Hannibal Rising (2007)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHY HE DOES IT)

[And now an example that demonstrates why there is no such thing as a rule in Plot Busting.

When a character or characters of a plot are more famous than the actors portraying them, it makes more sense to ignore Rule #2, and describe the plot in terms of the characters rather than in terms of the players. This would also be appropriate if a character was played by more than one performer in situations, for instance, where they age significantly during the course of the movie.

However, in such situations, don't mix character and player names. Stick to one or other for the whole description. And if a character name is not easily identifiable, use a character description instead.

Rather unusually this Plot Buster was produced for someone who was desperate for an explanation of a character's motivation, but who couldn't face the prospect of seeing the actual movie, for obvious reasons.]

Hannibal Rising (2007)
Directed by Peter Webber. With Aaran Thomas, Gaspard Ulliel, Li Gong. A prequel to the thriller film series featuring the notoriously violent Hannibal Lecter character created by the author Thomas Harris.

Hannibal Lecter is a homicidal maniac because as a young boy he was forced to eat part of his own little sister.

Hiding from Nazi persecution near the end of the second world war, the young Lecter, played by Thomas, and his infant sister witness the deaths of their parents in the midst of a battle on the Eastern Front between German occupiers and Soviet liberators.

Worse is to come for the pair though as they are discovered by a starving band of looting former local collaborators, who in desperation kill Lecter's sister and then share her remains with him as food.

The rest of the movie follows Lecter as he grows into a young man exacting bloody revenge against his sister's killers, in the process becoming a cold blooded cannibalistic murderer himself.

The young Lecter spends most of the remainder of the war in a Soviet run hostel for displaced boys, where, played by Ulliel, he makes life very hard form himself by punishing rudeness and fighting bullying on his path to adulthood.

Fleeing the threatening environment of the hostel, he travels west across war ravaged Europe into France where he manages to trace his recently widowed aunt, an ancestor worshiping Japanese former noble, played by Gong, for whom he develops an ultimately unrequited infatuation.

It is while staying in his aunt's household that Lecter's obsession with fine food is kindled and it is from her that he (somewhat improbably) learns "the way of the warrior." Indeed, it is as a result of Lecter's defending of his aunt's honour, that his activities as a killer are first brought to the attention of the authorities.

Fortunately for Lecter, though, the French war crimes investigator, who had been on the trail of Lector's first victim, fails to find enough evidence on which to charge him. So Lecter is free to move to Paris to take up a working scholarship at medical school, which proves to be the ideal opportunity for him to hone his skills as an anatomist.

Lecter is somehow able to fit his quest for revenge around both his studies and job in the dissecting school, and in a series of increasingly gruesome dining related murders manages to work his way through the gang responsible for his sister's death.

Neither the authorities nor his aunt are in any doubt about Lecter's murderous activities, though. Nevertheless he is eventually able to evade justice and conceal his flight in an explosion aboard the barge owned by his penultimate victim.

Forced out of France, Lecter washes up on the shores of Canada where he is both able to complete his bloody quest and begin a whole new career of murder in the Americas.


If there is a problem with this explanation of Hannibal Lecter's rise to infamy, it is in the way that aspects of his character and subsequent history are shoehorned (sometimes ridiculously) into the plot, most notably in the link that is made between the iconic face mask that prison guards later force him to wear and the Japanese warrior face mask that his aunt owns and he chooses to try on for no other, apparent, reason than to provide an image for the movie's publicity poster to use.

However, the real problem with the film is the lack of Anthony Hopkins, without whom this macabre character study is reduced to mere pantomime horror.


Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Rising_%28film%29