Nordling here.
Joe Wright's remarkable HANNA begins simply - an elk in winter, and the hunter. The hunter fires the arrow, and pierces the animal. The elk runs a distance then falls into the snow. The hunter approaches, and it is a young girl, on the cusp of adolescence. "I just missed your heart," she says, and fires her pistol into the elk's head. Smash cut to the film's title, white in red.
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) and Erik (Eric Bana) live in the forest. Erik relentlessly trains Hanna - teaches her multiple languages, spars with her in the snow - for something to come. He gives Hanna a backstory, which he makes her memorize - her address, her school, even her best friends, which she doesn't have. She will need to be prepared for the outside world, if and when she ever goes there. Hanna announces one day that she is ready, and so Erik digs up what looks like a car battery and tells her to flip the switch on the top. But he warns her, once she does this, she can never go back. One day while her father is hunting, Hanna flips the box switch, sure she is ready to leave. And a thousand miles away, a government agent, Marissa (Cate Blanchett) resumes her pursuit of Erik and Hanna, a pursuit that began over ten years before.
HANNA is Joe Wright's dark fairy tale, quiet, violent, and fairly astonishing. Right out the gate, I was impressed with the film's clarity of story and theme. Once Hanna flips the switch, all hell breaks loose as agents attack her home in the forest, her father escapes but has given Hanna the address to meet him in Berlin, and we're off. I don't want to delve too much into the plot because it's best discovered for yourself, but thematically HANNA is straight out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Sometimes the film is too on point thematically where subtlety would have sufficed, but for the most part Joe Wright has made a rich, satisfying action film.
Saoirse Ronan is amazing as Hanna. Broken at a base level, in the beginning she simply isn't a person. She's a collection of programming, so secluded that she does not even know what music is except by definition. Once she experiences the outside world, begins to take her strange steps to adulthood, she begins to show her personality and starts to see beyond her father's training. It is an accomplished performance, all piercing blue eyes and intent. Eric Bana has always been a good actor, even when he's in lesser films. Here, he's in one of his better roles, and in one particular action sequence, shot without edits, he's all fury and intensity. Cate Blanchett is definitely the villain of the piece, and although her Southern accent may be too jarring, it works for the character, who seems to slip deep into her drawl when she's upset. It's funny to me that she plays the one American in the film, and although her accent slips in and out a little bit, she's a formidable presence in the film.
Joe Wright has a definite eye for action. I'm a big fan of well-constructed action sequences, where everything makes spatial sense and the director doesn't simply shake the camera to show the intensity of the moment. HANNA is full of those, from the forementioned Bana fight to Hanna's escape from a government facility, and the mark of a good action film is that the scenes between the action sequences are just as rich as the fights. At one point Hanna hooks up with a British family on holiday, and as she sees life outside the forest, she begins to warm to them, all the while knowing that it will not last. Ronan plays these scenes with a quiet resolve, and she's impressive. The score by the Chemical Brothers may seem jarring to some but for me it worked completely. It's one of the best scores I've heard so far this year.
HANNA is a film with a heart - you care about every one of the characters, so that when it gets into the action the film has real stakes. Full of terrific performances, an amazing score, and riveting action scenes, HANNA is well worth your time this weekend.
Nordling, out.
