Rise of the Outcasts

There's something unequivocally appealing about people who have been wronged and seeing them up in arms to exact revenge. Such is the case of Sweden's The Millenium Trilogy.

Written by the late Stieg Larsson after work hours, and as the now famous account goes, inspired by him seeing the torture and rape of a girl when he was 16, the series was meant to be not one but perhaps three trilogies. Comprised by Män som hatar kvinnor (ineptly translated as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) and Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest), the trilogy centers on savvy hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, two outcasts in their own right.

If you take into account the Swedish film Insomnia and its cop-out of a Western remake, plus other prestige Swedish films such as Lat Den Ratte Komma In, which was also remade, they pinpoint an arguably well-known yet fundamental flaw with mainstream Western (read; Hollywood) thrillers and action films; while technically proficient, there are no real human beings at the center of most of them. For another example, try Russia's Timur Bekmambetov's Nightwatch and Daywatch.

When I first watched Män som hatar kvinnor, Lisbeth (the mesmerizing Noomi Rapace) struck me as a Joan Jett type. But she is very much her own self, with dreams that hint of a turbulent past that is never revealed in the first film. She teams up with Blomkvist (the world-weary Michael Nyqvist) to investigate a series of cold-case anti-semitic murders surrounding a wealthy family, which seemingly catch her attention for personal reasons. The twosome eventually crack the case and develop a relationship.

Flickan som lekte med elden, the sequel, also lasts two hours, something likely to annoy us westerners with short attention spans, yet it continues with its theme of "men who hate women." Here, Lisbeth is publicly accused of a triple murder and is drawn to the investigation of a prostitution ring by Blomkvist, who has been trying to reach her for months. We learn that Zalachenko, Lisbeth's abusive father, and her German half-brother, may be responsible for the murders. Also presented are details of part of her adolescence spent at a mental institution. It is the weakest of the chapters.

Luftslottet som sprängdes (which would actually translate as The Aircastle that Blew Up) is the final episode, which opens with Blomkvist preparing to go public with the story of the now badly wounded Lisbeth on his magazine. Zalachenko is still alive, for a while anyway, and his other son on the loose; Niedermann, the german character with "congenital analgesia," a fact which could be read as having a nazi undertone. A vast conspiracy involving secret police soon begins to emerge, as the trial against Lisbeth looms closer while Blomkvist wants to aid her defense by any means necessary. It marks the return to form of the series, after the second chapter, though both comprise a tonal shift.

Consider this; if The Millenium Trilogy had been conceived as a set of American movies from its inception (remake notwithstanding), Lisbeth probably would have been the antagonist.