Hanna Season 1 review: Not your typical teen [Spoilers]

Hanna tells the tale of a young girl trying to find her place in the world, and she’s anything but ordinary. Here’s a spoiler-filled review of Hanna Season 1.

Hanna takes the idea of isolation to the extreme when we learn that the titular character has grown up in the forest with her father and hasn’t experienced the things that most children do. The first episode is the only one that really focuses on this, but it’s mentioned every now and then throughout the season.

The real meat of the story comes from Marissa, who works at the CIA, and Erik, Hanna’s father. The two worked together once upon a time, but a difference of opinions drove them apart and instead they found themselves going toe-to-toe with each other once Hanna wanders too far.

While we still see plenty of Hanna throughout the season, she seems to adapt quickly to everything going on in the world. She’s still not the most social person, but she still manages to foster relationships with Sophie and Anton. The former falls apart due to the latter, which gives her a look at what teen life is like and shows her that doing whatever she wants is not the best way to go about things.

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By the end of the season, there’s some resolution mixed in with a lot of loss. Hanna and Erik are able to find Utrax, but they’re only able to rescue one girl. Before we even get to the big fight scenes at the facility, we get a sense that Erik knows he won’t be fighting again after this. The signs are there. He’s been shot and his wound isn’t healing, but he’s not alone at the end.

Since I haven’t seen the 2011 movie of the same name, I can’t speak to the differences. However, any time a movie ends up taking the form of a TV show, more has to be tossed into the mix in order to tell the same story with a much longer runtime. Many of the scenes with Sophie felt like they were filler since they had already made it clear how well Hanna was adapting to the outside world that she had never seen before.

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Marissa and Erik had a more interesting past to explore, which is what most of the flashback dealt with after the first episode. Since Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman have a history of working together in The Killing, their chemistry on screen played off better than most of the other pairings. Kinnaman and Esme Creed-Miles have some nice moments, too, but once Hanna becomes distrustful, a distance is put between them that’s hard to come back from.

The show was at its best when something was a stake. For a good majority of it, Hanna doesn’t really feel like she’s on the run because she just ends up hanging out with Sophie and her friends. When Hanna finds herself with Marissa in a hotel though, things heat up as Jerome Sawyer and Erik arrive and there’s actually a need to escape.

Overall, Hanna tells the story of a teen assassin and has some tonal shifts throughout to display how the life of a teenager is never really linear. She could be out partying one minute and killing a group of people the next. It can be a bit jarring, but it shows that Hanna never really loses sight of who she was trained to be.

I did find Hanna’s stubbornness annoying at times, and the same could be said with Sophie. They each took being a teen to the extreme, thinking that they had the right to do whatever they please regardless of the consequences. A lot of the trouble that Hanna ended up in was because of her own actions.

Hanna wasn’t one of the best shows that I’ve watched this year, but if you’re looking for an unusual teen story filled with action and betrayal, give it a try.

Hanna Season 1 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.