I’ve seen not only the Swedish trilogy but David Fincher’s movie too. I’m wondering, would reading the books be worthwhile? Is there much content from the books that were omitted? I really don’t want to read the books if I’m just going to be reliving the same plots and moments from the movies.
I wouldn’t bother with the books. It’s just not the same without Lance Henriksen.
Umm… in case it wasn’t clear, I’m talking about these books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_series
I prefer the classic movie with Kris Kristopherson and Cheryl Ladd.
“This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end… of the beginning!”
Seriously though, it is a great flick.
And a good book!
I’d also be interested in knowing the impressions of the books from others.
Seniority to the rescue?!
I’ve actually got a copy of the first–and as an audiobook–and just have struggled to get too deeply into it.
People seem to very much love these, and I’d love to know if that still holds.
Well it doesn’t look like anyone has read the books :/
I read the first book. The dryness of the text when dealing with the family history research threatened to put me to sleep in those sections. Parts that dealt with the titular Girl was much more alive, almost like it came out of another book. Frequently horrifying, though, and when the author has her get a boob job with stolen money at the end, it threw me off the track enough that I did not feel compelled to continue with the series. It felt like the author had abandoned his care for her.
I read the first book too. It has a lot of the same problems other mystery novels have, in that the solution is unsatisfying because it is not arrived at logically, using detection, but through the coincidental finding of clues at exactly the moment they’re needed.
Lisbeth is a compelling character but she’s more of a superheroine than a normal person with her super-hacking and super-intuition. The main character is one of the worst Mary Sues I’ve ever encountered in fiction (he’s a journalist like the author Larsson, only he’s MOST AWESOME and MOST SEXY).
I think the appeal of the book is in its unusual superheroine and her revenge scenes, rather than the central mystery. I don’t know if Larsson’s subsequent novels are improvements.
Would you say that the first novel has anything substantial that was omitted from the movies?
In my opinion, the book was not better than the movie versions, either Fincher’s or the Swedish miniseries.
Edit: I didn’t fully answer the question. There is some material in the first book about the researcher guy’s tax situation that didn’t make it to the movie. It takes the book something like 150 pages to arrive at the mystery, a time during which virtually nothing happens. The filmed versions wisely gloss over that part.
In fairness, he says her boobs were so small, the boob job could have been considered a medical procedure, cementing the writer’s position as a feminist. It was hard to read at that stage with all my eye rolling.
I read all of the books before any of the movies came out. While I enjoyed them, I probably would not want to read them if I had seen the movies first. They really aren’t that different. If you want to read some Scandinavian crime dramas, check out some of the books by Jo Nesbø or the Wallander books ( & good Swedish TV series on Netflix).
Hah, I actually just got a Jo Nesbo book for Xmas :)
So it definitely sounds like there is little point in reading the books, and that doing so may actually harm my enjoyment of the movies (mixing of alternate fictions and timelines and all that). Thanks guys.
Wait, what Millennium movies are you guys talking about? I watched the TV series with Lance Henriksen back when. Are these movies related to that somehow?
Not sure if trolling, but…
No, not trolling. Thanks for the reply. I’d forgotten that those books/movies were known as the Millennium series. I’ve only ever seen the first of the Swedish movies.