The fall of Lisbeth Salander

"The Girl in the Spider´s Web" is an international film released in 2018, and is very freely based on David Lagercrantz´ novel of the same name. (In the Swedish original, the novel is titled "Det som inte dödar oss".) That novel, in turn, is a sequel to Stieg Larsson´s "Millennium" trilogy. The original novels have also been adapted for the movie screens in both Sweden and the United States. 

Larsson was a left-wing radical, a member of the "Socialist Party" (a small Trotskyist group in Sweden) and a founding editor of the anti-fascist magazine "Expo". I never read the original novels, but the Swedish film adaptations - as far as I understand - do contain strong elements of Larsson´s conspiracist worldview, with secret elite societies of sexual perverts and various crime syndicates playing important roles in the plot. Curiously, the Secret Service are often at the good side, while the main character, Lisbeth Salander, is a feminist vigilante with a propensity for hardcore violence and a worldview that doesn´t seem particularly "leftist". Salander strikes me more as a libertarian "troubled superhero", and is frankly unrealistic, almost to the point of unintentional comedy. I sometimes wonder if this is how Expo secretely viewed themselves: as heroic superheroes fighting powerful evil conspiracies? A kind of QAnon of the left? 

Larsson´s novels were published posthumously, and their success prompted the publishers to go ahead with post-post-Larsson sequels. As I said, I never read the novels, but the film version of "The Girl in the Spider´s Web" is very different from the "canonical" Millennium stories. The secret billionaire paedophiles have been replaced (with one notable exception - see below) by more mundane conspiracy scenarios involving Russian mafiosi, American agents and a computer program that can control all nuclear missiles in the world (no less). The Swedish secret police have been compromised, as well. The plot is full of holes and so unrealistic that the whole thing often devolves into James Bond parody. Lisbeth Salander is like a cat with nine lives (or is it a jumping shark), surviving everything from huge gas explosions in her own domicile to large quantities of injected poison. "Basement dwellers" and "weaponized autists" might like the film, since the good guys frequently win by an amazing ability to hack each and every computer system you can think of. They have some kind of x-ray vision, too, which enables them to shoot everyone in a closed compound in the film´s dramatic finale...

But the most stunning aspect of the film is surely that it dethrones Lisbeth Salander from her position as larger-than-life superhero. A central plot element is that Salander abandoned her sister Camilla when they were both children, forcing the sister to endure a life of abuse at the hands of their father, a rich Russian paedophile named Alexander Zalachenko (although he looks "Western" in the film). Camilla wonders why Lisbeth didn´t save her own sister, while being busy rescuing victims of sexual abuse in the rest of the world for sixteen long years. Lisbeth has no good answer. After the father´s death, Camilla took over his crime network and continued his work, while woving revenge on Salander! 

This would have worked in a typical superhero story (making the troubled hero an *even more* troubled hero), but in the context of "Millennium", it looks more like the fall of humankind from Eden.

Unrealistic, mundane, bad English accents, attacks the original franchise...I´m not sure if there is anything positive with "The Girl in the Spider´s Web"? Maybe that it´s (relatively speaking) less brutal and less pornographic than the canon.

Probably not recommended.