In his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Mark Baulerine writes:

The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less. Careening through their formative years, they don’t catch the knowledge bug, and tradition might as well be a foreign word.

This is a harsh and oversimplified critique of a generation, but I think it explains the Twilight obsession. These kids today know nothing of Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau’s Nosferatu, or Whedon’s Buffyverse. Perhaps that is why they don’t care how the Twilight saga robs and corrupts over a century of great art. And they seem to miss the fact completely that the character of Bella is completely dependent on men for happiness. She doesn’t exist except as the object of desire of random scumbag guys. (I mean, what kind of jerk is teaching a girl he likes to ride a motorcycle and doesn’t have her wear a helmet or at least ride alongside her?) Bella is one of the worst role models for young women that could possibly exist. Maybe if they made her a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme it would be worse, but if Bella were a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme, New Moon might have been an interesting movie.

As it stands, New Moon is an abomination. It is a 130-minute affirmation of the antiquated notion of a woman existing in entirely in relation to, and under the protection of, a man. Misogyny aside, New Moon is also a continuation of the Twilight’s saga watering down of plots and characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The basic premise of the saga — the new girl at school, who meets a sexy brooding vampire and is challenged by the difficulties of the human-vampire relationship — is straight out of Buffy. But it lacks the tragedy of the Buffy-Angel relationship, as Bella is not a Slayer, so she does not exist for the sole purpose of killing vampires. Bella is just a sad little girl with no self-confidence and no self-respect. Whereas Buffy is the strongest girl on the planet, Bella is one of the weakest. She has no redeeming qualities, nothing to admire, nothing to respect, making her an awful protagonist in an equally awful movie.

In addition to robbing and diluting one of the main plot points of Buffy, New Moon also borrows other aspects of the series: haunting dreams (Buffy dreams about being attacked by the Master), packs of kids who behave like animals (Oz as a werewolf, the kids from The Pack episode), and the crazy evil vampire chick who has a history with the sexy brooding vampire (Drusilla). There isn’t an original plot line in the entire movie.

To make matters worse, the actors of New Moon have no talent. Buffy wasn’t exactly a course in Shakespearean acting, but holy crap the New Moon actors are dreadful. I don’t know if the chick who plays Bella has a breathing disorder, but her acting style features a wide variety of unnatural pauses. The guy who played Edward, while admittedly a dashing young man, also has an incredibly blocky face. If someone tried to make an 8-bit video game version of a sexy vampire, the character sprites would look exactly like the dude who plays Edward. When the shirtless werewolf dude is the best actor in the movie, you know you’ve got a problem. (For Internets fun, Google Taylor Lautner alpaca (dude looks just like an alpaca))

In short, New Moon is a downright despicable movie. The “happy ending” is that Bella gets to become a vampire. Hooray! Selling your soul and your humanity to get closer to a sexy guy! What a great message for the young people. To think that there is a generation of girls who look up to this tripe–who see it as romantic, rather than a paean to dysfunctional and abusive relationships–makes me weep for humanity.

The fundamental challenge in adapting a novel for the screen is narration. In literature, narration blends seamlessly with dialogue and action, allowing the reader to move in and out of characters’ minds and settings. Film cannot direct the viewer as easily as literature can direct the reader, so compromises have to be made. In bad movies, filmmakers will use a voice-over narration to compensate for the lack of interior monologue. After all, why show when you can tell? Good filmmakers thankfully try to find new ways to present all the content of a work of literature, without attempting to mimic the formal structure of a novel. Daniel Alfredson, the director of The Girl Who Played With Fire, sticks to straightforward filmmaking, using the characters and action to tell Stieg Larsson’s story. In doing so, he crafts a quality film, but it is not up to the same level of the novel.

There has been a lot of criticism of Stieg Larsson as a writer—he never uses contractions, every seven words there’s a reference to coffee or sex, and in The Girl Who Stirred the Hornet’s Nest, every female character seems to be wearing the same blandly described red jacket. Despite his limitations as a wordsmith, Larsson’s narration is what makes his novels more than run-of-the-mill airport crime fiction. His Dickensian political and social digressions and use of multiple points of view make the novels great. Without the narration—particularly without the ability to regularly go inside the minds of multiple characters, Alfredson’s film lacks the additional dimension of greatness that the novels have.

Because the film rarely enters the minds of the characters (there are a couple of Lisbeth flashbacks), many of the characters don’t have the same depth in the film as they do in the novel. We never really get a chance to see the struggle between logic and passion that rages inside Lisbeth.  She hardly says anything, which often makes her appear dim-witted, rather than the taciturn genius that she is in the novel. Niedermann, the deranged giant who feels no pain, is just a robotic thug in the film; his visions and paranoid thoughts are completely eliminated. Also eliminated is the role of the police as narrators. The story in the film is told entirely through the point of view of Blomkvist and Salander, which makes sense, although it will be interesting to see if Alfredson continues this approach in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, where the police play a much larger role in telling the story.

Even though Alfredson fails to capture the entirety of the novel, he has still made an enjoyable film. Michael Nyqvist is perfect as Blomkvist, alternating between smarmy, righteous, and protective. All the other characters are faithfully portrayed. I particularly enjoyed the actor who played Holger Palmgren’s performance, and the filmmakers did a wonderful job with the makeup to depict Zala’s burn wounds. Like the novel, the film gets a little ridiculous and unbelievable at the end, although Alfredson did a fine job adapting Larsson disappointing cop-out of an ending.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, while not as good as Alfredson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which did a great job adapting a much less cinematically-inclined novel), is still worth a watch. The pace of the film makes it feel much shorter than two hours, much like the pace of the novels make them seem much shorter than 500 pages. Also, there’s not nearly as much butt-rape as in the first film. Whether that’s good or bad is really a matter of personal preference. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give The Girl Who Played With Fire 3 tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.