The film opens with a credit sequence that makes even the most exciting James Bond opening look like it was stitched together by blind children suffering from cerebral palsy. It’s audacious and provocative in its visual prowess, peerless and imaginative in its execution.
As I sat in the dark, I couldn’t help but watch the sea of black, at first sprinkled with water, then consumed by cascading waves of pitch-black inferno, paired beautifully with Karen O’s haunting cover of The Immigrant Song, as a microcosm of everything the film was about to offer. The sequence was, among other things, a glimpse into the inner workings of the titular hero. It comprised a twisted amalgam of liquid mercury, raging fire, snaking wires, and broken bodies, merging and clashing, creating and destroying. It offered a cornucopia of textures - rigid metals, oozing liquids, unfurling petals - and relentlessly forced them upon one another as if to say, “these things shouldn’t go together and wouldn’t go together but they do and they will.” And you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.
And undoubtedly, it visualized the outer shell of Lisbeth Salander - harsh, cold, impenetrable - and juxtaposed it against her own inner identity - vulnerable, eruptive, but also graceful and dare I say it, beautiful. She screams across the landscape, uninhibited by boundaries, conforming to nothing. She invades the screen, spilling in, out, and around everything she touches. She’s constructed before our very eyes as metallic wires probe into relenting flesh, as delicate tendrils harden into bony fists, culminating in a tangled mess of secrets and scars. She’s armed, coiled, and ready to strike.
This is the primordial psyche of the internationally beloved anti-heroine with a large reptilian tattoo. I already understand her. I already admire her. And I definitely already like her.
And this is all within the first five minutes of the film.
