Plot
Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan) is a 16-year-old girl who lives with her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana) in the wilderness of Finland. Ever since she was two years old, Hanna has been trained by Erik to become a skilled assassin. Due to her training away from any civilization, she has never come into contact with modern technology or culture, and has memorized a series of fake back-stories for herself to be used "when the time comes", as well as a great deal of encyclopedic knowledge. She is also fluent in several languages.One night, Hanna tells Erik that she is "ready", and he reluctantly gives her a box containing an old transmitter that will alert the outside world to their presence. After some time considering the decision, Hanna flips the switch, sending a signal of her location to Marissa Wiegler (Cater Blanchett), a CIA officer. Marissa sends a team to Erik's cabin, where Hanna, who had been waiting for them since Erik left earlier, is captured and taken to a CIA safe house in Morocco. There, she discovers that Erik is a former CIA agent who betrayed the agency and knows a secret that cannot become public. Marissa has been assigned to kill him, but Erik has trained Hanna to kill Marissa. Suspicious over Hanna's request to talk to Weigler, Wiegler decides to send in a body double (Michelle Dockery) to speak with Hanna. Hanna asks the body double where she met her father. The double, who is being fed answers through an ear piece by Marissa, answers the final question correctly, which makes Hanna start crying and crawl into the lap of the double, sobbing into her shoulder. This makes the officials uneasy, who send soldiers and a doctor to her cell to sedate her to calm her down. As they enter the cell, Hanna kills the double believing her to be the real Wiegler, the doctor and the officials, breaks free and escapes the compound.
While on the run through the Moroccan desert, Hanna meets Sebastian (Jason Flemyng) and Rachel (Olivia Williams), a bohemian British couple on a camper-van holiday with their teenage daughter, Sophie (Jessica Barden), whom Hanna befriends, and their younger son, Miles (Aldo Maland). Once she realizes she is in Morocco, she sneaks into the family's camper-van and hitches a ferry ride across to Spain, with the goal of reaching Germany. Meanwhile, Wiegler hires a cross-dressing former agent called Isaacs (Tom Hollander) to capture Hanna before she reunites with her father, Erik, in Germany. Later, Isaacs and his men corner Hanna and the family, but she manages to escape after fighting Isaacs' men and killing one of them. Wiegler interrogates the family, and tricks the son, who became infatuated with Hanna, into revealing that Hanna is heading for Berlin. The fate of the family is not revealed.
Arriving at the Berlin, Germany, address her father had told her, Hanna meets with Knepfler (Martin Wuttke), an eccentric and friendly old magician, and prepares to rendezvous with her father as they had previously arranged. Knepfler introduces Hanna to the music of Edward Grieg and prepares waffles for her, commenting how Erik has given her too little of the riches of life. However, Wiegler and Isaacs arrive at the place and Knepfler manages to distract them while Hanna escapes, but not before Hanna secretly over hears Wiegler make some comments that suggest Erik is not her real father. Now confused, she eventually meets with her father at her grandmother's apartment, where Wiegler had killed her grandmother earlier in her search. Hanna then learns for certain that Erik is not her father, and it is revealed that Erik was actually once a recruiter for a program in which pregnant women were recruited from abortion clinics so that the CIA could alter their children's DNA, enhancing their strength, stamina, and reflexes while suppressing emotions like fear and empathy in order to create a batch of super-soldiers. However, the project was shut down for unexplained reasons and all the women and their genetically-modified children were eliminated. Erik tried to escape with Hanna and her mother Johanna Zadek (Vicky Krieps), but Wiegler murdered Johanna, while Erik managed to escape with Hanna.
As Erik finishes explaining the truth to a bewildered Hanna, Wiegler and Isaacs arrive, intent on killing them; Erik acts as a distraction to allow Hanna to escape. Erik kills Isaacs and his cohort, but is shot and killed by Wiegler, who then goes back to the Grimm house where she finds Hanna, who just discovered Knepfler dead from the interrogation, his corpse hung after being used for archery practice by Isaacs. After a chase into the woods toward a seemingly abandoned Grimm themed amusement park, Hanna and Wiegler confront one another. Hanna pleads for an end to the killing, saying she doesn't want to hurt anyone else. Wiegler says she just wants to talk, but Hanna starts walking away. Upset by this act of defiance, Wiegler shoots Hanna, who simultaneously shoots Wiegler with an arrow she pulled from Knepfler's body, using a bungee cord she found to propel it. Hanna is knocked to the ground with a bullet in her stomach. She gets up, gets her bearings and she sees Wiegler attempting to flee up a nearby water slide. An unarmed Hanna chases Wiegler to the top of the slide's stairs, as Wiegler continually shoots at her. Near the top, it becomes clear that Hanna's arrow did more damage than Wiegler's bullet, and a disoriented Wiegler falls and slides down the water flume right when she is about to shoot Hanna. Hanna follows the wounded Wiegler, picks up the dropped gun, comments on how she just barely missed Wiegler's heart, and shoots her dead, mirroring the scene at the beginning of the film with Hanna hunting and killing a reindeer.
Cast
- Saoirse Ronan as Hanna Heller
- Cate Blanchett as Marissa Wiegler
- Eric Bana as Erik Heller
- Jessica Barden as Sophie
- Tom Hollander as Isaacs
- Olivia Williams as Rachel
- Jason Flemyng as Sebastian
- Michelle Dockery as False Marissa
- Vicky Krieps as Johanna Zadek
- Martin Wuttke as Knepfler (Mr. Grimm)
- Sebastian Hulk as Titch
Production
Filming locations included are Lake Kitka in Kuusamo at Northeast Finland and several locations in Germany, including Bad Tölz, Potsdam's Studio Babelsberg, the water bridge at Magdeburg, the abandoned East Berlin amusement park Spreepark, and Hamburg Reeperbahn, and then Ouarzazate and Essaouira in Morocco. Temperatures during the Finland shoot sometimes fell as low as -33°C, but Ronan said "Finland did bring out the fairy tale aspects of the story. We were shooting on a frozen lake, surrounded by pine trees covered in snow. Most of the filming occurred at Studio Babelsberg.[8] Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuarón were previously attached to direct the film, before it was confirmed that Joe Wright would direct it, after Ronan prompted the producers to consider him.Some shooting was done in Denmark: The bridge in the background where Eric leaves the water, is the Femer Bridge in northern Germany. He then kills two Danish police officers and later is seen lying on a bed reading a postcard, where the address says Aalsgaarde, which is a city in the northern part of Zealand, Denmark. On a trivial note; the abandoned theme park where Knepfler lives is the same park that was used for the vampire's hidout in the supernatural thriller We Are The Night.
The film's story and script were written by Seth Lochhead while a student in the Writing program at Vancouver Film School. He finalized the script in 2006 with David Farr providing later changes. Lochhead wrote the original story and script on spec. Ronan commented on her character, saying: "We meet her as she goes out on her own, and when she does she is fascinated by everyone and everything she comes across. My favorite quality of hers is that she is non-judgmental; she shows an open mind to, and a fascination with, everything.
In an interview with Film School Rejects, Wright cited David Lynch as a major influence on Hanna. On The Chemical Brothers' score, he said: "You can expect an extraordinarily loud, thumping, deeply funky score that will not disappoint.
Marketing
On December 20, 2010, the first official trailer was released, the international trailer being released on February 3, 2011. On March 11, 2011, Focus Features released two television advertisements for their movie, which can be viewed on their YouTube account under the playlist "Hanna".[17][18] The official soundtrack, composed by The Chemical Brothers, was released 1 March 2011 on iTunes.
Universal Studios set up a promotional foursquare campaign featuring retailer HMV to celebrate the UK release of Hanna on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The campaign ran from 25th–28th August and invited fans of the film to participate in a 'Hunt for Hanna' to be in with a chance of winning a trip for two to Berlin. The competition took place in 3 locations around the UK and involved participants solving clues and checking into 6 locations within their city to be in with a chance of winning. All missions were set by the film's fictional character 'Marissa Wiegler' and the participants were encouraged to interact with her by notifying the character via email of when their mission was complete.
Reception
Hanna received mostly positive reviews; it holds a 71% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 196 reviews with the consensus stating "Fantastic acting and crisply choreographed action sequences propel this unique, cool take on the revenge thriller. Justin Chang of Variety states that "Joe Wright's 'Hanna' is an exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, commenting "Wright combines his two genres into a stylish exercise that perversely includes some sentiment and insight.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, on the other hand, gives the film two of five stars, stating "With its wicked-witch performance from Cate Blanchett, its derivative premise, its bland Europudding location work and some frankly outrageous boredom, this will test everyone's patience. Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, states that the film "starts off like a house afire but soon burns itself out". He states that even though the film is "[b]lessed with considerable virtues, including a clever concept, crackling filmmaking and a charismatic star, it ultimately squanders all of them, undone by an unfortunate lack of subtlety and restraint.
Box office
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