This film is better than the book, though both are disturbing

I can pretty safely say I will never read Steig Larssen's Girl who Played with Fire, and I wish I'd never read "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" because I would have liked the movie more if I hadn't read the book. Even so, I liked the movie much more than I liked the book - it's tense and atmospheric and moves along crisply and efficiently, even at 2+ hours. Why is that? First, in a movie, with time compressed and your consciousness so fully engaged, you're far less likely to question or even notice the gaping, almost ludicrous, improbabilities of the plot. In both novel and film, for example, you have to accept that the Swedish police are the most incompetent investigators on the planet and that two amateur sleuths could uncover clues that had gone unseen for 40 years. You have to accept an extraordinary string of improbabilities - a string of tiny encoded hints - that lead to the conclusion. You have not not question the likelihood of a 40-year series of hideous crimes going undetected on a tiny island and the likelihood of the central character remaining in hiding for basically her entire life. Etc. Trust me, these things bother you less in the movie. Second reason the film is better: the book was cumbersome, but the film (Oplev?, the director), makes smart decisions: main character Bloomqvist has only one intimate relation (not 3); they devise a much more clever way to bring Bloomkvist and Salander together, they improve the highly unlikely episode when Bloomkvist finds the torture chamber, and the smooth the edges of the conclusion (Salander does not toss the incriminating evidence into the sea). All that said, though the film is less polemical and self-righteous about violence against women, I had the uneasy feeling in both reading and watching that the story does nothing to raise consciousness on this issue, in fact it exploits the issue. By dwelling on the most lurid, violent, and grotesque incidents of violence (which inevitably are more disturbing on film than in the novel), Dragon Tattoo has almost the reverse effect: Oh, that's what violence against women is about, well we don't have to worry about that, those guys are truly insane - when in fact the true perpetrators are the everyday guys who have one too many beers and slap their wives/girlfriends around. That's the true horror story.