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Originally I was not going to see this, as there is no point in seeing it. Now I still know that AND I've seen it.
de Laurentis forced Thomas Harris' hand in the creation of this story. After 'Hannibal', de Laurentis told Harris that he was going to do the origins story, whether Harris wanted to write it or not. So poor Harris coughed up a book and a screenplay (and I'm not touching 'Hannibal Rising' because I got all the Lecter origins story I needed from the few paragraphs regarding Mischa in 'Hannibal').
This is what happens when a rich producer forces creative talent to go where it shouldn't: utter disaster. This story is NOT about Hannibal Lecter of "Silence" or of "Red Dragon" or even of "Hannibal". This is a different character, with different details coloring his life. I think the main actor does an okay job of nailing the Hannibal looks but he is atrocious with dialogue.
Obviously, production value is outstanding but sadly the script does not rise to meet it.
This is a straightforward revenge for Mischa's death, and it is a BAD origins story.
I expected the majority of it to be set during Hannibal's childhood, and if I were directing this, it would have been an art-house cannibal piece set entirely during Hannibal's childhood and ending with him escaping the ravenous creatures who devoured his sister. AT least I could have got a shot of when Hannibal finds Mischa's tooth in the men's stool and realizes then what has happened to his sister (it's a repeated memory in 'Hannibal' book).
Instead, this movie gives an outrageous plot of a young Hannibal attending medical school and accomplishing his first few murders and learning how cherished and yummy cheeks are. For a film about the penultimate serial killer cannibal, this movie has minimal killing and NO cannibalism on screen AT ALL. What a fucking waste of time and time and time and money and Harris' talent!!!! Dino de Laurentis: whut a cant.
This has to be one of the single worst movies I have ever forced myself to watch in my lifetime. I only watched it for a girl I liked at the time, and even as obsessed with her as I was, I couldn’t force myself to like this.
The entire movie is a cliché inside of a cliché. You think you’ve seen cliché movies before, right? Disturbia, 30 Days of Night, The Mist, The Decent. You know the list. But this movie makes all those movies look like the height of originality. It basically takes everything the History Channel has to say about the most average, lame, predictable serial killer alive and dumbs it down into a movie script.
In other words, you’ve seen this movie before if you’re over the age of 9 and have any idea about generic serial killers in children’s books.
Hannibal himself looks like a prettyboy. Wait! An emo prettyboy who is too much of a pansy to get over his “traumatic” (but not graphic) events of his childhood, which is yet another cliché.
I’d also like to know why on earth this was rated R. There is nothing more graphic in this movie than you could see on your standard TV show. I was so insanely bored with it I was about to punch out the TV.
I’ve seen bad movies. This isn’t a bad movie: it’s a training video for hell.
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