There’s suspense but little magic in new teasers for Amazon’s Hanna

Amazon Prime’s Hanna teaser.

Not everyone was a fan of Director Joe Wright's 2011 film Hanna, with its strange mix of revenge thriller and dark coming-of-age fairytale. But it's one of my recent favorites for precisely those elements, driven by an exquisitely unsettling performance by Saoirse Ronan in the titular role. Now Amazon Prime is adapting the film into a series, written by David Farr, who co-wrote the original screenplay. Two teasers have arrived over the last few days, giving us our first look at the adaptation. There's plenty of suspense, as befits the thriller genre, but little of the original's magic.
(Spoilers for the 2011 film below.)
Hanna is raised in the wilderness by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), an ex-CIA operative who trains her in all the skills she needs to survive in the brutal world outside their winter fairyland. Ronan had this otherworldly presence of untouched innocence, combined with a ruthless hunter's instinct, as we saw in the very first scene when she kills and dresses a deer. Shooting those early scenes in Finland set the fairytale tone perfectly, and it made the inevitable shattering of that peaceful solitude all the more powerful.
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