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Hanna is a 2011 action thriller film directed by Joe Wright. The film stars Saoirse Ronan as the title character, a girl raised in the wilderness of northern Finland by her father, an ex-CIA operative (Eric Bana), who trains her as an assassin. Cate Blanchett portrays a senior CIA agent who tries to track down and eliminate the girl and her father. The soundtrack was written by The Chemical Brothers. Hanna was released in North America in April 2011 and in Europe in May 2011. It received positive reviews from critics with praise for the performances of Ronan and Blanchett as well as the action sequences and themes. Plot Hanna Heller is a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her father, Erik, in rural northern Finland. Since the age of two, Hanna has been trained by him, an ex-CIA operative from Germany, to be a skilled assassin. He teaches her hand-to-hand combat and drills her in target shooting. Erik knows a secret that cannot become public and Marissa Wiegler, a senior CIA officer, seeks to eliminate him. Erik has trained Hanna with the intent to kill Marissa. One night, she tells him she is "ready" to face their enemies. Erik digs up a radio beacon that will alert the CIA to their presence. Although he warns Hanna that a confrontation with Marissa will be fatal for either her or Marissa, he leaves the final decision to her and she activates the beacon. Erik leaves, instructing her to meet him in Berlin. Hanna is seized by special forces and taken to an underground CIA complex where a suspicious Marissa sends a decoy to interrogate Hanna when she asks for her by name. While talking to the double, Hanna starts to cry and embraces her tightly, which makes her captors uneasy. They send guards to sedate her. As they enter the cell, Hanna kills the double along with some guards and escapes, discovering that she is in Morocco. Hanna meets Sebastian and Rachel, who are on a camper-van holiday with their children, Sophie and Miles, and stows away in the vehicle on a ferry to Spain, seeking to reach Berlin. The family is kind to her, and she and Sophie become friends: Hanna even tells her about the Berlin rendezvous and they kiss. Marissa hires Isaacs, a sadistic former agent, to capture Hanna while other agents are searching for Erik. She kills Hanna's maternal grandmother after failing to learn anything useful from her. Isaacs and two skinheads have discovered from the Moroccan hotelier with whom Hanna escaped and trail them. Cornering her and the family sometime down the road, Isaacs attacks but Hanna manages to escape after a vicious fight. Marissa interrogates the family and discovers from Miles that Hanna is heading to Berlin. The family is never seen again. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Erik fights off an attempted assassination and tries but fails to kill Marissa. Arriving at the rendezvous in an abandoned Berlin amusement park, Hanna meets Knepfler, an eccentric magician and friend of Erik's who lives there. Before Erik arrives, Marissa and Isaacs appear. Hanna escapes, but overhears comments that suggest Erik is not her biological father. Hanna then goes to her grandmother's empty apartment where she finds Erik, who admits he is not her biological father but loves her as his own. He explains that he once recruited pregnant women into a CIA program where their children's DNA was enhanced to create super-soldiers. After the project was shut down, its subjects – all except Hanna – were eliminated. Marissa and Isaacs arrive; Erik acts as a distraction to allow Hanna to escape. He kills Isaacs, but is shot dead by Marissa, who then returns to Knepfler's house in the abandoned amusement park and finds Hanna, who has just discovered Knepfler hanging dead upside-down, having been tortured to death by Isaacs. Hanna flees taking one of the arrows used to kill Knepfler. After Hanna flees, she is cornered by Marissa. In a final confrontation, Hanna turns her back to Marissa who shoots at her; but Hanna wounds Marissa by shooting an arrow at her. A now-staggering Marissa, pursued by Hanna, trips, leaving her badly injured. Hanna picks up Marissa's gun and uses it to kill her with two shots — a method she had previously used while hunting a deer at the film's beginning. Cast Production The film was co-produced by the American Holleran Company and German Studio Babelsberg, with financial support from various German film funds and the main distributor, Focus Features, which holds the copyright to the film. Development The film's story and script were written by Seth Lochhead while a student at Vancouver Film School. He wrote the original story and script on spec, and finalized the script in 2006, with David Farr providing later changes. Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuarón were previously attached to direct the film, before it was confirmed that Joe Wright would direct, after Ronan prompted the producers to consider him. Filming Most of the filming was done at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, but locations also included Lake Kitkajärvi in Kuusamo, Finland, several German locations (including Bad Tölz, the water bridge at Magdeburg, Köhlbrandbrücke and Reeperbahn in Hamburg, and various sites in Berlin, such as Kottbusser Tor, Görlitzer Bahnhof and Spreepark), as well as Ouarzazate and Essaouira in Morocco. Temperatures during the Finland shoot sometimes fell as low as −33 °C (−27 °F), 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". Themes and motifs Reviewers remarked that the setting and style of Hanna significantly depart from a typical action movie. According to the official website, the film has "elements of dark fairy tales" woven into an "adventure thriller". Joe Wright, the director, has said that the movie's theme is a "fantasy" about "overcoming the dark side" during the "rites of passage" of adolescent maturation when a child transforms and "has to go into the world". He said that he was influenced by personal exposure every day as he grew up to "violent, dark, cautionary fairy tales" that "prepare children for the future obstacles in the wider world", as well as his "deep love for the mystical qualities of David Lynch movies", by the patterns of narrative that he prefers because of his dyslexia, and by working as a child in his parents' puppetry company. In an interview with Film School Rejects, Wright acknowledged David Lynch as a major influence on Hanna and also pointed to The Chemical Brothers' score: "You can expect an extraordinarily loud, thumping, deeply funky score that will not disappoint". The music, including The Devil Is In The Beats and The Devil Is In The Details, underscores the movie's style, recalling Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange with musical motifs consistent with Wright's "fairy tale theme" of childhood innocence confronting the modern "synthetic" world. Several reviewers have commented that the movie has a hyper-stylized Kubrickian tone, remin.... Discover the Leslie Holleran popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Leslie Holleran books.