A Very Brief Movie Review: Hanna

Grade: A

 

Comments

How can you go wrong with Cate Blanchett?

Commentary

There was something rather unsettling about not really understanding what was going on in the movie, but I enjoyed that. The acting was superb, Cate Blanchett created an absolutely devilish and obsessive character who reminded me of the Brother Grimm’s Queen in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The fairytale quality of the film makes this comparison quite palpable. Though the story itself was a little derivative–a little Dark Angel (Jessica Alba’s breakout role), a little Salt (Angelina Jolie’s latest action flick)–I liked the fact that our heroine was a 14 year old girl played by the beautifully strange looking, Sanoirse Ronan.

Feminist Reaction to the Audience’s Reaction

There is a homoerotic scene in the film which I won’t spoil, but which brought out the closet-homophobes (those are people say things like “ewww, that’s soooo gay” in a dark movie theater, but wouldn’t dare say it when people could see their face). Though I wasn’t surprised, I often hear folks say that homophobia is a symptom of the previous generation… but that’s just not true. Even in a scene that could be read a number of different ways, that perhaps wasn’t even meant to be “gay,” people still have nasty visceral reactions to anything they perceive as non-normative, anything that doesn’t fit a heteronormative script. Now you have to go see it to figure out what I’m talking about right?

Go see it in theaters because all good action movies are better that way.

 

2 replies
  1. Julie says:

    I thought the movie was great too…and that scene’s audience reactions were just so out of control. Its as if non-hetero actions are WORTHY of shouts in a way that many other ‘others’ are not…

  2. Numbers says:

    This is another movie where the main character posses an incomparable killing skills. It is revealed that from birth Hanna was trained on all skills in killing people as well as surviving from an assault. Very fantastic movie and a good story on why Hanna posses such deadly skills.

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