It makes me grateful that the second trailer manages to outline almost the whole plot of the film in two minutes so there’s already a lot of stuff floating around. Anyway this will probably make more sense if you look at this first.

Right, first thing’s first the big hero who turns out to be a massive wimp when it comes to pain is one of my favourite things. Nathan Fillion’s characters tend to have it as a pretty big trait which I enjoy, although judging from behind the scenes stuff it doesn’t relate to the man himself (it’s a good job he doesn’t do his own stunts any more as he’ll do it until his face swells up to twice its natural size). Anyway, I digress. I enjoy it because I think it’s pretty realistic to not expect your heroes to be invulnerable and it also makes them more interesting to me. I don’t want to watch some two dimensional perfect man and one of the things that Larsson does pretty well is to show that even though Mikael is a fundamentally decent person he isn’t perfect. His low tolerance for pain is a part of that, although the fact that he’s a journalist and isn’t really used to being shot at probably also has something to do with it.

Anyway, on to Lisbeth. In this scene it’s a bit of a subversion of the usual nurse scenario which involves the woman being caring and tends to end up with entirely vanilla sex afterwards. Lisbeth obviously does care about him but she doesn’t see the point in wasting time on niceties or being gentle. In the long run, her being caring isn’t going to change a thing and isn’t going to change whatever pain he is going through. The vodka is the only small thing she allows for his pain and that probably wouldn’t appear if she didn’t care about him. It’s not that she’s unfeeling but it’s not top on the list of her priorities. She’s doing her best after a lifetime of being treated like a freak and mistrusting people.

It’s also another example of Lisbeth taking on the role of Mikael’s protector.  He can’t deal with everything by himself and in fact if she wasn’t there then it probably would have ended up with his death through not being genre savvy enough to bring backup to a psycho’s house. In his own way he’s slightly naive about the underbelly of the world so Lisbeth kind of balances him out. She’s willing to do the things which he won’t do himself and take whatever steps are necessary to protect him, which makes her a pretty powerful ally to have. Neither of them are flawless but somehow each of their flaws are balanced by the other to make what would combine one halfway decent person.

Although Lisbeth is his protector this doesn’t extend to comforting him. She’s not there to make his life suddenly better like some manic pixie dream girl. She has her own shit to deal with and he in turn has to learn to live independently and live with his own emotional trauma, which he undoubtedly would have after being almost strangled to death and threatened with rape.

Of course with all this my mind always goes back to that ending and I want to punch Larsson again. It is like a massive reset button and I hope that there is at least some reference to their relationship in the next book. It’s like everything became buried once Martin died, including Lisbeth’s ability to trust anyone again and any form of character development. I’m hoping that isn’t true but as I said I haven’t read the next two books yet so it’s hard for me to tell where things will go.