The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

David Fincher's worst film to date remains The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) despite people's insistence that it's Alien 3 (1992). Fincher's take on Stieg Larsson's monumental first novel in his Millennium trilogy was fine, but the redundancy of it was impossible to shake. English language remakes can rarely justify themselves at the best of times, but when one attempts to redo something as superb and worthy of its source material as Niels Arden Oplev's Sweedish Dragon Tattoo film (and subsequent sequels) it just becomes irritating. So director Fede Alvarez's choice to reboot the franchise by adapting the first novel in the series not written by Stieg Larsson (he sadly passed in 2004), David Lagercrantz's The Girl In The Spider's Web, seems a fairly astute one. Of Lagercrantz's three novels in the series, this is by some distance the best, but it's arguably the hardest to adapt for the screen. Claire Foy does an admirable job of taking the dragon tattoo on her back (literally and figuratively), putting her own stamp on the Lisbeth Salander character like Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara before her. Salander retrieves a dangerous NSA computer programme created by Balder (Stephen Merchant, somewhat bizarrely) that is also being pursed by a bunch of mercenaries, on the orders of Lisbeth's sister Camilla, whom Lisbeth assumed was dead. It sounds simple enough but the intricacies of the facts and figures in the novel are lost amongst the need to create a Hollywood spectacle. Although The Girl In The Spider's Web is functional and creatively makes more sense than Fincher's pointless remake, it gets very bogged down in genre cliches as well as trying to lean too hard on its Scandinavian roots. It's just shy of two hours but it feels a lot longer, and by the time of the films' conclusion I'd long lost interest in how it ended. Fans of Lagercrantz's book may get more out of this than others, but you'd be better off just rereading the novel again, or re-watching the original Swedish trilogy. 4.0/10