Hanna/Headscratchers

• Hanna is supposed to be trained as the perfect assassin, but she genuinely thinks the double is the real Marissa. Shouldn't her dad have gone over the concept of that trick as something the CIA would possibly pull?
  • Particularly as the double's wig comes off when she's killed.
  • I thought that, given how obsessed Marissa is with the whole project, it made sense for the dad to think she'd want to handle it personally.
  • Also: the movie makes it pretty clear that though Hanna can track and kill with the best of them, she still lacks a certain social awareness that would've prompted her to at least suspect the fake Marrissa. It was probably her Raised by Wolves background that hindered her on that one.
  • In my opinion it's from the fact that she had never seen Marissa at all.
  • I disagree. My interpretation of that scene was that Hanna could hear the real Marissa's voice in the double's earpiece and immediately knew she was an impostor. That's when she decided to feign her breakdown and got into the perfect position to kill the impostor and use her as a bullet shield.
  • Hanna sent a postcard to Erik telling her "The Witch is Dead", and after the fight with the four agents, Erik asks when the order was sent by her, and is visibly frustrated when he has confirmation that Marissa is still alive. Without any sort of photo, the best Erik could do was a description, and the double would more than likely match up to any description he could produce (and that's assuming he did describe her. With how much time has passed, any change would render the description pointless). She had very little reason to suspect that the double was anyone other than Marissa, with Erik likely telling Hanna Marissa would personally see her herself.
  • It's entirely possible that 'the witch is dead' is a reference to the first step of the plan being successful, or some other sort of code, or was purposefully obscure so if it was intercepted, other agents would think they thought Marissa was dead. I interpreted it as the movie trying to leave whether Hanna knew/suspected the fake was a fake as purposefully obscure.

• It's a bit irritating that Hanna's been isolated from civilization since the pre-Google era, but takes to internet searching quite readily. Did Erik regularly go back for more current reading material, or is all her information over a decade out of date?
  • There were other people using computers there, so probably she just watched what they were doing and figured it out. She is shown gradually adjusting more and more to the world.
  • This troper believes that Erik isolated her from modern technology a bit too much for her own good. She was trained to be this awesome fighter who is supposed to keep her guard up at all times, but an electric water heater, some lights and a TV set overwhelm her to the point where she reveals information that she definitely shouldn't be sharing ("I'm from the woods"). Also, it would have been really easy to kill her in that scene. He should have shown her those things so she'd be better prepared for her mission.
  • A deleted scene establishes that she had to ask for help with the computer, and was shown how to search. This troper basically assumes that scene is still canon.

• The CIA is an American organization, yet why would they bring Hanna to a secret base somewhere in Northern Africa?
  • Presumably to make it less likely for more White Hat elements in the government to unearth their work and compromise it.
• On a related note, the CIA super-soldier program was operating in Poland, and active 14+ years ago. In 1987 Poland was still a Warsaw Pact member with a Communist government. How exactly was the CIA running a top-secret research facility in Communist territory in the middle of the Cold War?
  • 2011 - 14 = 1997 duh.
• Why did they ever leave Finland? Obviously from a Doylist perspective, it was to give the movie a plot. But in-universe that move was absolutely the worst possible decision for everyone involved. Erik could have kept the radio transmitter to himself, or better yet broken it first thing, and Hanna would have gotten to live out her life peacefully hunting reindeer in the tundra with her dad. And if he didn't want to stay out there, fine, teach her what she needs to know to survive and hightail it. By giving her the choice to leave (which he must have known wasn't really a choice at all with the way he played it up) he knowingly put his daughter in even graver danger than she'd already been in, caused her intense emotional distress, and got a whole slew of people (including innocent children) brutally murdered. And all he offers as explanation is a vague sentiment about teenage independence? It's almost like he really didn't care about her welfare at all, she was just a tool to get revenge on Marissa.
  • The idea might have been that Hanna would never be safe while Marissa was still around so the only way to leave the forest and have a normal life was to kill her first, meaning they had to reveal themselves. Still seems a stretch though.
• What happened to the nice English family who'd helped Hanna? Were they killed, just left to starve in those shipping crates, let go, what?
  • A (German) poster later in the says they are missing, so we can assume it was nothing good.
  • The original script has Hanna sending Sophie a postcard at the end, so if you want to go with the happiest ending possible, there it is.
• How the hell did Erik manage to (apparently) swim across the North Sea from Finland to Germany, over thousands of miles of ice-cold water?
  • Adding to that, how the hell did he survive that blizzard at the start in just a suit?
    • The Director himself admits that Erik walking out into a Blizzard while only wearing a suit kinda ruins the believability of the movie and admits that he should've at least stuck a fur coat on him.
• How could Erik possibly consider Hanna "ready" to go after Marissa? All she knows of the world outside of the forest is what she got from an encyclopedia! Would it really have been so dangerous to take her to cities every now and then so she would at least have SOME idea of what was waiting for her? Even if the CIA has eyes and ears all over the world, they can't be everywhere at once.