Hannibal Rising is a 2007 feature film thriller, a prequel to
Manhunter, its remake Red
Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and
Hannibal. It is the fifth film to feature Dr.
Hannibal Lecter. The film is an adaptation of Thomas Harris's 2006 novel of the same name and tells the story of how Lecter becomes 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 Companyand 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.
Synopsis
This prequel shows a young Hannibal Lecter from childhood in Lithuania, to his teen and
young adulthood years in France, and up to his arrival in North
America.
At the beginning of the film, Lecter is a boy of 8 years (1944), who lives in Lecter Castle in Lithuania. 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 but 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 force 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. She
manages to get him to speak for the first time, 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 was
fishing, Lecter requests an apology from him, and is denied. He disembowels the butcher
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 dog-tags of the group of deserters who had killed his sister. Dortlich attempts to kill him
but is incapacitated by Lecter. After he buries Mischa's remains, Lecter ties Dortlich to a tree and forces Dortlich 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
and notices Mischa's bracelet on her. He then gives Kolnas' dogtag to her. Kolnas enters the restaurant, but Hannibal is
persuaded not to murder him, by his Aunt, 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 helped 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 get 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 shower. 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.
Differences between the book and the film
- In the book, Hannibal's uncle does not die in the war, but travels to Lithuania and brings Hannibal 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 Hannibal got the horse when he returns to Lithuania. The book explains that Hannibal stole
him 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 Hannibal and Lady Murasaki to discover who stole them.
- In the book, Hannibal 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, Hannibal 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.
Cast
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.
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 heard of the Goldberg Variations is the 1955 recording by Glenn Gould. In the other movies featuring Hannibal Lecter, the recording used is the 1981 recording by
Glenn Gould of the Goldberg Variations.
- 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 Lecter's medical studies, he experiments on the brain of a cadaver, another plot point in Hannibal, however in that particular instance, the subject was still alive.
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% "Rotten" on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes, with a
very low 8% Cream of the Crop rating [1]. 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 [2]. In its second
week of release Hannibal Rising dropped to #7 at the box office, making only $5.5 million, a 59% 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% 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).
Rating
The MPAA rated this film R for strong grisly violent content
and some language/sexual references.[citation needed]
External links
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