martiniboys event calendar «»January 2009 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa         1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

annibal Rising" is a prequel of sorts, about how the killer Hannibal Lecter ("The Silence of the Lambs") came to be. While "Manhunter" was a gripping thriller, "The Silence of the Lambs" a masterpiece and "Hannibal" a farce, Hannibal Rising goes to suspiciously shallow lengths to show how Hannibal became a monster and cannibal, how he developed his distaste for sadistic jailers and contempt for law enforcement.

The movie, adapted from the Thomas Harris novel and screenplay, drags us back to 1944, when Hannibal is a young boy (Aaron Thomas) in a horrific wartime period with his beloved little sister, Mischa (Tachovska): Times are rough, and the wealthy Lecter family has been forced to flee its estate in Lithuania and take refuge in a nearby hunting lodge.

Their estate has become a battleground during Russian-German fighting, and within the first 10 minutes of the movie, we watch Hannibal shelter his tiny sister after a fiery exchange between a Russian tank and a German plane leaves both parents dead. Soon they're trapped with looters in a freezing house where the food has run out. Then, five starving Lithuanian Nazis eat his sister.

Cut to eight years later, where a vengeful teenage Hannibal, now played by the 22-year-old Frenchman Gaspard Ulliel, is tormented by nightmares about his sister's awful fate as he travels throughout Europe in search of a home. The young Hannibal by chance encounters out Lady Murasaki, the fabulously rich and beautiful Japanese widow of his Parisian uncle (Gong Li), who gives him a place to stay and helps him deal with his dreams over the fate of his sister.