The Girl And The Spider
Lisa is moving. Upheaval all around: Her mother flirts with a handyman. An eccentric woman seems to be preparing for a glamorous event, a family next door returns from vacation, and a girl documents the adventurous day. As boxes are transported, walls painted white, and furniture is assembled, underlying problems in need of fixing are revealed, a to-do list expands, and desires and needs flair up.
The Girl and the Spider
You don't watch a Ramon Zürcher film, you move around and through it. You are a fly, or maybe a spider, on a wall and Zürcher's characters don't play for you, they live in their own world living their own lives.
Set roughly three years after the events of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander has applied her incredible skills at hacking and surveillance to become an avenging vigilante known as "the girl who hurts men who hurt women." She is then hired for those very skills by Franz Balder (Stephen Merchant), a former NSA programmer, to steal his invention, Firefall, a program that allows for a single user to access the nuclear codes of every country. Lisbeth successfully hacks the NSA and discovers that Firefall requires an access code even she can't decipher. Soon after, Salander is attacked in her apartment by a crime syndicate called the Spiders, who steal Firefall from her. Turning to her ex-lover/partner Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) for help, Lisbeth fails to protect Balder and his young son August (Christopher Convery) from the Spiders. Balder is murdered but August, who is autistic, is kidnapped because his father made sure that August is the only one who can decipher the access code to Firefall.
When Lisbeth arrives at the house she grew up in and escaped from long ago, she is unaware that Camilla found the tracker she planted on August. The girl with the dragon tattoo walked right into a trap laid by the Spiders, and despite her best efforts to fight them off, the Spiders expose Lisbeth to gas and knock her out. Camilla forces Lisbeth to allow August to decipher Firefall's access code, just as Camilla's mystery client arrives: Gabriella Grane (Synnøve Macody Lund), the deputy director of the Swedish Secret Service (SÄPO). Grane, who also kidnapped Blomkvist when he deduced that she was Camilla's partner, wanted Firefall because she felt the ability to access the world's nuclear codes was too dangerous for any nation to have - except her own. However, Camilla immediately betrays Grane and murders her because she has her own plans for Firefall and Lisbeth.
Overall, Lisbeth becomes much more of an action hero in The Girl in the Spider's Web. She is constantly dropped into violent situations that she literally has to fight her way out of and she also displays very James Bond-like traits, especially with her ingenuity to use gadgets and technology to her advantage. Whether she's riding her motorcycle across a frozen lake to evade police, careening across the highways of Stockholm on a breakneck car chase, or taking on a handful of thugs with a cattle prod, The Girl in the Spider's Web downplays Lisbeth's abilities as a hacker/investigator and refashions her as an invincible superhero. And, in keeping with her new action hero status, the girl with the dragon tattoo found herself responsible for saving the world - Camilla was literally going to launch nukes and frame her sister for causing global armageddon until Lisbeth stopped her. By the end of the film, Lisbeth is poised to finally put her past to rest and continue to help those who need her unique abilities the most.
While the film could have explored Camilla's history and psyche more than it did, a compelling question is still raised: was Camilla always bad or did she become so because of the abuse she suffered? Camilla accuses Lisbeth of leaving her behind to bear the brunt of life alone with their father for 16 years (and she infers Zalachenko became even more abusive to punish her for Lisbeth fleeing). However, Lisbeth was just a little girl when she escaped the Salander home and couldn't have saved Camilla (Lisbeth also believes Camilla chose to stay behind). An argument could be made that Camilla wasn't born bad any more than Lisbeth was and, had she also been able to escape, her life would have been very different - although Lisbeth's troubles and tragedy only continued after she left home, and Camilla would have likely had similar experiences.
The film opens in Sweden as a young Lisbeth Salander (Beau Gadsdon) is playing Chess with her sister Camilla (Carlotta Von Falkenhayn). One of Camilla's pieces is knocked over, and a spider crawls out. Moments later, the girls' father, Alexander Zalachenko (Mikael Persbrandt), comes in and orders them into his room. He comments how Camilla is growing, and he has her sit beside him. Sensing his lurid intentions, Lisbeth grabs Camilla and runs back to their room. Lisbeth runs outside their balcony and gets ready to jump. She waits for Camilla, but she rejoins Alexander when he orders them to go back to him. Lisbeth jumps and slides down the hill below the house, and she escapes, never to return home.
Lisbeth goes to the home of Plague (Cameron Britton), an ally of hers, for assistance. Not long after, she reaches out to Mikael, and the two start to work together to find out who took Firefall. Mikael investigates a surveillance photo of the masked leader of the men that broke in, whom he recognizes from another photo where he had worked with Alexander as part of a gang. Mikael finds a spider tattoo on him and traces it back to a man named Milos Meer (Hendrik Heutmann). Milos claims that what he has is not a tattoo, but a scar given to him by the group that he is looking for, the Spiders. He says he had encountered the Spiders before, and because of it, he reveals that his nose is fake because they took his real one from him and left him horribly disfigured. Milos warns Mikael not to go asking about the Spiders.
Based on the novel of the same name by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a critically acclaimed Academy Award-nominated film directed by David Fincher and released in December of 2011. The story follows disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Falsely accused of libel, Blomkvist teams up with a hacker named Lisbeth Salander to uncover the truth about a kidnapped girl named Harriet in exchange for clearing his name. A deeply disturbing psychological crime thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novel is the first in the Millennium series about cyber vigilante Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara in the film.
Cindy Moon was the second person to be bitten by the radioactive spider that granted Peter his powers, and developed the same abilities. However, she had more guidance than he did: that of eccentric businessman Ezekiel Sims, who trained her to use them and then hid her in a bunker for seven years to protect her from the Inheritors. She was eventually discovered and freed by Peter, and joined him and the other Spiders in taking down the Inheritors.
Like the other Spider-folks, Gwen joined in on the multidimensional battle against the Inheritors. She also protects her own home dimension, primarily against evil versions of Matt Murdock and Cindy Moon (the leader of S.I.L.K. and the source of the spider that gave Gwen her powers). 041b061a72