Hannibal Rising (film)
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| Hannibal Rising | |
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| Directed by | Peter Webber |
| Produced by | Dino De Laurentiis Martha De Laurentiis Tarak Ben Ammar |
| Written by | Novel & screenplay: Thomas Harris |
| Starring | Gaspard Ulliel Gong Li Dominic West Rhys Ifans |
| Music by | Ilan Eshkeri Shigeru Umebayashi |
| Cinematography | Ben Davis |
| Editing by | Pietro Scalia Valerio Bonelli |
| Distributed by | The Weinstein Company/MGM (USA) Paramount Pictures (Latin America) |
| Preceded by | Red Dragon (2002) |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Hannibal Rising is a 2007 horror/thriller film, the fifth film to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It is a prequel to Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal in the Hannibal Lecter series. The film is an adaptation of Thomas Harris' 2006 novel of the same name and tells the story of Lecter's evolution into the infamous serial killer of the previous films and books.
The film is directed by Peter Webber from a screenplay by Harris. It was filmed in Barrandov Studios in Prague. It is produced by the Dino De Laurentiis Company and was released on February 9, 2007. Theatrical distribution in the United States was handled by The Weinstein Company and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The DVD was released on May 29, 2007 in Unrated Widescreen and R-rated Full-Screen editions.
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[edit] Synopsis
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This prequel shows Hannibal Lecter from childhood in Lithuania, to his teen and young adulthood years in France, and up to his arrival in North America.
The film begins in 1944, when Lecter is eight years old, living in Lecter Castle; constructed by his paternal ancestor, Hannibal the Grim, in the Lithuanian countryside. Lecter, his younger sister Mischa, and his parents escape to the family's hunting lodge in the woods to elude the advancing German troops. Back at Lecter Castle, six Lithuanian militiamen (Grutas, Dortlich, Grentz, Kolnas, Milko, and Pot Watcher) request to join the Waffen-SS. The SS commander orders them to kill the Lecters' Jewish cook who was left behind, to which they gleefully comply.
A Soviet tank stops at the Lecters' lodge looking for water, and forces everyone out of the house. However, the tank is then spotted by a German bomber, which sparks a firefight. The bomber is shot down by the tank, but subsequently crashes into it, and the ensuing explosion kills everyone except Hannibal and Mischa.
The SS militiamen then loot Lecter Castle. Seeing their wounded SS commander, Grutas shoots him and takes his badge. However, the impending Russian advance forces them to hide out in the woods, where they locate the Lecter lodge. The SS militiamen storm and take over the lodge. Finding no other food in the bitterly cold Baltic winter, the men look menacingly at Hannibal and Mischa.
The movie then cuts to a scene eight years later inside Lecter Castle, which has been turned into a Soviet orphanage. A bully harasses Lecter, who has been rendered mute by his experiences, about not singing the orphanage anthem. The bully attacks his head, but Lecter blocks his swing with a fork, impaling the bully's hand. That evening, Lecter experiences a flashback about Mischa screaming in his sleep, which angers the youth commander, who locks him in a dungeon. However, Lecter escapes from the castle orphanage to Paris to live with his widowed aunt, the Lady Murasaki-Lecter. She gets him to speak for the first time since his childhood, and instructs him about flower arrangement, martial arts, and ancestor worship.
At a local market, a butcher makes a crude remark about Lady Murasaki. Lecter then attacks him. Later, while the butcher is fishing, Lecter requests an apology from him, and is denied. He then slices the butcher's stomach, arm, and back with a katana, then decapitates him. He is suspected of the butcher's murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who had also lost his family to the war. Thanks in great part to the intervention of his aunt, who places the butcher's disembodied head outside police headquarters while Hannibal is being interrogated inside, Lecter escapes responsibility for the crime.
Eventually, Lecter becomes the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. He receives a working scholarship, where he is given a job preparing cadavers. One day, Lecter witnesses a condemned war criminal receiving a sodium thiopental injection to force him to recall details about his war crimes. In an attempt to recall the names of those responsible for his sister's death, Lecter injects himself with the solution. His subsequent flashback reveals that the pot watcher was killed when the Russians bombed the lodge, and the dogtags were still left in the ruins of the lodge.
Lecter then returns to Lithuania in search of the dogtags, as well as his sister's remains. While crossing the Soviet border, he draws the attention of Dortlich, who is now a Soviet border patrol officer. Lecter excavates the ruins of the lodge where his family died, and also unearths the dogtags of the group of deserters who had killed his sister. Dortlich attempts to kill him, but Lecter gets the upper hand and incapacitates him. After he buries Mischa's remains, Lecter ties Dortlich to a tree and forces him to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of his gang. When he refuses to reveal enough details, Lecter decapitates Dortlich with a horse-drawn pulley. Dortlich's blood splashes on Lecter's face, and he wipes it off and licks it. Later, the Soviet police arrive on the scene, only to discover Dortlich's head, its cheeks carved off, apparently made into a brochette.
Lecter then visits Kolnas' restaurant in Fontainebleau. He finds Kolnas' young daughter, whom he notices is wearing Mischa's bracelet. He then gives Kolnas' dogtag to her. Kolnas enters the restaurant, but Lady Murasaki persuades Lecter not to kill him, for the sake of Kolnas' children. Dortlich's murder, along with Kolnas' dogtag, puts the rest of the group in alert. Grutas, now a sex trafficker, dispatches a second member of the group, Zigmas Milko, to kill Lecter. Milko sneaks into Lecter's laboratory at night with a gun, but Lecter senses his presence, and knocks him out with an injection. Just as Popil is entering the lab, Lecter drowns Milko in the cadaver tank. Popil questions Lecter about Dortlich's murder, but is again unable to establish Lecter's guilt. Popil then tries to dissuade him from hunting the gang, and offers to let him go free if he helps locate Grutas. After Lecter leaves, Popil remarks to his assistant that Lecter lost all of his humanity when Mischa died, and has become a monster.
Lady Murasaki begs Lecter not to complete his revenge, but Lecter says that he made a promise to Mischa. Lecter then sets up a time bomb in Grutas' home, and attacks him in the bath. However, a maid alerts Grutas' bodyguards, who then rush in. Just as Grutas' bodyguards are about to slit his throat, Lecter's time bomb goes off and he escapes.
Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki and calls Lecter, using her as bait. Lecter recognizes the sounds of Kolnas' ortolans from his restaurant in the background. Lecter goes there and plays on Kolnas' emotions by threatening his children, forcing him to give up the location of Grutas' boat. Lecter then says he will leave Kolnas alone for the sake of his family, and places his gun on the hot stove. As Kolnas goes for the gun, Lecter impales him through the head with his Tantō. He then hides the tantō behind his back.
Lecter goes to the houseboat. Just as he is about to untie Lady Murasaki, Grutas shoots him in the back. Grutas then proceeds to molest Lady Murasaki. Lecter takes out the tanto, which was broken by the force of the bullet, and slashes Grutas's Achilles' tendons with it, crippling him. In a final confrontation, Grutas claims that Lecter too had consumed his sister in broth fed to him by the soldiers, and he was killing them to keep this fact secret. Enraged, Lecter carves his sister's initial, M, into Grutas's chest. Lady Murasaki, disturbed by his behavior, flees from him even after he tells her that he loves her. As she leaves, Hannibal bites off Grutas's cheeks in what will become his signature attack. The houseboat is then incinerated, but Lecter, assumed to be dead, emerges from the woods. The film then concludes with Lecter hunting down the last member of the group, Grentz, in Canada.
[edit] Differences between the book and the film
- In the book, Lecter's uncle does not die in the war, but travels to Lithuania and brings the boy back to France. He dies of a heart attack after attempting revenge on the butcher upon hearing of the comments he made to Lady Murasaki.
- The movie does not explain where Lecter got the horse when he returns to Lithuania. The book explains that he stole the horse from the stable at the former Lecter Castle. It is in fact the same horse that his family had owned since he was a child.
- In the book, Grutas and his gang steal paintings hidden behind a secret door in Lecter castle to start their fortune after the war. There is a small side story of Inspector Popil working with Lecter and Lady Murasaki to discover who stole them.
- In the book, Lecter kills the butcher Paur Momund with lady Murasaki's ancestral wakizashi; in the film, he uses the katana from the same matched set of weapons.
- In the book, Lecter gets inside Grutas' house by hiding inside a crate in the back of Milko's truck. He pays a young woman nearby to drop it off, saying that Milko sent her.
- In the book, Lecter is arrested after the explosion on board Grutas' boat. He is set free after public outrage because the victims were white slavers and war criminals.
- The book ends with Lecter in the U.S., not in Canada -- on his way to the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore and ultimately a career in psychiatry, he stops off first in New York, where two of the Broadway theater marquees read: "Dial M for Murder" and "Picnic."
- In the movie, the characters Jakov, Chiyoh and Gassmann are never shown.
[edit] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Gaspard Ulliel | Hannibal Lecter |
| Helena Lia Tachovka | Mischa Lecter |
| Gong Li | Lady Murasaki Shikibu |
| Rhys Ifans | Vladis Grutas |
| Kevin McKidd | Petras Kolnas |
| Richard Brake | Enrikas Dortlich |
| Stephen Walters | Zigmas Milko |
| Ivan Marevich | Bronys Grentz |
| Charles Maquignon | Paul Momund |
| Dominic West | Inspector Pascal Popil |
| Beata Ben Ammar | Madam Kolnas |
| Pavel Bezdek | Dieter |
| Aaran Thomas | Young Hannibal Lecter |
| Goran Kostic | Pot Watcher |
[edit] Other titles
Other working titles for the movie were Hannibal 4, Hannibal IV, The Lecter Variations, The Lecter Variation: The Story of Young Hannibal Lecter, Young Hannibal, and Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask.
[edit] References to previous Lecter films
- While Lecter injects himself with sodium thiopental, he plays Bach's Goldberg Variations in the background, the same music that plays during his escape in The Silence of The Lambs. The recording is the 1955 recording by Glenn Gould. In the other movies featuring Hannibal Lecter, the recording used is Gould's 1981 recording.
- A boar - an animal that figured prominently in the plot of Hannibal, catches Lecter off guard when he investigates the grounds of his family's ruined cabin. In the book, the boar is the family totem of the Lecter clan, and featured on their family flag.
[edit] Reception
Hannibal Rising was neither a critical nor a commercial success. It was met with a mostly negative critical response. It currently has a rating of 15 percent "Rotten" on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes, with a very low eight percent Cream of the Crop rating [1]. It also received a Metascore of 35 ("Generally negative reviews") on Metacritic.[2] The film opened at a distant #2 in the United States with $13.4 million, barely one-third of the $33.7 million opening of Norbit [3]. In its second week of release Hannibal Rising dropped to #7 at the box office, making only $5.5 million, a 59 percent drop from the previous week. It dropped out of the top 10 altogether in its third week of release, coming in at #13 and bringing in only $1,706,165, a 68.5 percent drop from the previous week. After a theatrical release of 91 days the final total domestic gross of the film stands at $27,669,725, less than Hannibal and Red Dragon grossed in their opening weekends alone ($58,003,121 and $36,540,945, respectively).
[edit] Rating
The MPAA rated this film R for strong grisly violent content and some language/sexual references.[citation needed]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- The Official Dino De Laurentiis Company Website
- The Official Hannibal Rising website
- The Official Hannibal Rising MySpace site
- The Hannibal Lecter Studiolo
- Hannibal Rising at the Internet Movie Database
- Hannibal Rising at Rotten Tomatoes
- Hannibal Rising at Metacritic
- Cinefantastique Online Review
- Detailed Comparison between Theatrical Cut and Unrated Cut
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| Novels Red Dragon • The Silence of the Lambs |
Main Characters |
Films Manhunter • The Silence of the Lambs • Hannibal |
| Secondary Characters List of minor characters in the Hannibal series |
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