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 Did Erik regularly go back for more current reading material, or is all her information over a decade out of date?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.
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.
Yes, the CIA is an American operation, but it is a foreign intelligence agency and does most of its work outside of America. In fact, the CIA is near notorious for having "black sites" around the world.
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.
Erik was established to have gone off the map in 1994 and to have been framed for Johanna's murder in 1996, both many years after Poland ceased being Communist
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.
Marissa asks Erik this question when they meet in Berlin, and his answer is, "kids grow up". Based on the beginning of the movie, it's pretty obvious that now that Hanna is becoming an adult, she wants more out of life than living in the woods and never meeting anyone, and Erik realizes this. That's why he gives her the chance to leave. However, this raises a further question: since the CIA doesn't know what Hanna looks like now that she's grown up, nor do they know where in the world she is, why not just set up a false identity for her and not get Marissa involved with her at all? Even if they couldn't do this in Finland (every Finn has a unique identity number, which is required for setting up a bank account, renting an apartment, visiting the hospital, etc; so starting a life in Finland without one would be quite difficult), surely they could travel to some other country so Hanna could start a life there. (This seems to have been how the clown guy in Berlin was supposed to help Hanna, as he had a blank passport for her.) It's not like the CIA was gonna do random DNA tests to all blonde teenagers across the world, just in case they might catch Hanna. And, if Erik wanted Marissa dead so there would absolutely no knowledge of Hanna's true identity left, why didn't he kill Marissa herself? Why get Hanna involved in that?
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 a suit?
Joe Wright himself admitted that that was kinda unbelievable, and that he probably should have stuck a fur coat on him or something.
He didn't go all the way to Germany. He stopped somewhere in Denmark.
Kind of What Happened to the Mouse? - what happened to the technician uttering "God, help me" during Hanna's escape from Marocco base? If Hanna shoot him, why bother with ordering him to enter the locker? If she left him alive, why then she shoot at something? This keeps bugging me months after watching the film.
Whether or not she killed him was probably meant to be ambiguous.
Then why did she fired her gun? Making that kind of sound is rather jarring when you are trying to stealthy escape.
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.
Was Hanna being albinoid ever confirmed by Word of God, or is it just Fanon?
Hanna is a platinum blonde, not an albino.
Erik's last stand at the playground outside the apartments. Why did he spin the roundabout after killing the first hitman? Also, why did it spin afterwards even with the weight of both of their bodies?
Probably because he didn't have time to check if the first guy was down before he had to face Isaacs, and he wanted to hinder the guy from getting up again in case he was still alive. And the roundabout could have been pushed by wind.
How did Hanna, her pursuers, and Sophie get into the container park? Those places have security fences.
How on Earth can CIA send helicopters into Finland on a mission? Finland's not a NATO country, and the authorities would not look kindly at a foreign intelligence service violating the airspace, let alone carrying out an attempted assassination.
The thing about covert operations agencies is that they tend to perform operations covertly. Also, just because Finland isn't in NATO does not mean it isn't an ally of the US — not all US allies are in NATO and that's not even what NATO is about. Besides, even if Finland did object, it's not about to go to war with the US over it. Most of the time when these things do happen, the "host" country puts out a statement of "disapproval" and leave it at that.
2019-20 Series
In "The Trial," we see how Marissa figured out that Hanna had gone to the Passway facility in Charleroi. But how in the devil did Marissa figure out that Hanna was in a running gun battle, and then make her way into the Passway executives' parking garage just in time to come to Hanna's rescue?
" around the world.