I watched Joe Wright's film, "Hanna", last night, having also seen it in theaters when it was released in 2011. It is not a film that merely has fairy tale elements and themes in it; it is straight-forwardly a re-telling of the fairy tale, "Snow White". In one of the opening scenes, Hanna is reading a book of fairy tales (the Grimm's?), one of the few books in her isolated world. The director is showing the viewer the script for the movie. The main character, Hanna, is Snow White. The Queen is the head of a secret US genetic breeding program. Hanna is the product of that breeding program. The Queen devotes the movie to trying to kill her through her huntsmen agents and by her own efforts. In the end, Hanna kills the queen, who dies on the iron rails of a train ride in an abandoned amusement park, much as the Queen in Grimm Brothers story of Snow White. The director's effort to signal the audience that he is retelling a famous fairy tale appears repeated. The opening sequence involves the girl "waking up" by growing up and being ready to take on her role in the story, while living secretly in exile in Finland in a white, snowy landscape. During the story, Hanna is befriended by a variety of people (I counted seven of them - the foster-father character who raised her, a family of four in northern Africa, the resident of the fairy-tale themed abandoned amusement park, and a woman who was the mother of Hanna's mother.) The movie introduces the villain queen while she is doing her morning grooming in front of a mirror. Her castle is an underground fortress with prisons and laboratories in north Africa. How many more hints does one want?
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