The Millennium trilogy

I watched the TV series Millennium which was made from the three movies based on Stieg Larssons books. Even though this is a TV series with 6 parts, it's also released as separate three movies as an extended edition, each about 3 hours in length. So I'll review the extended movies here. As I've read the books too I'll compare the differences a bit, but won't go into too many details to avoid spoiling.



The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

A friend of mine recommended me the book so I gave it a try. Ended up reading it straight through and getting the following two right after it. So I liked it a lot and when I saw there was a movie coming of it, it went to my must see list. I actually went to see the shorter version in the theatres, but I'll focus on the longer version, as it's a bit better. First of all the cast, it's quite brilliant, most of the characters are strikingly like what I had imagined from the book. And also their performances are very good so everything great on that department. The movie looks nice, nothing special there but nothing to complain either. The movie cuts many corners to squeeze the quite lengthy book into 3 hours, that's understandable and most of the time it works great. The things left out are not really needed anyways. Sure it leaves some of the smaller characters quite thin, but you have to make compromises or you'll end up with a 24 hour movie. But that corner cutting leaves the ending quite rushed as the movie focuses almost solely on the murder mystery while the book keeps the big corporate scandal looming around all the time. So the resolve to the scandal comes quite from the bushes in the movie. Just like any movie based on a book it can't come to the level of the book, but this is close enough. Even though it has some flaws, it's still very gripping and thought provoking thriller. And the longer version is really better, it gives the characters more time to develop and thus making the story work better.
88%



The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

Even though many of the loose ends were tied up in the first one, the second part manages to find new twists to the story. I actually didn't like the book that much, first half of it was quite bad really, but towards the end it started to finally kick in and got on the same level as the first one. Well surprisingly this movie works better than the book as it cuts most of the nonsense out from the start and gets right into business. Especially the parts about the Carribean times were all well worth leaving out. Where the first part was a stand alone story, this is linked straight to the next part as a part of a bigger story. Too bad the actual bigger story and the connections are a bit far fetched for my liking, but luckily it's handled quite nicely without it getting too annoying. The smaller stories on the other hand worked quite good and luckily the movie hasn't forgotten all of them. Sure it has to leave some of them out as the book was so complex with tons of characters and stuff happening at the same time. But really it manages to work even better than the book as the book did get quite boring at times. One more thing I have to mention, the Blu-ray had a horrible picture quality with tons of very annoying flashing grain, so much for the "perfect picture quality"...
75%



The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)

As I said I didn't like the bigger story evolving in the previous part and this focuses solely on it, so the book and the movie are the worst of the series. But it's not totally bad, there are still tons of things that work in this one. Lots of smaller stories are wrapped up in this one as well and again the way the story is told makes it watchable, no matter that the story is quite far fetched.
64%

As a whole the series is well worth watching. Sure the first part would have worked great just as a stand alone story, but the other two have their rightful place also. All in all a great modern thriller which manages to avoid the usual downfalls of it's genre.