4 Tips to Make Your Girl with Dragon Tattoo Look Amazing

Dragon Tattoo is one of my favorite books. It’s set in Victorian England and follows a disgraced journalist named Mikael Blomkvist as he tries to solve the mystery of who killed his employer, one of the wealthiest men in Sweden. Alongside him is his brilliant secretary, Lisbeth Salander. Dragon Tattoo has all the things I love: an interesting plot, great characters, and an irresistible setting in old-world Sweden. Not to mention the fact that it’s set against a backdrop of rampant sexism and sexual violence, so it just makes it even more appealing to me as a reader. As an admirer of Stieg Larsson’s work, when I heard about the film version being released earlier this year I couldn’t wait to see what they would do with it. Unfortunately…

The movie didn’t do the book justice

It’s quite a shame to see such a great book get put on the big screen and turned into a rather disappointing film. It’s not so much the actors that are to blame for the poor adaptation, but rather the writers and director for the film. If I had to guess, I would say that Stieg Larsson himself wasn’t very involved in the adaptation process, since the movie felt very different from the book. It’s not that the book was bad, it was just dramatically different from what was on the screen.

Don’t get caught up in tattoos

If you’re reading a book about a woman with a dragon tattoo on her arm, you expect to see that tattoo onscreen. Unfortunately this is not the case with the film. Instead, we get to see a bare arm and the dragon tattoo is shown on a computer screen. I guess this is the cost of having the movie based on a book about a journalist and not a tattoo artist, but all of the focus on the tattoos and piercings felt out of place.

Stay away from pale makeup

The pale makeup was another aspect of the movie that I found hard to believe in. The makeup artists have done some very good work with the look of Dragon Tattoo, and the pale makeup is just a very odd choice for a period piece about the English upper class. Pale makeup is a modern trend, and really doesn’t exist in the Victorian era. Pale makeup just doesn’t look good on a woman, and it takes away from the strong look that Salander has without pale makeup.

Be careful with your nails

I found it hard to believe that a girl who was an expert with a knife was also so bad with her nails. The movie showed Salander with black nail polish on several occasions, and I found this odd considering that she was an anti-social person who didn’t enjoy being in public. If she had been someone who loved nail polish, I imagine that she would have been wearing clear polish dragon tattoo.

Be careful with your hair

The film chose to focus on Salander’s long, dark hair and her love of touching it while she was typing on a computer. This is not a detail in the book, and while it may have been a good detail to include in the movie, it’s not something that’s in the book.

Conclusion

The book was great, and the movie was just ok. The worst part about this whole situation is the fact that the book is such a classic, and I can’t see it ever getting the same type of attention that it would have had if it had been made into a better movie. While I’m happy that a movie version of the book is out there, I’m also sad that it’s not the version that I love.