I've wanted to see Hanna ever since I heard Cate Blanchett is in it and fyredancer said it's good. Possibly I've also seen a trailer and learned that it's about this teenage girl who's kind of a soldier.

I went to see it today with some (six) friends. Omg, I loved that movie! I sat there and it was bliss. I kept thinking how it was like the movie was made for me.

Our group of friends talked about it afterward and I said that I loved it (seriously, I loved it so much I almost cried at one point), and then they criticised it for half an hour. They said the plot didn't make sense and it wasn't logical and so on. Why did Hanna kill all those guys at the beginning and escape a heavily guarded building, only to be followed by three guys for the rest of the movie, unable to stop them? And so on.

Well, I don't care. I don't care! I didn't question the plot once. I understand why people like mindless action movies now -- this is the way they like them. I don't care about the plot or the coherence or anything like that: I care about a few key scenes and a few key elements in the movie.

I loved Hanna. She's about sixteen (oh wait, IMDB says fourteen... anyway) and she's dangerous. When she runs into the dark and three threatening-looking guys chase after her, the guys are in danger. They attack and she fights them and kills one of them. It was glorious.

I loved that Hanna, young female main character, is kind of queer. She asks a Spanish boy if they should kiss now (the only time when my mood sank while watching the movie) but mostly, it seems, out of curiosity or recognising the convention, and then she won't let the kiss happen, anyway. She does kiss her female friend in an incredibly sensual scene where they talk about how they're friends. I love that ambiguity! I think the scene was shot like porn (good porn!), pretty much -- all that skin and close-ups and looking at each other in the eye and Sophie's fingers on Hanna's wrist. And so on. But they talk about being friends. Sophie said earlier that she'd like to be a lesbian... but Hanna's kiss is like a friend kiss. Or is it? It's so undefined! It makes me really happy.

I loved Cate Blanchett. She's amazing. She's hot. Her character was really interesting. Before the movie, one of my friends said that she suspected Cate Blanchett's character Marissa will be Hanna's mother, and she disliked it because it would be such a cliché. After the movie, my friends talked about how Marissa wasn't the mother... but I think she was! She says Johanna was Hanna's biological mother, and I interpreted that to mean that Marissa is Hanna's genetic mother. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't mind either way.

I loved how competent all of the characters are: Marissa is deadly and good at what she does, Hanna is, and Hanna's father Erik is, too.

And I loved Hanna's relationship with Erik. My friends ridiculed how Erik kept Hanna hidden (in Finland, by the way -- the scenes were actually shot in Finland, too) and then let her flip the switch that announced their presence to the CIA -- why didn't they keep hiding from Marissa? But I loved that Erik taught Hanna so much and told her a story about a woman who killed her mother and who Hanna would have to kill some day. I loved that Hanna had to learn that Erik wasn't her biological father, and that Erik insisted that he was Hanna's father in another sense, having taken care of her since she was a baby. I loved the family fight that was a real, violent, potentially lethal fight between equal opponents, and that after the fight when Hanna ran away, Erik was able to tell her what he wanted her to know. It was a really satisfying scene. I was afraid that Hanna would run away and later find out that Erik was desperately trying to tell her something but she didn't listen, or something stupid like that. This was so much better!

I just watched the trailer and omg, it SUCKS. How did they manage to make that fascinating movie sound so boring and -- argh.

Don't mind me. I just, this movie spoke to me and I feel like the rest of the world sees it very differently.

When I was sixteen, I started to write an epic fantasy novel. It was about an assassin who was a loner and roamed around the country, killing people for a criminal organisation. The idea compelled me and I kept writing that story for years: I wrote several chapters of it (which was a lot for me, a lot), and then I got better as a writer and I had to start all over again, and I wrote even more chapters. The assassin just fascinated me as a character. A major plotline in her life was a time when a man took her in and convinced her that he was her father, and later she found out that he wasn't.

I was astonished how similar Hanna as a movie is to my epic fantasy novel (which I never finished, and gave up maybe five years ago). A woman who's a killer, who doesn't have many significant relationships in her life, and who has a conflicted relationship to a man who claims to be her father.

As weird as it is, I really identify with Hanna in a way I pretty much never identify with female characters in fiction. It's because she seems queer (which I am) and because she's so dangerous and fearless (which I wish I was, not that I want to kill anyone). I think I want to see this movie again. I haven't felt so smitten with a fictional piece in a long time!