RevIew: Hanna

A movie may not always be realistic, but it sure needs to be believable. For example, Quentin Tarantino movies don't necessarily live in our realm of reality, but you buy into them when you're watching. It seems for a movie to be successful, it needs to be completely out of our reality or completely in. A lot of problems arise when we're stuck in between those worlds (I think a lot of comedies suffer from this) - what's surprising about Hanna is that it lives in this betweensie universe and still finds a way to succeed.

Hanna (Soairse Ronan) lives in the forest with her dad (Eric Bana). Dad used to be a special agent, but is now hiding out and raising his daughter. He teaches her all the secret agent fighting stuff he knows and reads to her from an encyclopedia every night. Hanna has never seen the real world, so she really only is an encyclopedia that can kill people. In what seems like an attempt to get back into normal life, Hanna and her father split up and have a plan to meet back up together. This puts Agent Marissa (Cate Blanchett) on their tale along with a whole crew of bad guys.

There is a lot to like about this film. There is some awesome action (honestly, not as much as I thought there would be). Director, Joe Wright has a knack for making some of the most beautiful scenes without any cuts (Think Atonement / Pride & Prejudice), so adding that film making ability to some some well choreographed fighting is great.  The parts that aren't violent explore Hanna experiencing reality, which is interesting. The music fits the movie really well and the sound itself is really amazing, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets nominated for an Oscar for sound editing. Acting is great; interesting characters, likable good guys, hatable bad guys. Some characters fall in to that betweensie universe that we talked about and so does the story, but everything else is so good that it shouldn't bother you too much.

There may have been a couple of scenes I didn't particularly like. Look out for an incredibly awkward kiss scene, it could have been done in a much better way. In all, Hanna finds itself a lot more than it doesn't. Great film, the acting makes it more emotionally deep than it was probably intended to be.

To accurately sum up, my movie watching buddy tweeted this: