Director: Fede Alvarez
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 117 minutes
The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo might ring a bell for many, as it was a popular movie in 2011 and it was based on the well-known Millennium series by Stieg Larsson. While this movie’s title sounds similar and it will actually revolve around the same characters, the movies are only loosely tied to each other, making this one both a sequel as well as a reboot of the series. With Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig passing on the torch to Claire Foy and Sverrir Gudnason, we weren’t sure what to expect of this spiritual successor. Nonetheless, while we were not blown out of our seats, the movie still packed a fairly heavy punch.
The movie starts off with a small introduction about Lisbeth Salander’s (Claire Foy) past, quickly sending us to the present where she is a cyber vigilante for women in distress. You’ll get a rather impressive introduction with her breaking into a house where a man abuses his wife, trapping him, stealing all his money, blackmailing him, allowing his wife to flee with her child. This is a proper introduction on how her character views the world. After that, she is approached by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), to retrieve a program he has created, that allows the one in possession of the program to access all nuclear devices in the world. Frans was promised full control of his program, but after developing it, he was removed from the project, putting it in the American government’s hands. As this specific program cannot be copied, it has to be moved, which requires Lisbeth’s hacking skills. After retrieving the program, Lisbeth is however on the NSA’s radar, as well as that of a criminal organization that is also looking to get access to the program. When her hideout gets torched, she knows things are getting serious.
The movie begins with a fairly strong intro, to slow down in the middle, to give you a fairly impressive and intriguing conclusion. There is a lot of information that has to be processed about what is currently going on, but also about Lisbeth’s past and current living situation. The movie does have a few action sequences, which certainly get the blood pumping at all the right times. Nonetheless, with the current span of the movie, it would have been nice to see Lisbeth evolve a bit more, or to see her tackle some odd jobs before digging into the meat of the movie. The flow is actually quite good, with a proper suspenseful buildup, making sure the movie doesn’t get boring or bland before the credits start rolling.
Like mentioned in the introduction, the original movie in 2011 starred Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara as the main characters, who have now been replaced with Sverrir Gudnason and Claire Foy. Both ‘replacements’ do a formidable job, and perhaps even do so better than the ‘original’ cast members. Claire Foy plays a great rendition of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth, and Sverrir feels a bit more believable as Mikael Blomkvist thanks to his looks. The supporting cast members also do a decent job in this latest Millennium film. A special shout out goes to Stephen Merchant, who is more known for his comical appearances in films or other shows, and does a great job in managing a more serious role, albeit still a bit eccentric. Christopher Convery also seems to be an up-and-coming child actor scoring this film after his appearances on Gotham.
The Blu-ray edition of The Girl in the Spider’s Web comes with many special features, ranging from audio commentaries, to deleted scenes to making of sequences. You’ll see snippets about the stunts, the Salander sisters and a few other featurettes to properly prolong your experience with the movie.
Conclusion
The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a great homage to the Millennium series, and we truly hope that a sequel with the same cast is made. It might be sad that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo never received a proper sequel, but this spiritual success/reboot does the series a lot of justice and we were intrigued by the story that was shown. It shows us that there are still enough written works to be used to create great pieces of cinema, without having to reboot old classic movies to come up with ‘new’ material.
The Girl in the Spider's Web (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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