The Girl in the Spider’s Web(2018)

Plot Summary

• The film opens in Sweden as a young Lisbeth Salander (Beau Gadsdon) is playing chess with her sister Camilla (Carlotta Von Falkenhayn). One of Camilla's pieces is knocked over, and a spider crawls out. Moments later, the girls' father, Alexander Zalachenko (Mikael Persbrandt), comes in and orders them into his room. He comments how Camilla is growing, and he has her sit beside him. Sensing his lurid intentions, Lisbeth grabs Camilla and runs back to their room. Lisbeth runs outside their balcony and gets ready to jump. She waits for Camilla to join her, but Camilla rejoins Alexander when he orders them to go back to him. Lisbeth jumps and slides down the hill below the house, and she escapes, never to return home.Over 20 years later, we find a CEO in Sweden who has beaten his wife. The lights go out in his house, and he goes to turn them back on, only to see Lisbeth (now played by Claire Foy) standing there as a dark hooded figure with eerie makeup to obscure her face. She knocks over a statue tied with a rope that wraps around the CEO's feet and hangs him upside down. Lisbeth tells him that she knows of his deeds, like beating up two prostitutes and sleeping with the wife of a man who bankrolled his company. Lisbeth says she has removed all of his funds and put them in the accounts of the prostitutes and the man's wife, if the wife will simply give her the codes. The wife hesitates for a moment, then gives Lisbeth the account codes and takes her daughter away. The CEO says that whatever Lisbeth does now, he'll just have it reversed. Lisbeth shows him a video of the CEO screwing his boss's wife, and threatens to distribute it if he contacts his own wife and daughter again. Lisbeth leaves the man screaming and pissing himself.Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) arrives at work and shows displeasure toward the new owner of Millennium Magazine, which he bought from Mikael. He talks to publisher Erika Berger (Vicky Krieps) and invites her to join him later, but she says she has plans with her husband.Meanwhile, Lisbeth finishes having sex with a woman named Sofia (Andreja Pejic). Sofia goes through Lisbeth's pictures and sees one of her and Camilla as children, and guesses it's her sister. Lisbeth comments that Camilla killed herself three years earlier, and she is glad that both her and their father are dead. Lisbeth curtly dismisses Sofia so she can go back to work. After Sofia leaves, Lisbeth receives a message regarding something highly valuable.Lisbeth meets with Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), a former contractor for the National Security Agency. He informs Lisbeth of a program he developed called Firefall, which has the power to access the world's nuclear launch codes, and he feels that, in the wrong hands, it can lead to dangerous and devastating results. He regretted doing it and now Balder hires Lisbeth to steal Firefall back from NSA.At the NSA headquarters in Washington, security expert Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) sees an alert for an unauthorized user in their system. He attempts to shut their systems down, but it's too late, and Lisbeth has taken Firefall and left a taunting image to Needham.Lisbeth attempts to access Firefall, but finds herself unable to do so because it requires answers to a series of cryptic prompts to activate it. Soon, a trio of masked thugs break into Lisbeth's apartment and try shooting at her, one bullet hitting her in the back of the left shoulder, in her dragon tattoo. The leader of the thugs turns on the gas and leaves some particles on an alarm clock to create sparks, causing an explosion in the apartment that Lisbeth narrowly escapes by jumping into the tub. The thugs have also taken Firefall from her. As the police arrive on the scene Lisbeth tries to escape on her motorcycle but is surrounded by police. She finally drives off a pier and escapes by driving over the frozen lake. Balder sees the explosion from Lisbeth's apartment at the spot where he was set to rendezvous with her, and he thinks Lisbeth has taken Firefall for herself.Balder gets in touch with Gabriella Grane (Synnove Macody Lund), the deputy director of the Swedish Secret Service, after believing that Lisbeth has turned on him. Not long after, Needham arrives in Sweden to retrieve Firefall for the NSA, but Grane and her men intercept him since they think he's there on work business. Needham tells Grane he is there for pleasure, and she warns him that if he is there for any other reason than for a vacation, she will have him arrested and sent back to the States.Lisbeth goes to the home of Plague (Cameron Britton), an ally of hers, for assistance. Not long after, she reaches out to Mikael, and the two start to work together to find out who took Firefall. Mikael investigates a surveillance photo of the masked leader of the men that broke in, whom he recognizes from another photo where he had worked with Alexander as part of a gang. Mikael finds a spider tattoo on him and traces it back to a man named Milos Meer (Hendrik Heutmann). Milos explains that what he has is not a tattoo, but a scar given to him by the group that he is looking for, the Spiders. He says he had encountered the Spiders before. He pulls off a full-face mask to reveal that his nose and upper lip had been crudely cut off leaving him horribly disfigured. Milos warns Mikael not to go asking about the Spiders.Needham finds a name tag bracelet of Sofia in Lisbeth's burned apartment and goes to a club where he finds Sofia, knowing of her connection to Lisbeth. After convincing her that Lisbeth can't be trusted, she gives Needham her phone so that he can contact Lisbeth. As he does so, Lisbeth is monitoring the Spiders' movements to try and catch them. Lisbeth tricks Needham into thinking she was fooled by him and sabotages his attempt to find her. She then spots Jan Holtser (Claes Bang) and his goons kill the policemen guarding Balder through a security camera. Having watched the scene on a camera she placed, Lisbeth goes to find Balder and his son August (Christopher Convery), but Holtser reaches them at the same time. After a struggle, Holtser overpowers Lisbeth, injects her with a drug, and while she is conscious but unable to move he uses her hand to shoot and kill Balder. They then take August with them, leaving her on the floor to die. Through an enormous effort, Lisbeth reaches a bottle of pills, dumps some on the floor, crushes them into powder with the bottle, and inhales the powder. She begins to recover enough to get out of the building. She gets into the police car that had been guarding the building, pulling out the dead driver. Lisbeth pursues them and hacks into their car's remote access feature to cause their airbags to deploy, which knocks the villains unconscious and makes their car slow down so Lisbeth can safely get August out. They turn to drive away when a truck comes over the bridge to pursue them. Lisbeth climbs up a bridge tower, smashes safety glass, and activates the bridge-raising mechanism, leaving the truck high above her car, unable to follow. Then Lisbeth sees Camilla dressed in red, standing in the road watching her leave. Then she realizes that Camilla is behind the plot to take August.Lisbeth brings August to stay with her at a safe location. He has a strange lack of emotion over his father's death, and says he would like to go back to his mother. After he beats her at a chess game in only a few moves, she realizes he is a genius. She asks for his help in unlocking Firefall, and after earning his trust, he explains to her that the phrases she needs to decode are complex number problems based on the letters used, which is something that Balder knew his son could figure out.Needham is eventually found by Grane when he is snooping around the building where Balder was killed. Grane has him arrested and locked up. Lisbeth manages to remotely unlock his holding cell and lead him to a hidden cell phone where he is able to communicate with her. With Plague's help, Lisbeth convinces Needham to take August with him to America to rejoin his mother. Needham agrees, but he says he won't go back home without Firefall. He leaves with Plague.Soon, Lisbeth is led to the true mastermind behind the Spiders -- Camilla (now played by Sylvia Hoeks). She took over the Spiders from her father after his death. It is also revealed that Grane was the client in the scheme to steal Firefall. Grane wanted Sweden to get control of Firefall so it could never be used; she did not trust the U.S. to have the wisdom to have custody of it. Camilla says that the Spiders changed their mind, and they are going to keep it. She kills Grane by slitting her jugular vein with a razor-sharp blade hidden in the ring. She and her henchmen kidnap August and take him to their hideout, which is her and Lisbeth's childhood home.Camilla orders August to unlock Firefall, and she gets Holtser to show Lisbeth a video where they have Mikael hostage. Holtser threatens to inject Mikael with two needles filled with serums; one will blind him, and the other will kill him. Lisbeth convinces August to solve the codes to unlock Firefall, but before Camilla and her men can access it, suddenly we hear a "ping" and one man falls. Plague is in a van with an infrared scanner, giving Needham targeting information so he can act as a sniper with a very high-powered weapon integrated to the equipment in the van helping him target the men inside the building. He takes down the gang one by one, shooting right through walls. Lisbeth makes it in and takes out some henchmen herself, even injecting Holtser with the first serum. Camilla tries to escape with another henchman, and Holtser emerges from the woods in front of the car, now barely able to see as a result of the serum. Camilla congratulates the driver on the successful escape inadvertently distracting him from the road at the exact moment the blind Holtser stumbles in the path of the car. The car hits him and runs off the road and crashes. Lisbeth pursues Camilla until they reach the side of a cliff, and Lisbeth aims her gun at Camilla. She knows of Lisbeth's reputation for helping victimized women, but she asks Lisbeth why she didn't go back to help her. Camilla said she suffered at the hands of their father for 16 years, always wondering why Lisbeth abandoned her. Lisbeth tearfully states that it's because Camilla chose their father. Camilla realizes she has become the monster that their father was, and she lets herself fall off the edge of the cliff to her death, echoing the initial scene where Lisbeth falls off the balcony to escape. Camilla leaves only the laptop with Firefall on the ground where she last stood. A bit later Needham tries to access Firefall, only to find it has been deleted, with a message saying "This is what Balder would have wanted."Mikael is in his office writing a new article in which he details Lisbeth and Camilla's whole ordeal, but he decides to erase the whole thing instead of having it published.In the final scene, Lisbeth goes to her home one last time as she rigs the place to blow up. She watches it go up in flames and rides away into the night on her motorcycle.

Storyline

• Scarred forever by the hideous and unforgivable sins of her father, the antisocial, technologically brilliant computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, finds herself ridding Stockholm of sadists who hate women. It's been three silent years since she last saw her old journalist friend, Mikael Blomkvist, after the events of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) , and now, Lisbeth is with her back to the wall, hunted down like prey for stealing Project FireFall: a powerful tool designed for the Americans, developed to breach and control most online defence systems. Now, as the NSA, the Swedish Security Service, and deadly Russians are hot on her trail, more and more, Lisbeth's horrible past comes back to haunt her, and no one in this world is safe if the state-of-the-art computer software falls into the wrong hands. What does the future have in store for Lisbeth Salander, the girl in the spider's web? — Nick Riganas