Hanna: Movie Review

Hanna stars Saoirse Ronan as Hanna Heller, Eric Bana as Erik Heller and Cate Blanchett as Marissa Wie­g­ler. It was dir­ec­ted by Joe Wright from a screen­play by Seth Loch­head and David Farr and released in 2011. Saoirse Ronan is best known for her role in Atone­ment and Eric Bana’s most fam­ous spy thriller role was Munich .

Warn­ing: Major spoil­ers are blacked out like this secret . To view the spoil­ers, just high­light them.

Hanna: Logline

When a teen­age assassin’s mis­sion goes wrong, she is pur­sued across Europe by a ruth­less CIA agent and must come to terms with the secrets of her child­hood in order to survive.

Hanna: Plot Summary

Hanna Heller is a 16-year-old girl. She lives in hid­ing with her father, Erik, in a cabin in an arc­tic forest.

Erik has trained Hanna from early child­hood in spy­craft, lan­guages, com­bat and sur­vival skills. Now he plans to use her to assas­sin­ate Marissa Wie­g­ler, the CIA officer he blames for the death of Hanna’s mother.

Hanna is now ready for the revenge mis­sion. She activ­ates a hom­ing beacon that will tell Marissa where she is. Erik checks Hanna has mem­or­ised their ren­dez­vous point in Ber­lin, where he expects her to travel after the assas­sin­a­tion. He leaves the cabin, and Hanna waits there to be cap­tured and taken to Marissa.

In CIA cap­tiv­ity, Hanna repeatedly asks for Marissa. But Marissa is cau­tious and sends in a lookalike. Hanna kills the impostor. Believ­ing she has ful­filled the first part of her mis­sion, Hanna escapes from the CIA facil­ity and finds her­self in the Moroc­can desert.

Back to Berlin

Hanna befriends a Brit­ish fam­ily with a camper-van and hitches a ride to Spain, head­ing for her ren­dez­vous. Along the way she learns a little about the mod­ern world that she has not been a part of until now.

Marissa’s hench­men even­tu­ally track Hanna and the Brit­ish fam­ily down. Hanna escapes, but the fam­ily are cap­tured and inter­rog­ated by Marissa, who dis­cov­ers Hanna is head­ing to Berlin.

In Ber­lin, Hanna goes to the ren­dez­vous point in an aban­doned  fairy tale theme park. There, she meets a friend of her father’s who gives her a dif­fer­ent address.

Marissa arrives and Hanna over­hears her say that Erik is not her real father . Shocked and con­fused, Hanna escapes and goes to con­front her father.

Nature or Nurture?

Erik admits he is not Hanna’s bio­lo­gical father. He was a recruiter for a pro­gram in which chil­dren had their DNA altered to make them tougher and less emo­tional, in the hope of devel­op­ing per­fect sol­diers. The pro­ject was can­celled and Marissa murdered all the genet­ic­ally mod­i­fied chil­dren except for Hanna, who was saved by Erik.

Marissa and her hench­men arrive. Erik dis­tracts them so Hanna can escape. Erik kills all the hench­men, but Marissa shoots him and chases Hanna back to the theme park.

Marissa corners Hanna. Hanna says she doesn’t want to kill Marissa but Marissa, who seems con­flic­ted in her atti­tude to Hanna, shoots her. Hanna shoots her back with an arrow. They are both hurt, but Marissa seems more ser­i­ously injured than Hanna. Marissa dis­ap­pears into a tun­nel. Hanna chases after her.

About to kill Hanna, Marissa slips and slides down the water flume, drop­ping her gun. Hanna picks up Marissa’s gun and kills her with it.

Hanna: Analysis

Things are look­ing Grimm

Although spy themed, Hanna is really a fairy tale. Hanna her­self is a suc­cessor to any num­ber of fairy tale heroines; Marissa is the wicked witch, Erik the wise old king. The movie does lack a dash­ing prince to save the prin­cess, that line of think­ing being rather old fash­ioned these days. Teen­age prin­cesses save them­selves from the big bad wolves these days.

Fairytale imagery abounds. Some of the cine­ma­to­graphy, par­tic­u­larly the final show­down in the theme park, is of stun­ning beauty.  The theme park is a real place, the Spree Park in Ber­lin, and once upon a time was East Germany’s flag­ship tour­ist attrac­tion. The park went bank­rupt after the Ber­lin Wall came down and is now aban­doned, provid­ing a per­fect sur­real loc­a­tion for the films dénouement.

Another fairy tale ref­er­ence is the mir­ror image bookend­ing sequences. In the open­ing Hanna kills a deer. At the end, she sees a deer and then kills Marissa . The first and last lines are both, ‘I just missed your heart’, mak­ing a sat­is­fy­ing com­ple­tion of Hanna’s jour­ney away from childhood.

The Real-o-Meter

Hanna scores a one out of ten on the Real-o-Meter. No six­teen year old girl no mat­ter how genet­ic­ally enhanced  can fight three fully grown men at once, climb sheer cliffs and seem­ingly become invis­ible. One sequence shows Hanna leap­ing from a ver­tical shaft onto the under­side of a speed­ing vehicle. This is so far bey­ond the bounds of pos­sib­il­ity as to com­pletely break sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Another where Marissa can’t see Hanna hid­ing under a bed is sim­il­arly unbelievable.

Another Teen­age Spy?

A teen­age assas­sin trained by an older man? Com­par­is­ons with Leon are inev­it­able, and Leon is, in my opin­ion, the super­ior film. How­ever, the movie also reminded me of Run Lola Run , in that it has a lot of visual chase sequences, all scored with pound­ing techno music. The soundtrack, pro­duced by the Chem­ical Broth­ers, is prom­in­ent through­out the film.

Hanna is, loosely, a fam­ily film. It was rated PG-13 in the USA and 12 in the UK. The theme of grow­ing up and becom­ing inde­pend­ent of both good and evil par­ental fig­ures, is a per­en­nial young adult one. Also, I’m sure the kick-ass teen­ager heroine will appeal to many young adults. For the adult viewer it prob­ably holds a little less last­ing interest, as the story is a straight­for­ward one with no real twists. The rev­el­a­tion that Hanna is genet­ic­ally engin­eered is so heav­ily tele­graphed that few would be sur­prised by it.

Loose Ends

One ques­tion in par­tic­u­lar is unre­solved: the fate of the fam­ily that helps Hanna.  Marissa, who is hold­ing them, has been set up as ruth­less and her chief hench­man is por­trayed a psy­cho­path. So, it seems clear that they would have been killed. Their deaths pre­sum­ably were not shown in order to secure the PG-13/12 rating.

The Altern­ate Ending

The ‘altern­ate end­ing’ on the DVD is not so much a real altern­ate as a deleted scene. It’s a post­script show­ing Hanna return­ing to her father’s house in the woods. She puts her homemade clothes on over the mod­ern ones she adop­ted on her mis­sion, and greets her wolf pups.  Her voi­ceover implies ‘life goes on’ which cre­ates an optim­istic feel­ing and, to me, weak­ens the wow factor of the the­at­rical ending.

Hanna: My Rating

A must watch if you are/have a teen­ager. Oth­er­wise, a straight­for­ward ‘suspend-disbelief’ chase thriller with great visu­als and a fairy tale atmosphere.

Want to watch it?

Here’s the trailer:

The DVD is on Amazon here

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