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ROME 2018

Review: The Girl in the Spider’s Web

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- Claire Foy stars in the latest episode of the Millennium series. Fede Alvarez's action film waves goodbye to the nuances of earlier movies with hacker-punk heroine Lisbeth Salander

Review: The Girl in the Spider’s Web
Claire Foy in The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Claire Foy is the new face of heroine Lisbeth Salander in the latest episode of the Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web [+see also:
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, which world premiered at Rome Film Fest in Official Selection and is due to for a worldwide release imminently. The 34-year-old British actress taking on the role previously played by Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara – the punk-hacker created by Stieg Larsson – became well-known after her stint as Anne Boleyn in the BBC TV miniseries Wolf Hall, before playing the young Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of The Crown on Netflix, which earned her an Emmy, and finally her potentially Oscar-worthy performance as Janet Armstrong, the wife of the heroic astronaut who landed on the moon in First Man.

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A whopping $43 million North American-European co-production, the film was directed by the Uruguayan director – specialising in horror thriller and crime – Fede Alvarez, who unfortunately hasn’t added anything new to the series, if not the protagonist's intense gaze (he originally mentioned Natalie Portman or Scarlett Johansson, and then Felicity Jones or Alicia Vikander for the role during production). The Girl in the Spider’s Web is based on the novel of the same name by David Lagercrantz, who continued the series created by Stieg Larsson, after his death in 2004, and is an action movie that ranks among the Mission:Impossible, Jack Reacher, James Bond and Jason Bourne franchises. In addition to its very quick pace, which leaves no room for reflection or any dialogue that lasts longer than 20 seconds, what it shares with these other franchises are its carbon-copy pursuits, always seeming to involve Italian vehicles (Ducati and Lamborghini) and the usual super-baddie who wants to destroy the world. In this case it's Lisbeth's sister, Camilla Salander (played by the Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks), assumed dead following a faked suicide but who has instead replaced her criminal father in league with the Russian mafia. Camilla was abused and tortured throughout her childhood by her father and accuses her sister of having abandoned her. She shows up in the film in a completely red outfit (even her boots), somewhat reminiscent of the evil Marvel mutants and parodies of 007 films, such as Austin Powers.

It's difficult to follow the references in this hyper-kinetic flow of events without having read the books or having seen all the previous titles in the series, but the film is a high-tech playful device that manages to engage its audience for 117 minutes. At its heart is a scientist who is very sorry for having designed some deadly software.  On his side are badass bisexual hacker, who uses a taser as a weapon, and the allied journalist Mikael Blonkvist (played by Sverrir Gudnason), assisted by trustworthy hacker Plague (Cameron Britton).  On the other side is her sister Camilla, the glacial head of the Swedish secret services who wants to take possession of the lethal weapon (Synnøve Macody Lund) and the American intelligence agent Needham (Lakeith Stanfield), who wants to restore world order. The only ironic remark in the film is entrusted to Synnøve Macody Lund: "Why leave this weapon to the Americans, who’ve never lost a war, when we've never started one?" Shot in grey-bluish tones in Stockholm and Berlin, Alvarez's film, written by Jay Basu and Steven Knight renounces the painful psychological nuances and themes of anti-violence against women included in the early Swedish adaptations (those with Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyquist) and even makes us a bit nostalgic for the marvellous opening credits of David Fincher's series.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a Columbia MGM production with Scott Rudin Productions, Regency Enterprises, Yellow Bird, The Cantillon Company and Pascal Pictures and is being distributed by Sony and UPI.

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(Translated from Italian)

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