First in Millennium Trilogy is simply a lucrative exercise in misogyny, reports Elizabeth Kerr.

Publishers with bestselling books series have become the movies' best friend. Adapting popular literature is by no means a new phenomenon, but the recent wave of series being mined for material for has reached a fever pitch. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy - really the modern standard - everyone and their dog has been searching for the Next Big Thing. Ideally this Thing has a broad, built-in global audience and comprises multiple lengthy tomes that can be split into two features thus creating lucrative franchises.

Not everything works. Film of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass' sequels sputtered when that film earned an underwhelming $372 million worldwide. It had all the makings of a hit - adventure, effects, movie stars - but why it didn't catch on remains a mystery. Another failure? Billy Bob Thornton's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon. Dense morality plus bleak Western landscapes multiplied by mid-century cowboys equals a dismal $18 million. McCarthy was made into an Oscar winner by the Coens (No Country for Old Men) but still only earned $170 million.

But then, in 2001, came LOTR. In a few years, Peter Jackson proved the power of the geek with $3 billion dollars worth of ticket sales - and several Oscars. That's enough for Jackson and an army of producers to continue the difficult development on The Hobbit - in two parts. LOTR opened the floodgates to series that were long shots, niche market hits, and best of all, works in progress.

Damon's eventual franchise success with Jason Bourne, Ian Fleming's James Bond, the first franchised book hero and those 22 films, two of potentially seven parts of C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series, Stefenie Meyer's divisive Twilight, and Harry Potter, the reigning franchise king (the last trio of which have forthcoming installments) have combined for a total of over $14 billion in receipts, $20 billion if you adjust Bond's box office take for inflation - Hong Kong International Airport's construction budget. This doesn't even include television, which counts The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and True Blood - all "hits" for their broadcasters - as series from books. The revenue from those would probably cover HKIA's extensions.

That's a lot of revenue, so much so in fact there is a slew of book projects on the horizon: Ron Howard is making Stephen King's The Dark Tower into both film and television properties, Game of Thrones is coming to HBO, based on George R. R. Martin's five-part (so far) A Song of Ice and Fire series, Eric Kripke (Supernatural) is rumored to be adapting Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, young adult series The Hunger Games should begin production in 2011, and Ridley Scott bought the rights for Justin Cronin's The Passage, the first part of an alleged trilogy Cronin hasn't even completed yet.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is next up to the plate. The pulpy thrillers have sold 27 million copies in 40 countries and dozens of languages, making it an ideal franchise property. Three films have already been produced in Sweden, and Daniel Craig and relative unknown Rooney Mara are slated to star in David Fincher's American version - likely the first of three. On top of that, Larsson's partner, Eva Gabrielsson, and his family are feuding over his estate (Larsson had a fatal heart attack in 2004), the kicker there being that she has his old laptop, which rumor has it contains the majority of a fourth Millennium book, possibly more. Stay tuned.

For now we have The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a vaguely noir conspiracy thriller involving Nazi sympathizers, incest, freedom of the press, computer hacking, missing teenagers, torture, and a parade. The key players are journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and overly-pierced hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), an unlikely duo that team up after he's found guilty for libeling an industrialist in his radical newspaper. Lisbeth points Blomkvist in the right direction in his investigation of the alleged murder of a young woman 40 years earlier, and a bizarre romance blooms as they dig in to research.

Dragon Tattoo can be taken two ways, most easily as the violent, by-the-numbers Mickey Spillane-light diversion that it is. The other is as a lurid, self-contradictory piece of trash entertainment people are confusing as "art" because is has subtitles. Blomkvist is one of those characters that could only be conceived by a man: he's all righteous crusading and "honor," cost of living be damned, and his creaky, rumpled person makes him a bona fide chick magnet, irresistible to a mature colleague, a self-assured heiress, and the way-too-cool-for-him Lisbeth.

Nyqvist and Rapace bring more nuance and less sensation to the film, and Nyqvist does have a hangdog charm that takes the male fantasy edge off the character. Rapace is in the unenviable position of playing a character that is simultaneously the point and its defeat. In a story that allegedly condemns violence against women Lisbeth is subjected to an inhuman amount of it, to the degree that the film becomes a tawdry bit of exploitation. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the original translated title was "Men Who Hate Women." How apropos.

Veteran TV director Niels Arden Oplev doesn't have a particularly cinematic film language to draw upon, relying mostly on the bleak Swedish landscape to stand in for visual flair, and while Dragon Tattoo may be faithful to its source, it makes for long sequences that are needlessly dragged out. If you non-readers can't guess who the heavy is by the 45-minute mark, you haven't been paying attention in Detective Fiction 101. If you have, you'll expect all the rich cliches (my favorite is when the bad guy orates about his actions instead of just offing the hero the way he should) that make this painfully conventional noir fiction, not the breath of fresh air it's touted as. If Gabrielsson gets that mysterious fourth manuscript in order, chances are we're going to see more of Blomkvist and Lisbeth, in several languages ($160 million and counting) beyond the "concluding" Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Thing is, we just don't need to.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 10/16/2010 page4)