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Created Nov 09, 2007 09:29PM PST • Edited Nov 09, 2007 09:29PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Pretty Bad 1.5

   The story takes place with young Hannibal (Aaron Tomas) and his family. The family is being torn apart by the war. One day, his mom is hit and she dies. Hannibal is left to take care of his sister, Mischa (Helena Lia Tachovska). This proves to be a very challenging task when a group of Nazi men find them in the house and capture them. At first, they are just looking for valuables and if anyone comes they will claim to have saved the children. One man comes back who was sent to get food. All he comes up with is one dead, frozen animal with maggots on it. After some hesitation, the leader digs in and says they will eat or die. Translated this means that they have all turned in to cannibals and the main dish is children. They go after Mischa and Hannibal tries to stop them, but it is hopeless.
   8 years later, Hannibal (Ulliel) is briefly in an orphanage. He has no likings for the rules and makes it a point to get out of there as soon as he can. Hannibal manages to make it to France in hopes of staying with his uncle. Unfortunately, his uncle, like almost all his other family and everyone he has ever cared about, is dead too. The women his uncle married is still there though and she takes in Hannibal. She feels for him, because she can relate to loss and him being part of something she has lost makes her want to hold on to him. In her defense Hannibal even kills his first victim. Hannibal does end up going to medical school though.
   In time, his aunt helps him piece through what really happened when he lost Mischa. Before that he would just have flashbacks in his dreams about it, but he would never see the ending, he would just wake up screaming. Now he has found the truth that he has longed to know, yet he is furious that this was what really happened. He goes back to his old house (that is still just as they left it all these years later). He finds one of the men who was responsible for Mischa’s death. He makes him tell him where the other men are and still kills him. He basically does this with everyone of these men that he comes across until he is done with them all.

4. Acting

   Barely OK 2.0

   The acting was alright. It just seems like it was wasted on this film. Gaspard Ulliel does not seem like Hannibal Lector at all, even a younger more inexperienced version of him. I just couldn’t help but think these characters belong in another movie.

5. Male Stars Barely OK 2.0

6. Female Stars Barely OK 2.0

7. Female Costars Barely OK 2.0

8. Male Costars Barely OK 2.0

10. Film

    Bad 1.0

    I was skeptical going in to this, because it was a prequel. It wasn’t a good prequel, but not for the reasons I thought it might not be. It seems like lately horror remakes, prequels, or sequels that are bad, fail because they try to over do things. In Hannibal Rising, they under do far too many things. Everything was far too easy. How did he just find the guys after all that time? If he did, he would have to have advanced connections. He wouldn’t have any way of getting these and even if he did, he didn’t know the names of the men who killed his sister. He wouldn’t be able to just magically find them. If Hannibal had an uncle and he knew it, why wasn’t he sent to live with him in the first place if he could live with the widow later? Would he even realistically been able to make that trip on his own? The forming of the true Hannibal would have had more dramatic changes as he was going through everything. Simple isn’t him, everything would be much more elaborate and complex. This movie went extremely slow. It didn’t seem American at all, but one with at least foreign influences. The other movies seemed to have so much style. They drew me in and they were so much more intense. There were a few gory moments, but that wasn’t until the ending when I had pretty much given up on the film. I want to say that they just didn’t pace this right but as a whole it kind of just bored me, which isn’t too common for a horror movie.

11. Direction Bad 1.0

12. Play Bad 1.0

13. Music Bad 1.0

14. Visuals Bad 1.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.0

    There are some fighting scenes as Hannibal becomes more violent. There is one fairly gory scene when Hannibal commits his first murder. The most horrifying part of the film is what isn’t seen though; the cannibalism done to his sister. This has the largest effect, haunting Hannibal’s dreams.

17. Sex Titillating 2.0

18. Violence Fierce 2.0

19. Rudeness Salty 2.0

21. Reality

    Glib 2.0

    I think showing what had happened to him and his sister in the beginning was a good idea. It was a real life event that they made sicker with the circumstances. However, they managed to dwell on it too long and still didn’t do enough with it. I understand an event like that messing up a person. I can even believe that it would have that affect on him, although he did seem like a pretty unnatural character, but not for this movie. If this was just some movie about that experience I would by it and would probably have been a decent movie. That is the only reason why I gave this movie a grade this high. My enjoyment factor was about a D- maybe, but I felt I needed to base it more on the factor of the actual quality of the film. As a Hannibal movie it sucks, under other circumstances on its own it could have been okay. Anyone who goes to see this isn’t looking for some slow-paced, foreign like movie. If they are going they want to see Hannibal and how he came to be. This movie does a pretty crappy job of that because I did not believe this was Hannibal for one second. I thought surely this must just be some guy with the same name. Maybe he could pass as a distant relative of some sort, but not the man himself. Hannibal is way more sick, twisted, and complex than this. The mind of Hannibal could make one hell of an interesting movie. There was so much that could have been done with this and we ended up with this? What was Thomas Harris thinking with this film? He wrote it just like the others, yet this one ended up having hardly any similarities and falling so short.

22. Circumstantial Glib 2.0

23. Biological Glib 2.0

24. Physical Glib 2.0