Warning: SPOILERS for Hanna.
The Hanna TV series also makes some significant changes to Hanna’s origin story. In both versions of Hanna, the young girl is raised in the forest and trained to fight and survive by a former soldier named Erik Heller, played by Eric Bana in the film and by Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad) in the series. Heller saves the baby Hanna from a CIA facility and tries to escape with her mother Johanna, but she is killed and Erik must raise Hanna alone.
They then hatch a plot to confront Marissa Weigler, the CIA agent who is hunting them and was in charge of the program that made Hanna; Marissa was played by Cate Blanchett in the film and by Mireille Enos (The Killing) in the series.
After Hanna’s birth, Johanna realized she made a mistake and pleaded for Erik to rescue her baby. Erik had fallen in love with Johanna and agreed; he broke into UTrax and stole Hanna. After they escaped, the CIA ordered Marissa to destroy the evidence and kill the rest of the babies. Despite her reservations, Marissa followed orders and had all of the babies burned in an incinerator. She then attempted to recover Hanna but Johanna was killed in the process while Erik and the infant Hanna disappeared into the forest, where Erik raised her in secret for over 15 years.
What Are Hanna’s Skills And Abilities?
Hanna is a more character-driven and grounded story so, despite her being a super-soldier, fans expecting Hanna to have comic book-style superhuman powers like Captain America might be disappointed. Hanna’s abilities are more understated but when she fights, it’s clear that Hanna possesses superior strength, speed, agility, more finely attuned senses, and the capacity to learn quickly.
Hanna doesn’t perform feats of strength and it’s not clear exactly how strong she is but Hanna can typically knock out soldiers with one punch. She doesn’t run at superhuman speed but her reflexes are faster than normal, so she can disarm an opponent and react much faster than even a trained soldier. She is also extremely agile and she can leap further than a normal person as well as fall from great heights and land on her feet. Her sharper senses allow her to listen and detect when danger is coming and her greater visual acuity helps make her an expert marksman with a gun or bow and arrow.
Hanna also possesses a great deal of stamina; she can go for long periods of time without eating (she often refuses meals claiming she isn’t hungry, but when she does it, she prefers chocolate bars), but she does need to sleep. Hanna is also a quick study; she watched Erik hotwire a car and immediately knew how to do it and despite growing up in a forest, she quickly learned how to drive.
There Are More Super-Soldiers Like Hanna
The CIA quickly restarted UTrax under the designation UTrax Regenesis in 2004. More babies were experimented on by Dr. Roland Kunek (Noah Taylor). There are over a dozen recruits with Hanna’s abilities that have been trained to be super-soldiers since birth and are kept under control by Dr. Kunek’s unspecified medication. And, like, Hanna, all of the UTrax Regenesis recruits are female. When Hanna learns there are others like her, her goal is to set them free from their programming.
