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I recently watched Hanna, because it fit with my brother and my not-very-overlapping movie tastes. An action thriller (good for him!) with a non-sexualized teenage girl protagonist (hooray for me!), which fortunately turned out to be excellent, if kind of trippy.
The action begins in the frozen arctic, where Hanna’s ex-CIA father trains her in all his ex-CIA know-how; continues once Hanna has been whisked away to a labyrinthine top secret base; and then follows Hanna’s road trip adventures, where it quickly becomes clear that her father’s years of intensive training totally failed to teach Hanna the most basic ability of spycraft: being unnoticeable.
Hanna is not merely not unnoticeable, but endearingly incapable of fitting in at all. At one point, a boy is about to kiss her, and she says, “Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips.”
Oh Hanna. As if that line weren’t enough, she proceeds to deck him. It’s probably just as well for him, though, because people who spend too much time with Hanna tend to end up running afoul of the CIA and getting killed…
This leads me to one question the movie leaves open, which is driving me mad. Hanna spends a large portion of the movie traveling about with a dysfunctional British family with the world’s most obnoxious daughter. The husband and wife constantly snipe, the daughter is forever rolling her eyes, but Hanna is nonetheless enchanted: her childhood was so devoid of warmth and fun that the family delights her.
Eventually, of course, the family fall into the hands of the CIA, and we see them being questioned. But the movie just drops the plot thread! Perhaps we’re supposed to assume they were killed? Maybe the director felt a big squeamish about killing off the kids on screen? But I want to know...
And then Hanna confronts the big bad in a dilapidated fairy-tale theme park, which is satisfyingly surreal. Hanna is not a retelling of any particular fairy tale, but there is a sense of fairy tale hanging over the whole story: Hanna’s only storybook, for instance, is a German book of Marchen. There’s a sense of eeriness, almost a fascination with the grotesque, that hangs over the story: it’s reminiscent Twin Peaks if it’s like anything, but it’s really not much like anything else.
***
Incidentally, if you have any ideas for good movies that my brother and I could watch over Christmas, please share. So far I have Iron Man 3 and perhaps The Incredible Hulk, because Marvel movies also fall into that amorphous category of “movies we might both enjoy.” Maybe Skyfall?
The action begins in the frozen arctic, where Hanna’s ex-CIA father trains her in all his ex-CIA know-how; continues once Hanna has been whisked away to a labyrinthine top secret base; and then follows Hanna’s road trip adventures, where it quickly becomes clear that her father’s years of intensive training totally failed to teach Hanna the most basic ability of spycraft: being unnoticeable.
Hanna is not merely not unnoticeable, but endearingly incapable of fitting in at all. At one point, a boy is about to kiss her, and she says, “Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips.”
Oh Hanna. As if that line weren’t enough, she proceeds to deck him. It’s probably just as well for him, though, because people who spend too much time with Hanna tend to end up running afoul of the CIA and getting killed…
This leads me to one question the movie leaves open, which is driving me mad. Hanna spends a large portion of the movie traveling about with a dysfunctional British family with the world’s most obnoxious daughter. The husband and wife constantly snipe, the daughter is forever rolling her eyes, but Hanna is nonetheless enchanted: her childhood was so devoid of warmth and fun that the family delights her.
Eventually, of course, the family fall into the hands of the CIA, and we see them being questioned. But the movie just drops the plot thread! Perhaps we’re supposed to assume they were killed? Maybe the director felt a big squeamish about killing off the kids on screen? But I want to know...
And then Hanna confronts the big bad in a dilapidated fairy-tale theme park, which is satisfyingly surreal. Hanna is not a retelling of any particular fairy tale, but there is a sense of fairy tale hanging over the whole story: Hanna’s only storybook, for instance, is a German book of Marchen. There’s a sense of eeriness, almost a fascination with the grotesque, that hangs over the story: it’s reminiscent Twin Peaks if it’s like anything, but it’s really not much like anything else.
***
Incidentally, if you have any ideas for good movies that my brother and I could watch over Christmas, please share. So far I have Iron Man 3 and perhaps The Incredible Hulk, because Marvel movies also fall into that amorphous category of “movies we might both enjoy.” Maybe Skyfall?
