A New Adventure by Lizbeth Salander

The film tells the story of another adventure by the world famous hacker Lisbeth Salander. After completing a hacking job to restore a sensitive piece of software to its creator, Salander finds herself under attack, which costs her the loss of the software and the loss of the trust of her client. So, she goes on a quest to salvage the stolen software with the help of her journalist friend Mikael Blomkvist, unknowing that her adventure will take her back to a dark past that she was trying to forget.

I didn’t like much of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” and I felt bored through the most of its duration. The cinematic layer has little to do with this opinion. I mean, I liked the way this film is directed, I loved the way it was filmed and edited. I may have some problems with some performances and I honestly hated the music and the sound effects. The sound effects of this film feel like the effects we used to add to buttons in our graduation projects presentations. However, all of that could’ve been tolerable if only our story was good but, unfortunately, the story is really predictable and just really bad.

Most of the chapters of our story are templates that we’ve seen in so many films. Our great danger? A tool that puts all the nuclear weapons of the world under the control of one person. As if we haven’t had enough with nuclear threats in films already. Our villain? A psychopath with a relation to our hero that the movie was rude enough to spoil entirely in the teaser. Our allies? Some of the most cartoonish characters ever including Mikael Blomkvist who shouldn’t have featured in the film at all. Our story drivers? Some obscure hacking scenarios that fit in a movie in the 80s or the 90s, some genius plots that Lizbeth designs though they make very little sense, and lots and lots of coincidences. Really, they are there all the time, even when they’re really not needed, and they cause the greatest developments and they help the most critical of transitions.

Fede Alvarez in the director’s chair did a lot to try to save this story. Some real original ideas in execution were deployed to help us swallow the unoriginal ideas in writing. A risky approach to take the film from the neo noir realm of David Fincher to the action and intelligence packed flicks of James Bond. This film felt like a James Bond flick more than anything else and you get that feeling starting with the opening credits, and surprisingly I wasn’t bothered by that a lot. The film also has the advantage of being R rated so it can take a great deal of freedom with violent and disturbing content. However, all of that didn’t really work in rendering this into a good film. Especially that, like I said, there’re problems with performances. I expressed my astonishment to the choice of Claire Foy for the character of Salander since the trailer was released and the film proved my worries to be in the right place. This is not Lizbeth Salander! This is a nice decent woman in a Lizbeth Salander Halloween costume. Not daring enough, not strong enough. The genius in the way Rooney Mara portrayed Salander was the fleeting glimpses of emotions she slipped from behind that senseless mask. But here? she’s almost a mom! Sverrir Gudnason is totally forgettable, I really don’t know why the character was in the film at all! The good performances came from Stephen Merchant and Sylvia Hoeks but there wasn’t enough of either of them.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a boring film filled with unoriginal ideas and unbelievable coincidences. The effort made in directing it makes it almost watchable but nothing else helps,
and the casting made matters worse and not even in comparison to the cast of the 2011 movie. If The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo wasn’t inviting enough to make sequels to it then this film should force Sony into 5 years of peaceful imitation before making another film.

Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in Room

Following the familiar storyline of abduction, isolation and captivity, Room managed to inject two more ingredients that managed to transform the movie into an entirely fresh cinematic experience. First, we have the son, who was deliberately deceived in perceiving his own environment for the sake of his own sanity and safety, and second we have the events that took place after the release of the victims, where we followed how bad they struggled to find a place in the world.

Classifying “Room” simply as a psychological drama is an understatement. The true character of the movie is reflected in the amount of beauty that it contains. The first half of the movie takes place in a dark, cruel, small space that felt rather big and welcoming while we were seeing it from Jack’s perspective. The second half takes place in a much larger and brighter place that felt so narrow and strange once seen from the same perspective. The whole time we’re faced with situations that we don’t want to live and conditions that we don’t want to live in, however I don’t believe I will ever have a problem rewatching the movie, because Jack’s way of describing things makes it beautiful in a very poetic way.

Good luck holding your tears while you’re watching “Room”, mostly all kinds of tears, tears of sadness, tears of joy, tears to vent the cuteness overdose supplied by Jack’s character, and tears of sympathy with Joy and the choices she has to make. Portrayed perfectly by Brie Larson, Joy’s hardest moment comes when she needs to risk her only reason for living for the sake of his own salvation. The contrast between how determined she is to see her plan through and how heartbroken she is for having to do that to him, is the peak moment of her otherwise flawless performance. It’s kind of hard to believe now that I was first introduced to Brie Larson by her role in the shallow comedy “21 Jump Street”.

I can’t say that the consistency of Brie Larson’s performance was matched by similar consistency in the pace of the events. The first half feels much better tuned, to my surprise actually, because you could make a movie of 2 hours around the events of that half alone and yet, nothing felt rushed or badly introduced to me. Things were a bit too fast on the second half though, I don’t think the build up for every transformation was well served. I’m mostly disappointed because it all seemed avoidable to me, the movie is only 2 hours long, I don’t think it would’ve been a bad idea to add 15 minutes to that .. I mean, we have watched movies of 3 hours where nothing ever happens!

I also wouldn’t say that the movie did so well in making sure all the logic switches were checked, especially in the escape plan, but I don’t think I have the right to stop for long at this, especially with my eyes so red from crying most of the time, again, thanks to Jack. Jack was portrayed by 9 years old Jacob Tremblay who is a true discovery in this cinematic year, because of how emotionally demanding his role is. I would love to give most of the credit for Jacob Tremblay’s performance to the director, Lenny Abrahamson, who appears to have embraced a quick cuts technique to avoid having to request too much for too long from Tremblay and edited the whole thing perfectly that nobody in the academy felt that Larson’s performance was under-challenged.

“Room” is the black horse of the cinematic season and the greatest way to pay credit for independent cinema as well as authors getting the chance to turn their own production into screenplays.