The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

How do you set yourself up for disappointment?  You go to watch a movie adaptation of the original novel.  While all the cool kids go to see Salt and Inception, me, the coolest of them all got myself the DVD version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and saw the entire movie in Sweden with English subtitle.  How cool is that?  Plus I saw it in the sub terrain of our house from an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS box hooked to an HP w2207 at 1680x1050.  I think the DVD with progressive scan is at most capable of delivering 480p only.  So I am cool, as a cucumber.
The fact that the movie is not a Hollywood production means something.  You don't see ridiculously beautiful stars in the leading roles and overly produced sets.  Instead, you got two competent actors who resemble the characters they play.  Salander's character is kind of hard if not impossible to cast.  How can you find somebody who is 24 and looks 14 and also has traits of Asperger syndrome?  Noomi Rapace does a decent job portraying Salander though I think her Salander is bit more social and older than the character in the book.  Michael Nyqvist plays Blomkvist, a women's man in the book.  I think he's right physically but looks a bit too constipated than the role calls for.
 As to the story, it does make certain changes.  But overall, the adaptation is bit too literal and seems interminable.  It tries to squeeze in everything from the book onto the screen.  And in a couple of instances, it even gets ahead of itself hinting at Salander's past which is not supposed to come out until the second book.  The book is more than 600 pages long and I think editing is just crucial for adaptation.  The film runs more than two hours and honestly it's too long for your average audience.  At times it just seems impossible to grasp all the material that's even for somebody who has the benefit of having read the book.  The book is rich in plots, subplots and details and for the movie to even try to put everything in I think it's just too much of a good thing.