The Girl In The Spider’s Web Review (Minor spoilers, and they’re only spoilers if you haven’t seen the trailer)

I never expected The Girl In The Spider’s Web to hold a candle to Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo, but I like the cast and director enough that I expected it to be at least solid. Claire Foy was also no small part of my anticipation; I haven’t seen The Crown but she’s given two of my favorite performances of the year with Unsane and First Man so I knew I was going to see it as soon as I could because of her alone.

I still cannot believe what I just witnessed.

Alvarez’s direction, at its best, is brisk and tight, but these moments are few and far between.

A notch right below its best is solid but “off”. Sometimes he clearly has some interesting framing and editing in mind but at these moments it always feels like there’s a few shots more than necessary, and whatever interesting ideas he had in mind don’t come to fruition. Other times he’s trying to incorporate two different styles, going for a sleek sort of perfectionism and a gritty handheld. I’m not opposed to these different styles being in the same movie, the same scene, or even separated by a single cut but Alvarez seems to just have no idea what he’s doing in combining these styles, and it doesn’t help that at its worst he’s clearly trying to do gritty handheld just for the sake of gritty handheld.

And don’t get me started on the crosscutting.

So that’s his direction at its high points, which I would say makes up maybe 30-40% of the movie. The rest is aimless and atrocious. Two or three shots more than necessary becomes 5 or 6 and the movie dwells on things it has absolutely no reason to. It’s aimless and atrocious.

The awful filmmaking might have been endurable if the script was any good; as incompetent as the filmmaking of The Predator was I at least appreciated the majority of the script and its attempt at economic storytelling.

But

Yeah

No.

The whole thing is devoid of personality that it is so, so desperate for. Any sense of (dare I say) “edge”, sexuality or dark humor feel tacked on because “that’s what a Lisbeth Salander movie should have, right?” Unlike Fincher’s film, in which the characters struggles and the forward motion of the different plots are beautifully in sync, there is no synergy between the character development and the plotting. There are designated “emotional moments”, designated “plot moments” (which take up the meat of the movie) and an occasional forced overlap that you can’t really blame on the actors because they aren’t given squat to work with. Fincher’s film is full of character whereas the most Spider’s Web can give us is “let’s have the characters be sad for a little bit about their traumatic past/love triangle.” The build up of Camilla Salander is also incomprehensible and dramatically inept; the film can’t decide if she’s supposed to be an unknown, mysterious figure or “the one that Lisbeth didn’t save” and it leads to her presence being all over the place. (Though she has a monologue that’s, mercifully, one of the only effective parts of the movie visually and dramatically).

Alvarez also seems to want to show off by having long stretches of no dialogue (which you’d think would be a mercy); I don’t know, maybe he wanted to show off his “visual storytelling”. Regardless, these moments are only memorable in the sense that I noticed them and spent their entirety waiting for him to do something interesting or dramatically effective with them. This theoretically could have happened if the generic, royalty-free sounding score wasn’t lazily slapped on for every second, but I guess we’ll never find out.

Anyway, the movie’s garbage, and that’s a shame. The only thing I can hope for is that its financial failure could maybe possibly theoretically inspire Sony to finally go through on the sequel to the 2011 film with the original cast and crew, the way the Jason Momoa Conan reboot got a sequel up and going for an Arnold Conan movie (which was also cancelled). But as the likelihood of that happening is non-existent, I’m gonna do my best to just forget I ever watched this thing and still look forward to Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe sequel and whatever Foy and the rest of the cast will do in the future.