Film version of 'Girl with Dragon Tattoo' stays true to novel of grit

When Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, he was to many just a 50-year-old Swedish journalist, a reporter at one of Sweden's largest news agencies, Tidningarnas Telegambyrå (Newspapers' Telegram Bureau). Then they found the manuscripts.

There were three finished novels apparently intended as a series; an unfinished fourth on a laptop; and gists and writings for probably two more.

The first three eventually found print, and are now known collectively as the best-selling "Millennium Trilogy," after the fictional magazine run by the novels' main protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist.

Of course, Larsson was hardly "just" a journalist.

He was a Trotskyist, a member of the Communist Workers League, and later the founder of the Swedish Expo Foundation, all while conducting research on Swedish right-wing extremism and gaining a good number of political enemies.

But perhaps Larsson's greatest contribution to modern fiction is not the alternate reality where the political and racist predilections of big, moneyed entities are gutted from behind immaculate corporate façades.

We have a fair share of that from American scribes, particularly of the legal thriller genre.

Neither is Blomkvist, Larsson's literary Doppelgänger, an activist of sorts who roots out dirt in the shadier parts of corporate finance.

The real hero is, in fact, an antihero, an outcast, and, apparently amid an unseen Swedish supremacist culture, a young woman, Lisbeth Salander.

Heavily armored personality

In "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," Salander is a computer-hacking prodigy lost in the middle of Stockholm's social welfare system.

She uses her computing skills to work for an investigation agency, easily becoming the best there with her detailed results.

She is assigned to track down Blomkvist, who in the meantime is convicted for a libel charge by a corporate titan.

Described as "a pale, skinny young woman who had hair as short as a fuse," she sports tattoos of a wasp on her neck, loops on her left bicep and ankle, and a dragon on her left shoulder blade.

With a heavily armored personality, she is wilfully antisocial and indifferent as to consequences, particularly when getting what she wants.

But she ends up working with the man she was asked to investigate.

Blomkvist sees her qualities as curious, but altogether not unattractive.

Their case is the unsolved, 40-year-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger, of the wealthy Vanger family, whose conglomerate turns out to be the archrivals of Blomkvist's legal tormentor, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

Henrik, the current Vanger head, thinks Harriet was murdered during a family reunion, and commissions Blomkvist to find closure to the story in exchange for Wennerstrom's head on a silver platter.

Thus, we are introduced to the inner workings of a Swedish family corporation, including tales of intrigue, twisted ideologies, and family's brand of distrust of other members.