Hanna is the first wide release of 2011 that I’m truly smitten with. Granted the competition isn’t exactly fierce this early in the year, but I’ll wager right here and now that this arthouse action flick about a little girl with quick reflexes and an itchy trigger finger will prove to be more satisfying than a number of the big budget effects orgies that populate the summer and fall box offices– and hey, I’m all for effects orgies, but considering we’ve got Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Green Lantern in our future, I’d hardly call this a far fetched prophecy.
But I’m not using this week’s MindFood just to fawn over how badass Saoirse Ronan is as Hanna, how devishly fairy tale her story is, how on-point the supporting characters are (if Thor has a single character more amusing than the wannabe celebutant Hanna befriends, I won’t speak for a week), how wonderfully engaging director Joe Wright’s camerawork is or how blood-pushing the Chemical Brothers’ score is. I could easily do all those things, but that’s not the agenda this week. Instead I’d like to focus on one aspect that Hanna does better than most of its peers — and it’s got plenty as far as this particular premise goes: the super soldier.
It’s certainly easy to diagnosis why so many movies chase the super soldier thread. Having the government play with a few fundamental proteins is an easy way to make man made superheroes. No need to devise an elaborate mythology for why someone has abnormal strength, speed, and sight; just saying their DNA was changed is a magical panacea that allows you to invent whatever abilities you want. So you’d think with that level of freedom, it’d be pretty easy to make a kick ass movie about a super soldier, no? You’d be wrong.
All too often the soldier is just plain boring. Too many filmmakers lack restraint; they go wild with their uber soldat’s capabilities, turning them into unstoppable slayers of mere mortals and in the process make their only real threat a fellow super soldier. That’s all well and good if you’re playing with action figures, but when you’re working with actual characters and narratives for 90+ minutes, the only way you’re going to make a genetically perfect human interesting is if they’re, well, not perfect. They have to have an Achielles heel.
In the case of Hanna, it’s not her actual sex or age that makes her vulnerable, it’s the fact that she suffers from arrested development. She’s spent her entire life training to kill people, and she’s a certified death dealer for sure, but her separation from the world has turned her personality into a ticking time bomb. It’s the little things in life she can’t handle and you’re really not quite sure if she’s going to explode and kill everyone around her, implode and kill herself or if someone will be patient enough to defuse her triggers. That’s not to say she’s on the verge of killing innocent people or slitting her wrists, but that Hanna is simply on the verge of… something.
There’s a variable to her that has yet to be pinned down. And in a genre where super soldiers all have one track motivations and single purpose existences, it’s revitalizing to see an action movie where a character has divergent emotional breakthroughs.
That may sound sappy, but emotions are what separate the action movie men from the boys. Good heroes need to be soldiers first and super second. They need to question why they’re doing things, they need to discover what they’re truly capable of and they have to act out of a respect for the greater good. They can’t just act because they’re super and that’s what super people do. When that happens you get movies like Ultraviolet, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Salt, G.I. Joe, Doom, Aeon Flux, Solo and even Kick-Ass. Enjoyable movies? Yes. Benchmarks? No. And in the case of that last inferior flick, yes, it’s sa-weet watching Hit Girl kill a bunch of schlubs, but it’s also hollow and meaningless.
Hanna, on the other hand, joins the ranks of The Bourne franchise precisely because it does have a solid core. Its stars’ actions resonate with other people and vice-versa. She’s not just some killer who exists in a consequence-less void, she’s a human being. Genetically abnormal, but a human all the same.
