Hanna, Season 1 (2019)

 

Erik Heller helps a young mother escape a covert facility with her baby daughter, Hanna.  The extraction is not a smooth one: the mother dies.

For fifteen years, deep in the forests of Poland, Erik raises Hanna as his own daughter.  It is not, however, a typical childhood: Erik rigorously trains Hanna in weapons use, martial arts, hunting technique and covert operations, and drives her to hone her body with punishing strength and endurance exercises.

For all her life, Hanna has followed the instructions of her 'father', learning the skills he has to impart and obeying his rule to never travel too far from their home.  But she is a teenager now, and the limits of her world have begun to chafe.  Secretly, she ventures beyond them ... a decision that will totally overturn her life.

Because Hanna is no ordinary child, and the organisation that killed her mother cannot afford to let her roam free ...

This series was inspired by the 2011 film of the same name, but soon diverges from the plot of the movie in order to pursue its own path.  There's considerably more complexity to the situation in which Hanna finds herself, and it is much more challenging for her to be sure who her friends and enemies are.  I think that adding extra complexity is certainly necessary; this first season alone already has quadruple the film's runtime.  I do however have mixed feelings about the specific choices made in terms of plot progression.  Some elements work well, in my opinion, but some do not.

For instance, I like the show's recognition that, having been raised in complete isolation by her 'father', Hanna has become a skilled tracker, fighter and survivor, but she's also socially a bit awkward.  She does not fully understand social cues and interactions, because she has no experience of them.  This isn't always that consistently applied, though.  Or at least, Hanna seems to abruptly become much more comfortable with physical and emotional intimacy the moment she meets a boy she likes.

Related to this, I also in principle like the show's attempt to balance the espionage and action with slice-of-life, coming-of-age learning to be a 'real person' growth that Hanna has to go through.  Again however, I think the pacing of this is a bit wonky.  The show's momentum definitely sags a lot in episode 5, for instance, and after recovering in episode 6, it accelerates to warp speed for the final two: the show is trying to get such a lot done in those episodes that the pace is almost breakneck and I don't feel like everything gets a full chance to breathe.

The show does have a couple of unalloyed positives.  The action choreography is generally solid, for instance, and the cast is uniformly good.  In particular, Esme Creed-Miles does a great job in the title role.  Hanna is on screen a lot, so there's considerably pressure put on her then 18-year-old shoulders, and she definitely rises to the challenge.

Overall, I am interested to see where they go from here with Hanna, but I am not convinced I will like what they do.  Possibly at least in part because some of the evolving premise just reminds me a bit too much of the ultimately disappointing Nikita TV series.