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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Swedish journalist/activist Stieg Larsson had been a fan of science fiction. He taught women revolutionaries to use grenade launchers. He did research on right-wing extremism in Sweden. He died in late 2004, leaving behind three novels that he wrote for his own pleasure. Novels he’d never tried to have published. When they were published, they became international best sellers. Naturally, Swedish filmmakers were quite interested in adapting the series to film, which also became a hit internationally. Originally titled Men Who Hate Women, the first novel in the trilogy now meets its second feature film adaptation. The original Swedish film adaptation made over $100 million on a $13 million budget. Directed by David Fincher, the Hollywood film adaptation cost roughly $100 million to make. How does it measure up to the original novel and film?

The Book

Stieg Larsson witnessed the gang rape of a young girl when he was 15. It’s possible that a lot of his life had been shaped by that event. Witnessing that kind of atrocity at an early age tends to make an activist out of anyone with a conscience. In some sense, the novel seems to have been a desire for Larsson to come to terms with not doing anything about that when he had the chance. The girl’s name was Lisbeth... which also happens to be the name of the girl referred to in the book’s English title.

The novel is a contemporary thriller that reads in places like an espionage thriller and in others like... a particularly twisted mutation of a Lifetime Movie. As the book opens, we are introduced to Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who is also publisher of a Swedish current affairs magazine called Millennium. After being made aware of possible corruption on the part of billionaire industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, he’d published a story that the courts had found to be libelous. Down on his luck, Blomkvist is offered proof of Wennerström’s wrongdoing (and more than a little money) in exchange for doing a family history of on Henrik Vanger. Vanger believes that a distant niece Harriet was murdered and he wants Blomkvist to find out what happened to her.

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