abused women. Her life seems balanced enough until she is hired by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) to "take back" a super secret computer program he designed which can allow open access to the worlds arsenal of nuclear weapons. Upon retrieving the program, Lisbeth is immediately attacked by a mysterious and evil syndicate, known as The Spiders, who want the program for themselves. They succeed in extracting the package but cannot access it without the proper code sequence. Which, as it turns out, is somehow linked to Balder's young son. Complicating matters even further is the leader of The Spiders, who turns out to be Lisbeth's long lost sister. Now the race is on to save the boy and the world.
This particular book series, known as the Millenium series, has been adapted before. The first book titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was adapted in Sweeden and starred Noomi Rapace. A few years later, director David Fincher did his own take on the story with Rooney Mara in the lead role. Regardless of which film you have seen or prefer (speaking personally I have seen both and very much prefer the Sweedish version) it goes without saying that this series has become something of a cultural phenomenon. Even though the central theme of "over the top bad-ass woman duking it out against misogynistic violence towards women" is, at least in this particular iteration, a little too extreme for me personally, but still appreciated nonetheless. That same theme carries over to this story (the fourth book in the series) and is very much welcome as always. It's just a shame that the movie as a whole doesn't really give its theme the same amount of respect and attention that it deserves.
The biggest problem with this movie is its sense of rhythm. To use a music analogy, every scene in this movie plays out at the very same measure of beats with no variation. As a result, the film feels incredibly stale and almost motionless. Sure, characters progress from one thing to another, but it mysteriously never really feels like it. It's like that famous shot in the movie The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is running like crazy, but because of the choice of lens and camera placement, it looks like he's not even really moving at all. This issue is further exacerbated by the pace of the film. This movie is in such a hurry to get through everything that it wants to do, that it rarely offers any moments to allow the audience to just let it all sink it. It's similar to the issue I had with David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where the fast-paced editing made it almost impossible to absorb any emotional weight the story was meant to have. I understand that the intent is to recreate the fast-paced thought process of the main character, but there has to be a better way to showcase it than this.
Another problem I had with the film is its dialogue. It suffers from the same problem as The Last Airbender, where it had a lot of backstory and texture to the story that it needed to inform and catch up the audience on, so about 85% of everyone's dialogue is just exposition. I can't tell if this is because the writers just didn't know how to weave exposition into the narrative more naturally (like they're supposed to) or if it's because this story is the fourth book in the series and Sony didn't bother to adapt the other books first. In any case, it's amaturish writing that does not belong in such an expensive looking movie.
The final issue I have with this movie is the treatment of its main villain. As a character, Camilla Salander (Sylvia Hoeks), is otherwise excellent. She is performed well, she has a sympathetic backstory and motivation, and she serves as a compelling opposite to the protagonist. Or at least she would be if the movie spent more time with her. You see, the film tries to treat the sudden reveal of the villain, as Lisbeth's believed-to-be-dead sister, as an incredible twist that the audience would otherwise not expect. However, because of the movies very first scene, the fact that the dialogue told us of her demise off-screen, and the truth of her identity was not entirely hidden away in most of the advertising (at least not to my knowledge) not only is this not indeed a twist, but it's a twist that doesn't mean anything. After the opening scene, Camilla is totally absent from the first hour and a half of the film only to suddenly return all evil and scarry looking like a third rate Bond villian. You either spend the first half of the movie thinking to yourself "I know who the bad guy is" or you've forgotten about her entirely. If the filmmakers really wanted this to have a stronger impact, they should have given her more screentime, balanced it out and go back and forth between the two to further cement their connection. There was a lot of popential there which, sadly, never saw the light of day. Although, given who directed this movie, I am not entirely surprised.
The film was directed by Fede Alvarez, who is slowly becoming my least favorite filmmaker. Having previously helmed the Evil Dead remake (which was actually okay), only to then follow it up with Don't Breath (disappointingly awful), only to now return to the screen with The Girl in the Spider's Web, is causing me to lose faith in Mr. Alvarez as a storyteller. He seems to have a bad habit of overlooking, rather too quickly, aspects in his movies that could have been handled better, were easy to spot and fix before shooting, or just simply, makes no sense. Combine that with is usually sickness inducing visual palette (which is, fortunately, absent from this film) and I can only wonder how it is that this guy keeps getting work. Not at all helped by the notion that Don't Breath is apparently getting a sequel. Can't imagine why.
On the plus side, the cinematography is lovely, the music is appropriate for the tone of the film, and the performances from the whole cast, especially the leading lady Claire Foy, are well crafted and show a definite amount of conviction from the cast. Every other aspect of this film clearly had a lot of commitment and passion put into it, so it's really a shame that everything else just boggs it all down. This is becomming an unfortionate, and far too often repeated, trend in Hollywood.
The Girl in the Spider's Web is a movie that, under better circumstances, might have been a real gem. As it is now, it's a directionless slog that puts an unwarrented stain on the future of movies with strong and three dimentional female leads. I can only hope that, as bad as this movie is, that it still makes the right amount of money at the box office to not discourage producers from making more movies with lead herions. Goodness knows, we could use a lot more of them right now.
Is this movie worth seeing?
Maybe.
Is it worth seeing in theaters?
No
Why?
It squanders its own potential and offers nothing we haven't already seen before in better movies. If you are still even the least bit curious about this one, I suggest waiting for video.
Ladies & gentlemen, I am TheNorm, thank you for reading.
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