Hanna

I enjoyed Hanna, but it was a film that relied on its style alone more than almost any I've seen in a long time. Director Joe Wright is known for his serious period dramas, but Hanna is very different. It's an action movie; a revenge thriller where the protagonists are always on the run and trying to get back at the person who wronged them years ago. Eric Bana is a former CIA operative who has been raising his daughter played by Saoirse Ronan in the woods, and training her her whole life for one mission, to kill a woman from the same organization responsible for her mother's death. Hanna is not only a very adept hunter and fighter, she's also unusually strong for her age and fluent in many languages. The secretive nature of her past and larger-than-life skill set hint toward the inevitable plot revelations, ones I won't spoil here but which are pretty easily guessed at and honestly not kept all that secret.

I think if I played fewer video games, I might have enjoyed the story of Hanna more. But as it is, the concepts it deals with are very familiar to anyone who's spent some amount of time with the kind of outlandish stories that games trade in, or just pulpy genre fiction in general. The craft with which the film is made doesn't discount the familiarity of what it's doing. I also wasn't really thrilled by the subplot where Hanna learns what life outside the forest is like and comes to regret her upbringing, which is another idea that's very familiar and is hard to make interesting anymore. Also, while Bana and Ronan are both good in the movie, I really didn't like Cate Blanchett's work as the villain. The American accent she put on was pretty terrible, and the character in general wasn't as interesting as the movie wanted her to be.

Where the movie succeeds though is definitely in the presentation. Wright definitely has a handle on action, creating some memorable sequences that don't rely on super fast cutting to be exciting, and he knows what he's doing in the personal scenes as well. Two moments that definitely stood out were a pair of long takes that were gripping for their entire duration, even though I'm sure I spotted where a cut was masked in one of them. Apparently they're a trademark of his, and while most people can hold a camera in one place for a while or even move it through a crowd, it takes a lot of effort to shoot scenes like this in that style. It definitely reminded me of Children of Men, even though they weren't quite that impressive. Elsewhere, I generally liked the look of the film, even if the use of color was a bit over the top and places, and the score by The Chemical Brothers was as interesting as promised. Hanna is certainly a flawed movie, but it's a unique one, certainly worth a watch if you like to see a different take on the action genre.

Dollhouse - Season 2

When Dollhouse was facing possible cancellation after season one, I was hopeful it would continue, but the prospect of it ending wasn't a particularly depressing one. The show found its stride in the second half of the season (and the more disconnected first five episodes actually hold up better than expected when watched again), but an early death didn't seem like the tragedy that Firefly was. And the first two episodes of season two continued to underwhelm and shut down any possible chance of the show gaining an audience before Fox finally pulled the plug. But the last two episodes that aired before the cancellation was announced were pretty strong, more or less just stand alone stories, but they signaled that the writers still knew what they were doing and prepared fans for the sad truth. Once we knew Dollhouse was dead, it became the best show on television in what may be an unprecedented run of quality science fiction programming. The show didn't make us really miss it until we already knew it was gone.

The question of course, is whether the show would have still been as good if the writers thought they were safe, and the answer is probably not. At the very least, the plot would have developed much more slowly. They could see that the end was coming, and instead of just playing out the string, they dropped the normal formula of Echo going on various engagements that go wrong and decided to give us as much of the planned story as they could in the time they had. I thought after "Epitaph One", there was no way we could reach that point in the story naturally, but in season two they told us pretty much everything we needed to know. The last two episodes suffer the most for the rushed plotting, wrapping up everything that had to be a bit too quickly and conveniently for the series' normal reasonable intelligence, but they got the job done for the most part. "The Hollow Men" is the heroes' last ditch effort to prevent the Dollhouse technology from destroying the world, which is a bit too much standard action movie, and "Epitaph Two: Return", which makes resolving a horrible dystopia seem too easy. They didn't have to be perfect though, the first sort of working because we know their plan ultimately fails anyway, and wrapping up of all the character arcs being the second's more important goal. In between the first two and last two episodes, the show really was completely brilliant, with smart, believable character development, twists that hit the right balance of throwing you completely off while making sense in retrospect, brilliant uses and abuses of the central premise, and plenty of those tragic Whedon moments. Dollhouse wasn't perfect, but it succeeded in making me care that it's gone, which is an accomplishment for it lasting less than 30 episodes.

Dollhouse - Season 1

Thanks to a weird production quirk, there was another episode filmed that didn't relate directly to the season's plot and won't air on TV just yet, but will appear on DVD. That leaves this week's twelfth (that's a weird looking word, isn't it?) episode as the finale, although hopefully not for the whole series. The show's in big trouble thanks to poor ratings, though I'm not sure what FOX was expecting sticking it on Friday night. After hating the original pilot so much that they made Whedon do another one, causing the aforementioned confusion with the last episode, they seemingly made him do several episodes in a style he didn't want, causing the show to sputter out of the gate quality-wise, and then stuck it in a viewership black hole. It's like they were trying to kill it before it even started. I was definitely not sold on Dollhouse through the first five weeks. A couple episodes were pretty good, but there was no thrust to the overall plot when the series seemed to be crying for it, as we saw Eliza Dushku go through several disconnected assignments with only hints of what was to come.

Thankfully, by the sixth episode things get more or less on track as the central story develops into something worth following and the show simply becomes more enjoyable to watch. In many ways it's not very typical Whedon, as there's still some humor but it's not as prevalent in the tone, and they often seem more focused on delivering a message than just keeping the viewer entertained. The very idea of the Dollhouse is a scary one, as for various reasons, some more justified than others, these people are removed from their bodies for years as they are forced to do whatever their employers are paid to do. Even if they agree to it beforehand, there's something very wrong about what they're doing, despite the fact that they are very often used as forces for good, protecting helpless people and bringing criminals to justice. Still, just as often or even moreso, they're merely pimped out for some rich guy's personal amusement. But even with that it's hard to dislike any of the people responsible too much, because they seem to believe that they're not in the wrong and are very well-written as likable, complex characters. They really packed a lot of great revelations and twists in the second half of the season, culminating in a great climax to a lot of things I thought would have taken longer to cover. I hope it survives to see another season, because I really wonder what they could do with the continued opportunity.