The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Movie Review

This movie is a suspense, mystery, thriller. Daniel Craig plays a writer who loses an important legal battle in the very first scenes of the movie. He accused a CEO of being a "criminal". The CEO then sued and won 600,000 Swedish kronas (about $87,000). He quits his post as co-editor of a newspaper, leaving behind his married female partner in editing as the new solo editor.

He takes a job writing the memoirs of a retired business man. This is a cover for his real investigation. The real purpose of his hire is to investigate the death of the business man's niece, Harriet. Harriet simply disappeared one day when she was just 16. Since then, someone has been mailing a Christmas gift every year to the business man. A dried wild flower on a canvas backing. This is the gift Harriet used to give to him every year.

While the story follows the writer, the scene cuts frequently back to another young woman, an investigator. She is a ward of the state, and receives money for her living expenses in this way. (Sweden is Socialist). Her case manager, with whom she enjoyed a family-like relationship, suffered a stroke. As a result, the government assigned a new case manager to her.

The viewer quickly discovered the new case manager was a pervert. He forced her to perform oral sex on him in his office. She needed money to replace a laptop destroyed in a mugging. The scene left little to the imagination: it showed the girl's back as she moved up and down in front of the case manager, a large, fat man.

Now, I should have walked out right then. This is not something I wanted to see. I understand developing the story. These things happen at the hand of evil people in the world. Evil is real. I get that. But, the art of film has many ways of expressing such things without actually showing them.

Bizarre Pre-Movie Musical Score and Imagery

I should have anticipated that the movie was produced by strange persons. The opening is a loud metal rock score with a bizarre conflux of people being coated in some slick black liquid. It pours from their lips, over their heads, merges them together, and rips them as they come apart. One grows wings, black wings, like a dark angel. A single match is thrown, igniting and melting at least one person down to the skull. Hands come from behind, binding a mouth and ripping apart. insects emerge in a cloud from a black mouth. All of this is done in shades of black. And, this bizarre, irrelevent opening drolls on and on. It may have been five full minutes or more.

At the end of it, several people could be heard saying in indignation, "What was that?!?"

Our movie started at 2:10 (previews, anyhow). About an hour into the actual movie, the writer is beginning to just put together some notes on Harriet. The girl with the dragon tattoo, however, quickly advances from fellatio to being raped.

The entire scene is shown. How the man binds her, how he tears off her clothes, parts of her nakedness, are all shown. As he climbs on top of her, unrolling a condom, he says, "I forgot to ask you if you like anal sex." At this, my wife and I looked at each other and said, "Let's walk out."

The manager agreed to give us tickets for a later show. At first we accepted. But, when he returned with the comp tickets, I told him I wanted the studio to know we walked out. This required a cash refund, which we received.

If, like me, you do not want to see bizarre videos of black-oil devil angels, too much detail in forced oral sex, and an anal rape, walk out. The movie industry needs to know: We do not want garbage. We want movies like Courageous. Give us what we want, or we will stop going.

Every person needs to start doing this:

1. Walk out of movies that promote or blatantly show what you disagree with or do not want to see. This often means walking out in the second half of the movie, after they have you hooked, too curious to see the conclusion to walk out.

2. Encourage others to walk out and to likewise teach others to walk out.

I found an interesting site, with comments both for and against. Another commenter, "Marky Mark" had basically the same thoughts as my wife and I.

Dragon Tattoo comments

I also spoke with an in-law living in Sweden. There, he tells me, the movie ran under the title "Men Who Hate Women". In Sweden, it is illegal to speak against homosexuality in public. Two years ago, there for a conference, my wife said something using the word "homosexuality." A man from the adjacent coffee shop table politely leaned over and whispered, "You can be arrested for that in Sweden."

I think most of the commenters to this review do not yet realize that most, if not all, movies are just two things: advertisement and/or socialization. The attack on men is in full operation. This movie is not so much to bring concern for rape, as some state here. It is to reflect negatively on men.

Socialization: The art of subtly guiding, influencing, and controlling the thoughts of a population or demographic.

When I searched for the author of this violent, anti-male movie, I was not at all surprised to find that he was a leader of a communist group in Sweden (read: anti-freedom) Has communism ever been anything besides a giant red herring leading people to captivity beneath an elite cabal of tyrants? He also edited a Trotsky publication.

Read the rest about Stieg Larsson here: Stieg Larsson

The other curious aspect of this story is this: No one knew Mr. Larsson was writing these books. Nobody knew. Some time after his death, his girlfriend announced she had the books. They were published after his death.

Most movies are written and created to further agendas. That is the real reason most scripts are rewritten and modified- to incorporate lines that introduce ideas and form opinions in minds (read: thought control.)