Thursday, November 8, 2018

Film Review - The Girl in the Spiders Web (2018)

The Girl in the Spiders Web is not based off of the late Steig Larsson Millenium books but is based off of the book written after his death and this time Claire Foy replaces Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander who is asked to investigate the disappearance of Project Freefire which could give one person complete control of the US Nuclear Arsenal though as she investigates the case demons from her past also emerge.

The Girl in the Spiders Web is very much familiar to me in that I feel about this movie the same way I felt about Pacific Rim: Uprising back in March in that this film is not terrible or awful in any way but really suffers from the long shadow the 2011 film David Fincher made based off of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo book which I absolutely loved.

Ms Foy does a good job as Lisbeth but a lot of the time it feels like she is playing Catwoman/Selina Kyle as a lot of the film just feels very clean for the most part like its only a low ranking MA15+ film when it could so easily have been a high M rated film with some minor tweaking whereas the Fincher movie really felt like a great fit for him as a director it was a dark, nasty crime procedural that also peeked at some of the underbelly of human society something Fincher in films like Fight Club and Seven was no stranger to.

Here it feels like a Catwoman solo film in any other name where something gets stolen and Lisbeth has to get it back but that is only the films first big problem the second is the Blomkvist who was the co lead in the Fincher film and in the Larsson books is very very badly handled here he kind of just drifts into the story, does very little, means very little and then leaves that’s about it and it feels like he was inserted into the story during a script rewrite of an earlier draft that did not feature him in much capacity and yeah that’s that.

Look the Girl in the Spiders Web is not a bad film but its also a very pale shadow of the David Fincher film and like when I saw Pacific Rim: Uprising I just couldn’t help but think of the earlier film it followed which got me into the books after I saw it but the underuse of Blomkvist and it feeling more like a Catwoman film than a Dragon Tattoo story really bothered me, 2 out of 5.

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