Surprisingly, one of the biggest improvements over Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish-language version (which, in fairness, is pretty good — a whole lot better than its successors) lies in the acting. Rooney Mara is a revelation as Lisbeth Salander, the damaged, aggressive computer geek and feminist revenge angel, playing the character as far more feral and vulnerable than Noomi Rapace’s borderline-stereotype sexpot Goth girl. And Daniel Craig leaves his Bond manner and wardrobe at home, playing disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist as a wry, bespectacled, middle-aged dad, who never considers the idea of being Lisbeth’s sexual partner until it happens, and never seems at ease with it after that. I like Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish actor who played Blomkvist in the first series, but there’s a reason he’s moved on to playing Hollywood villains. There’s a bit too much wolfish swagger about Nyqvist, a bit too much leather jacket, a bit too much confidence that he can outdrink younger guys and bag younger women. Craig can certainly turn on the masculine charm, as required, but his Blomkvist is a driven professional in search of redemption, not a wallowing Hemingway romantic.

Surely there’s somebody out there who hasn’t read the book or seen the previous movie, and doesn’t know the story. On the other hand, maybe not; my usual focus group consists of my mother and my mother-in-law, and they’ve both read it. Let’s cut to the chase by saying that Fincher and Zaillian remain generally true to Larsson’s novel while perhaps rearranging its emphasis a bit, but also that — as you may have heard, O frequenter of the Internet — they have indeed crafted a clever new solution to the central mystery, as well as a final scene that’s quite different from the Oplev film (but closer to the novel). No doubt all sorts of people will complain for all sorts of reasons. In my view the rewrite is a canny adjustment, far more in keeping with the nature of the characters, and a solution Larsson — who was a terrific storyteller, if an indifferent writer — might well have approved of were he around to do so.

Undone by his own sloppiness and facing a major libel judgment, Craig’s Blomkvist walks away from his investigative magazine and his long-running relationship with Erika (Robin Wright), his married editor. He goes into a bar, orders a coffee and a pack of Marlboro Reds, smokes one and throws the pack in the trash — exactly one of those character-defining actions Fincher handles so exquisitely. That’s when he gets the call from a shadowy lawyer who works for Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), an aging, reclusive tycoon who just happens to be the former boss of the guy who ruined Blomkvist’s career. As we already know, Vanger’s people have employed Lisbeth to compile a confidential and not necessarily legal report on Blomkvist. (She doesn’t think he performs cunnilingus on Erika often enough.)

While Blomkvist begins to investigate the presumed murder of Vanger’s beloved great-niece 40 years earlier — she disappeared from the remote family-owned island Vanger describes as a nest of thieves, misers, bullies and Nazis — Lisbeth is in Stockholm, battling skinheads on the subway and wreaking vengeance on Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), her abusive guardian. I realize that Lisbeth’s brutal rape by Bjurman, and the equally cruel and violent payback, are supposed to be crucial moments in her life and her story. Furthermore, I think I get the point: In a corrupt and chaotic universe, you have to fight fire with fire, and those with no power must find a way to get it, by any means and at any cost. But the whole knife-edge equation between Lisbeth as victim and Lisbeth as avenger, both on the page and in both screen versions, is simultaneously too schematic and more than a little queasy-making.

With her pale eyebrows, shapeless clothing and careless haircut, Mara’s Lisbeth is quite a different creation from the one in the Swedish movies, and much closer to the literary heroine. She craves attention and deflects it with almost every gesture, and her hard shell can’t conceal the fact that her emotions are too close to the surface. Her awkward manner, along with her photographic memory and exaggerated computational skills, suggest the possibility of an autism-spectrum disorder. When she decides to go to bed with Blomkvist, once they’re finally united on Vanger’s Nazi-infected island, she simply takes off her clothes, comes into his room and gets on top of him. Of course most of us know it’s coming, but I still felt almost as surprised as Blomkvist does.

Fincher’s not the kind of director to leave a psychological detail unnoticed, and I think he uses the sex scenes between Blomkvist and Lisbeth to disquiet us as much as turn us on. Almost a hostile stick figure with her clothes on, Mara’s Lisbeth is a voluptuous, spectacular nude, and Blomkvist literally can’t believe his good luck. (Discussion of Mara’s nude scenes has returned the word “merkin” to the popular lexicon, and surely that’s a win for everybody.) Nor does he trust it; in a subtle but significant departure from Larsson’s book, it is Mikael rather than Lisbeth who remains emotionally distant, uncertain about the prospect of true love with a whack-job nearly young enough to be his daughter.

The case of the long-missing Harriet Vanger turns out, of course, to open up a whole series of gruesome, biblically themed murders of women that the Swedish cops have pretty much bungled or ignored. But isn’t it nice that Harriet’s brother Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), who now runs the Vanger company, is being so helpful and giving our investigators everything they need? Rather quietly, and in late middle age, Skarsgård has become one of the most reliable and charismatic performers in world cinema, capable of elevating mediocre material by his presence. (If you haven’t seen his hilarious starring role in the Norwegian film “A Somewhat Gentle Man,” do so immediately.) Unfortunately, by the time Martin appears, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has indeed lapsed into the kind of middling whodunit where long-hidden clues are distressingly easy to find and the villain takes a long timeout, Goldfinger-style, to explain his motives before he kills you.

As mentioned, I really do like the way Fincher and Zaillian wrap things up, and even during the movie’s slower patches cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (who also shot Fincher’s “Social Network”) delivers spectacular images of the Scandinavian winter and the severe interiors. Fincher’s movies always have density and atmosphere to burn, and those things are arguably the point of the Millennium trilogy, more than its frankly nonsensical story line. This is an immersive and powerful thriller, driven by terrific leading performances. It’s mostly really good and then it wears out its welcome. Now, seriously, can’t we quit while we’re ahead? I’m not sure I can stand two more rounds with Lisbeth and Blomkvist (and a pile of villains we haven’t even met yet), not to mention sit through two more movies made in that deadly “international style,” where everybody speaks English with a Nordic-Slavic, Greta Garbo-meets-Ingmar Bergman accent. (Craig doesn’t even do that, although other Anglophones in the cast do, including Mara, Wright and Plummer.) The Nazi-Soviet woman-hating butler did it. Is that good enough?

There’s no need for me to explain the teaser trailer, as you’ve either read the books and recognize your favorite Stieg Larsson scenes and characters, or you don’t. If you’re part of the latter group, all you need to know for the sake of this trailer mystery is that Lisbeth, she of the dragon tattoo, is a pro at computer hacking and deception. Here’s the trailer of the David Fincher adaptation, in all its shaky-cam glory:

Since we’re all super-sleuths here, the trailer was immediately suspected as viral marketing instead of a bootleg. Doug Gross of CNN breaks it down:

• The video quality is pretty solid for what purports to be a camcorder creation, and the sound quality is even better. The camera work appears self-consciously shaky at first but then steadies somewhat as the trailer goes on.

• It starts with a “red band” Motion Picture Association of America rating, despite supposedly being posted by someone from the Netherlands.

• And the seemingly unauthorized leak is something that the movie’s title character, computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, might do.

In addition, Sony has not taken down the ostensibly illegal video, which has garnered over 1,000,000 views since it was uploaded to YouTube by first-time user dobvlvstiuwir on Saturday. The only part of the game that doesn’t fit is the website that the trailer directs you to: www.dragontattoo.com just relocates you back to the Sony page.

So the “feel bad movie of Christmas” may have pulled a clever stunt, although during a time when even seeing a still from the new Batman film required an extraordinary amount of sleuthing – a website soundtrack that needed to be decoded to reveal a Twitter account that led to a collage that unlocked a tile every time a new user subscribed with a certain hashtag – one could argue that there’s more than enough Lisbeth Salanders on the Internet already.

What do you think? Clever marketing gimmick or another viral ploy? Or hey, do you think this “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” bootleg trailer is really what it claims to be after all?

Guardian readers have already ably dismantled the straw men in Docx’s essay. I don’t agree with most of what he says, but he has a point when he suggests that the other side often resorts to arguments as trumped up as his own. In fact, ferocious defenders of genre fiction seem far more numerous to me than its (public) detractors, and Docx may have even done them a favor; they seem to enjoy their indignation an awful lot. The not-so-secret reason why pissing matches are so common, after all, is that some people just really love taking it out.

Instead of getting into all that, however, let’s consider the original source of Docx’s concern: the enormous popularity of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and the novels of Dan Brown. Certainly, these writers are far from the best their genres have to offer. Even the most vehement of genre champions will not argue that either man is a good, or even adequate, stylist. (Larsson himself seems to have been well aware that he was no Hemingway.) Rather, they are both, in many respects and apart from the whole genre question, fairly bad writers. So why do so many people devour their books?

I pose this question as someone who enjoyed all three of Larsson’s books, although I don’t care for Brown’s. I am exactly the sort of person who might be glimpsed reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” on a train. Docx seems to think his fellow citizens only resort to these books because they aren’t aware of the much better ones out there. “We simply have to find a way to bring the finest writers of the language more often to the attention of the carriages of people up and down the country who are evidently still willing and able to buy novels for the journey,” he writes. These hapless souls are currently being “subjected” to “atrociously bad” thrillers when they could be immersed in such Docx favorites as “Franzen, Coetzee, Hollinghurst, Amis, Mantel, Proux, Ishiguro, Roth.”

Now, I’m not only aware of all of those novelists, I’ve read much of their work, too; some of it I love, and some of it I don’t. Yet this didn’t stop me from reading Stieg Larsson with a considerable amount of pleasure. Most people who read a lot also read to satisfy a wide spectrum of moods and hankerings, and sometimes trash (provided it’s sufficiently engaging) is just the ticket. This taste, like any other, can be highly idiosyncratic. My friend Lev can’t abide Larsson, while I have in turn needled him for enthusing over a — to my mind — cheesily hard-boiled action-adventure fantasy novel. (Also: He claims to be a “Twilight” fan.)

Why do people like bad books? Some of them probably don’t read enough to know the difference. But all the same, I suspect that they wouldn’t be equally content with Martin Amis’ “The Pregnant Widow” should the bookstore clerk have mistakenly slipped that into their shopping bag instead of “The Lost Symbol.” Chances are, Amis’ strenuously inventive prose would strike them as too much work. The popular species of bad writing (for there are many, many kinds of awful prose) abounds in clichés, stock characters and conventional plot twists, and, as Amis indicated in the title of a collection of his literary criticism, he is a general in the War Against Cliché.

Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer clichés to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who — in a wonderful little book titled “An Experiment in Criticism” — devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the “unliterary” reader. Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original

… because it is immediately recognizable. ‘My blood ran cold’ is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn’t want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.

With the advent of Amazon reader reviews, such readers have finally found a voice, and a vocabulary with which to express their taste. Speed is the operative metaphor. Novels are praised for being a “fast read” and above all for having writing that “flows.” “Flow” is an especially fascinating term because it’s one that literary critics have never used, and it perfectly captures the way that clichéd prose can be gobbled up in chunks at a breakneck pace. “The Da Vinci Code” is over 400 pages long, but you can race through it in about three hours. Combine the large population of casual readers who limit themselves to such books with the hardcore bibliophiles who like an occasional dip into something easy, and you have enough buyers to create a hit.

Lewis also juxtaposed the unliterary reader with what he called the “Stylemonger,” who makes too great a fetish of words and sentences for their own sake. (Persnickety grammar and usage monitors are included in this group.) “He creates in the minds of the unliterary (who have often suffered under him in school) a hatred of the very word ‘style’ and a profound distrust of every book that is said to be well written.” Even if Docx were in a position to lecture his fellow railway travelers as to the superior merits of Proulx and Hollinghurst, he’d run the risk of activating just this sort of resentment, and doing his favorite authors more harm than good.

And, chances are, quite a few of his listeners would be well aware that Larsson and Brown aren’t very good writers. If pressed, they’d say that sometimes they just want to gallop through a story — or in the case of Larsson’s novels, proceed along with a weird methodicalness that taps into what appears to be an amazingly widespread streak of latent obsessive-compulsive disorder. They’d say that they’re not, at the moment, equal to the demands of literature, but that just last week they finished “Disgrace” or “Wolf Hall.” And then they’d say, Would you mind? Are we done here? Because I’d really like to get back to my book.

Referenced in this article:

Edward Docx on why genre fiction is inferior to literary fiction.

Laura Miller on the strange allure of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy

Things that annoy Lev Grossman about Stieg Larsson’s fiction.

I began to harbor the heretical suspicion that the long-brewing Hollywood version, from “Social Network” director David Fincher and “Schindler’s List” screenwriter Steven Zaillian, might be an improvement. That may still prove correct, but the good news is that Alfredson finds his footing in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” and delivers a rousing, grueling, almost operatically scaled finale to the series. There are undeniably some problems here that may limit the film’s audience appeal: “Hornet’s Nest” is a densely plotted procedural, constructed largely around crusading journalist Micke Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist, Scandinavia’s answer to Harrison Ford, at his understated best) and his sister, defense attorney Annika Giannini (Annika Hallin), who adds a much-needed female moral center.

Annika’s star client is of course the trilogy’s damaged and charismatic heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), who is reduced here to a supporting role. Lisbeth’s many admirers will be disappointed that she isn’t called upon here to torture any rapists or engage in high-speed chases, since she spends most of the movie either recovering from a brain injury or standing trial for the attempted murder of her father, onetime Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov). She does show up in court in a glorious assemblage of mid-1980s Goth-punk piercings and leather, which wouldn’t be my choice for a felony defense, but there you have it. As we all know, Lisbeth isn’t inclined to take shit from the likes of you and me. Is she destined for one more face-to-face confrontation with her Frankenstein-like half-brother, Ronald Niedermann (Mikael Spreitz), who’s been on the run since the end of “Fire”? Readers of Larsson’s novels already know the answer, and others will have to find out for themselves.

While Lisbeth cools her heels in a hospital room and/or a prison cell, Micke and Annika methodically unpack the enormous conspiracy that victimized her in the first place. Lisbeth wasn’t the real target, mind you; she was collateral damage inflicted by a clandestine organization whose tentacles reach virtually every corner of postwar Swedish society. Even the sinister Zalachenko, like the Nazi-linked woman-killers of “Dragon Tattoo,” turns out to be no match for the deep-cover secret police who hold the real power in this supremely orderly society. Despite moments of confusion and clunk in “Hornet’s Nest,” Alfredson and writers Jonas Frykberg and Ulf Ryberg succeed wonderfully at capturing Larsson’s central premise: Beneath the neutral, rational, pseudo-socialist Nordic calm of modern Sweden lie the worst and darkest kinds of secrets.

How plausible or realistic that is I have no idea, and for audiences outside Sweden that stuff is more ominous atmosphere than social criticism. (I could point out that we live in a society that has blindly and enthusiastically given up its liberties to the secret police over the last decade, but let’s move on.) It remains to be seen what Zaillian and Fincher will make of Larsson’s material, but his barbed and ironic critique of Scandinavia’s social order is not likely to be high on their agenda.

If you can navigate the thick forest of new characters and competing agendas in “Hornet’s Nest” — special kudos go to Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, who plays Lisbeth’s corrupt and unctuous shrink — the movie reaches a powerful but gloomy crescendo, in which the catharsis and redemption this kind of story demands are tempered by innate Swedish skepticism. You have to wonder how Fincher and his collaborators will deal with the relationship between Lisbeth and Micke, who become lovers in “Dragon Tattoo” and then are kept apart for nearly all of the two succeeding narratives. (Let me go on record as saying that Micke behaves abominably toward his gorgeous and age-appropriate colleague Erika, played by the wonderful Lena Endre.) They conclude on an extremely un-American note of melancholy and irresolution: Sure, at least some of the bad guys have been vanquished, for now. But there’s no way to undo the painful European past, and it lingers.

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” opens Oct. 29 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, Conn., Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., Seattle, Tampa, Fla., Washington and other major metropolitan areas, with wider national release to follow.

The U.S. likes to do things its own way, though, and director David Fincher has been attached to the American interpretations of Larsson’s books. Daniel Craig has signed on to the lead role, with Robin Wright as his colleague and lover, Erika Berger. But the search for Lisbeth has been fraught with difficulty — big-name actresses such as Natalie Portman, Ellen Page and Scarlett Johansson were reportedly desperate for the part, but fans were unsettled by the rumors and the search continued.

Fincher and the producers pulled the trigger yesterday — casting an actress named Rooney Mara as Salander. Mara has a limited résumé, primarily consisting of TV guest spots and the recent “Nightmare on Elm Street” remake, but is sure to gain some recognition for her role in the upcoming Facebook-origin-story “The Social Network.” Entertainment Weekly’s film critic takes a look at her casting, and the Los Angeles Times goes in depth by looking at Mara’s past work. E!Online has five things you need to know about the actress, and the New York Daily News says Johansson’s breasts and hips lost her the role. As for the supporting cast, Screen Rant has a breakdown of the veteran actors who are in talks to join the party.

As anyone who pays attention to Hollywood gossip knows, an English-language adaptation of the Larsson trilogy is purportedly in the works, with David Fincher directing and Daniel Craig playing crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Carey Mulligan of “An Education” may play pint-size feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander — not a great choice, if you ask me — and then again she may not. (Kristen Stewart, who would be terrific, says she definitely, maybe, sort of isn’t interested.) But that project has development-hell problems that go well beyond casting.

Are Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian really going to make one of those ’50s-style movies where the characters all live in a foreign country but speak English? That particular suspension of disbelief works OK if you’re dealing with the distant, mythic past — nobody expects a movie like “300″ to be in ancient Greek, although that would be kind of cool — but otherwise I associate it with cheeseball costume dramas shot in rented Italian villas, or pompous middlebrow movies about how much some dude loves his cello. If they don’t do that, though — if they transfer the setting to, say, Cape Cod or the Napa Valley — well, that screws up the plot in all kinds of ways and you might as well make a different movie.

We’ll let those people sit around in Malibu spending millions of dollars trying to figure that out, and in the meantime we’ve got Alfredson and Frykberg’s lean, mean and workmanlike adaptation, with Spanish-Swedish bombshell Noomi Rapace as ass-kicking, Web-hacking Lisbeth and Michael Nyqvist, who is something like the Scandinavian world’s answer to George Clooney, playing the phlegmatic Blomkvist. They make an appealing yin and yang, around which Larsson’s murky, conspiratorial plot whirls, but one of the problems this middle chapter faces is that they’re kept apart from each other for virtually the entire movie.

Exonerated of the libel charges that sent him to prison in “Dragon Tattoo,” Blomkvist is back at the helm of Millennium, his muckraking magazine, which is about to publish a young journalist’s explosive exposé of a sex-trafficking ring that implicates many of Sweden’s top political, business and law enforcement figures. (At least in Larsson’s vision of 21st-century Sweden, investigative journalism, charmingly enough, still matters.) His ex-lover Lisbeth has vanished from his life without a trace, and Mikael takes up again, in desultory fashion, with Erika (Lena Endre), his more age-appropriate co-worker.

We know, of course, that Lisbeth is back in Stockholm but living under the radar, dropping in occasionally on her ex-girlfriend Miriam (Yasmine Garbi) for a little Sapphic action — and also on the loathsome rapist-lawyer Bjurman (Peter Andersson), with whom she has a little unfinished business. Actually, there’s a whole lot of secrets-from-the-past, “Return of the Jedi”-style unfinished business in this movie, including revelations about what exactly Lisbeth did as a girl that got her locked up and classified as “mentally incompetent.” (Spoiler police: If you want to get mad at somebody, blame Larsson and the filmmakers for giving away a key plot point in the title.)

Anyway, when Blomkvist’s journalistic protégé, the one with the big prostitution scoop, is brutally murdered along with his activist wife, and the gun found in their apartment has Lisbeth’s fingerprints on it, then we’ve got a crackerjack three- or four-way manhunt. Blomkvist searches for Lisbeth, certain that she didn’t do it, and also hunts for the real killers; gloomy Jewish cop Bublanski (Johan Kylén) plods through his investigation, and if he’s less convinced of Lisbeth’s innocence at least he’s not corrupt, unlike every other authority figure in the story. Lisbeth herself, of course, pursues all kinds of people, including the shadowy figures who’ve set her up. At the end of the road lie a notorious Russian gangster and his robotic minion, a big, blond palooka seemingly impervious to pain — but as readers of Larsson’s novels know, I’d better stop there.

As my critical mentor Joe Bob Briggs often used to say, there’s way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, which makes it tough for Alfredson and cinematographer Peter Mokrosinski to focus on the series’ strongest elements. Of course it’s the character of Lisbeth that has made these books and movies into a worldwide phenomenon, and Rapace gets to ride motorbikes, steal cars and do some paramilitary, weapons-based action sequences. But Lisbeth is more a cog in a big, grinding engine in “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which at its best captures both the beautiful but lugubrious Swedish landscape and the existential mood of contemporary northern Europe, trapped between the info-capitalist future and the ideological prisons of the past.

People of Lisbeth’s generation, and even Blomkvist’s, aren’t personally implicated in the crimes of World War II (the specter in “Dragon Tattoo”) or the soulless gamesmanship of the Cold War (referenced here). But even in the Internet age they still have to live in the world those events created, and Larsson’s genius was to suggest a connection between those cruel but supposedly dead ideologies and a continuing legacy of misogyny, rape and violence against women. This sense of history as a living, malevolent presence is largely alien to Americans — William Faulkner aside — and is just one of two or three dozen reasons why the Hollywood version of this story, if it ever gets made, is likely to get it all wrong.

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” opens July 9 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Palm Beach, Fla., Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Washington; July 16 in Baltimore, Charleston, S.C.; Indianapolis, Kansas City, Madison, Wis., Milwaukee, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; and July 23 in Albany, N.Y., Boise, Buffalo, N.Y., Chapel Hill, N.C., Charlotte, N.C., Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Honolulu, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Providence, R.I., Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Ariz., and Columbus, Ohio, with more cities to follow.