The Engelsfors trilogy is my favorite book series, but I didn't have high hopes coming into this. It's a swedish film after all AND it's a fantasy. Something that swedish film industry has pretty much never done. With that in mind I was actually positively suprised by the casting, the special effects and the score.
The characters actually didn't differ much from how I imagined them in the book, and the acting isn't bad from these girls. The special effects actually look very good, especially in the ending scene. The score is also composed by Benny Andersson from ABBA, so this movie could have been great!
BUT
Pretty much every other event from the book has been cut, the dialogues have been shortened and some parts have been changed in ways that I feel are not clearly understandable. And even though the pace was hilariously rushed it's still longer than most movies (2h20min). This made me realize that this book probably isn't suited for film adaptation. Maybe a movie-series would be the right way to go? That way you could cover one book per season.
The process of making this film probably went something like this:
Someone wanted to make a movie on this great book. Fair enough. They wrote a reworked script for the movie and realized that they had to cut a lot of stuff. They started filming and only realized once they saw the end result that it was too rushed. That's why I don't blame the people who made this. It was a great initiative, but now we know it was never meant to be.
What makes the book so good is all the small details in their conversations, the interactions between certain members of the group and their internal monologues (which are very hard to translate to film, I understand). You would need a LOT more time to properly express these strengths in video form. That's why a series would be better. It's a shame that this movie turned out so awful, because the books are fantastic. Hope most people watching this had read the book first, otherwise they would be put of from reading them.
