just watched it last night, thought it was great. one thing puzzled us tho.

its about how matey first finds out about lisbert. he mentions to one of the family that he thinks his laptop is being hacked and asks if he knows who might be responsible. and the bloke seems to imply that he knows who it is. then it goes straight to him knocking on her door.

why would the family have any inkling of who lisbert is? did i miss a link somewhere?

I finished the book recently and then watched the Swedish film, thought it was ok, but not great. Yesterday I watched The girl who played with fire and enjoyed it more, probably as I haven’t read the book yet, so it had nothing to live up to. It is rare for any film to compare to the book, but I thought Dragon tattoo missed some important points and lacked punch.

sadexpunk, you are right the film does not explain how they would know about Lisbeth, Have you read the book? Vangers lawyer had used Lisbeth to run checks on Blomkvist before hiring him.

Vangers lawyer hired her, through Milton Security, to run checks on him (as they wanted to be able to trust him obviously). In the book, he takes a lot of convincing to take the job and as part of the attempts to convince him, Vanger and his lawyer tell him about Milton/Salander.

The killers death at the end is different from the book – where he loses control of the car and hit an HGV, bursting into flames – Salander doesn’t even stop and certainly doesn’t watch him burn. The references to her as a kid throwing petrol into a car are taken from the second book too.
In the book he sleeps around a bit too – a key relationship is with the blonde editor of Milennium and he also sleeps with the Vanger woman (Cecilia? – Martins sister)

excellent, that explains it. just got me thinking then to the start of the film. was that vangers lawyer then who got the lowdown on blomqvist or am i getting a bit mixed up?

EDIT: is it still worth watching the new film? and are the other ‘girl who….’ films linked to this or totally different stories?

According to a Swedish friend at work, the books were turned into series for Swedish television, but significantly edited down to be condensed into the three films for international release. This is why a lot of stuff in the book is missing from the film and the plot occasionally seems to jump.

Having not read any of the books I quite liked the first Swedish film (not seen the others). I thought it was quite clear that it was the lawyer who was questioning Lisbeth on her report at Milton Security – and it was him that directed Blomkvist when questioned about the hacking/report. (Did I imagine this scenario?)

Having said that, the plot presentation is clearly not for everyone – I re-watched it with a friend, who every 5 minutes was like, ‘oh, why did that happen?’, to which my answer was inevitably always ‘they explain it in a minute!’

There was a short scene earlier in the film IIRC where they’d met across a table.

They didn’t elaborate on it too much, but the link was there.