Nothing but the dreams

DAMN YOU LARSSON, SERIOUSLY. I don’t care if you’ve redeemed yourself somewhat by giving us Miriam to make up for this ending, I’m still annoyed at you.

For full emotional trauma you need to look at these while listening to What If We Could? and Is Your Love Strong Enough? from the soundtrack. I suppose I should partly blame Trent and Atticus for the emotional trauma but really Larsson’s most to blame.

Now this is the part where my heart really starts feeling like someone’s jumping down on it. Rather than writing about that I’m just going to say that I’m glad that in the film Lisbeth knows about Palmgren being alive and doesn’t just run off. I’m part way through The Girl Who Played With Fire at the moment and I’m really enjoying their relationship. Now I can also appreciate the detail of them playing chess as a kind of foreshadowing for the next book.

The moment right after Mikael says ‘you look nice’.

I just can’t. My heart can’t take it, especially as it’s one of two times she smiles in the entire film. The worst part is that it isn’t even like Mikael’s being a bastard deliberately. He just doesn’t realise how much she does care about him by this point. Plus he’s always going to stay with Erika whatever happens.

It took me until about ten minutes before the end of the film to get a screencap of this. He was always moving too much or it was too dark. Anyway, it’s one of those small details which I became slightly fixated on while I was watching it. That probably wasn’t helped by the fact that I had the commentary on as well while I was doing it.

The first one: AAAHHHHHH. I don’t know why but there’s something vaguely unsettling about seeing her dressed like that. Apparently she was really uncomfortable in that costume after months of being Lisbeth which doesn’t surprise me at all. She looks much more relaxed in the second one, which I suppose suits this whole section of the film really.

Again with the heartache. They need each other more than they know. Plus I like the switch that Mikael is pretty much unable to protect himself properly and Lisbeth is the one who has to protect him even though she’s so much younger than him.

Continuing with the scenes which make my hurt heart knowing what’s coming.

The last one is one of those moments which made me grin my face off watching it. Lisbeth is going to get what she wants and ‘Harriet fucking Vanger’ will have to wait until afterwards :D.

That last close up may well be one of the most beautiful things in existence.

I like this scene because it shows that Lisbeth is actually growing to trust him. It just makes it more heartbreaking when you know how it ends though. It’s not exactly their relationship ending which upsets me, it’s the fact that she feels like she’s been betrayed by the one person she’s been able to trust since Palmgren.

I almost forgot that I have more of these. It could be because this almost feels like the end of the story in a way, in that it is the end of the mystery which started it all off, kind of. I agree with Fincher though that at the end of the day the mystery itself is almost superfluous. It’s all about Lisbeth and Mikael and their relationship, how they support each other and manage to bring themselves back into the world. That’s why there’s another half an hour or so after this, as well as having to tie up what actually happened to Harriet.

‘May I kill him?’

Aka possibly my favourite moment in the whole film and one which I found out was actually wholly David Fincher’s idea. It shows a great understanding of the characters as really if she wanted to kill him she’d do it anyway without having to get Mikael’s permission for it. What she’s really asking is whether Mikael would hate her for doing it, as someone who hasn’t had to deal with the reality of these kind of situations before. In the commentary Fincher says about how Mikael thinks he understands the darkness of people but only really does from a distance, whereas Lisbeth has personal experience with it, which I thought was really interesting. It’s oddly gratifying learning that you didn’t completely misinterpret the intentions behind a scene sometimes.