Take AMAZON PRIME which seems determined to destroy any bright spots of this era by offering rank trash like HAND OF GOD, ALPHA HOUSE, JEAN-CLAUDE VAN JOHNSON, TOM CLANCY'S JACK RYAN and, now, HANNA.
Back in 2011, the film HANNA was released. Eric Bana played Erik, Hanna's father. The two lived in the woods of Finland. No this isn't a foreign version of LEAVE NO TRACE where a veteran and his daughter go off the grid in a park. The film HANNA was about a CIA project where infants had their DNA enhanced and Erik trains Hanna in the wild to take on the project.
It's not really a complicated or surprising plot but actors like Bana and Cate Blanchett filled out the weak story, flooded it with something more.
Neither Bana nor Blanchett are part of AMAZON's HANNA. But, for the TV series, they've cast two strong actors -- Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos. The two last worked together in THE KILLING. They are capable of great acting. They aren't capable of rescuing a skit passed off as a script. They try and they are surely the best things about HANNA but they can only do so much.
19-year-old Esme Creed-Miles is . . . What? We started to say "cast in the lead role;" however, there's no role there. Hanna, in the film, wasn't much but she wasn't three steps below a Neanderthal.
Both feral and primal, but in the most rudimentary way, somehow Hanna never comes off as either threatening or remotely interesting. She's like the visuals, flat and uninteresting. The whole thing is so dull it's hard to believe it was rushed or that rushing it to film is the reason its fails to achieve anything. It's a really ugly looking show and it's a really ugly offering to viewers. Even syndicated offerings like XENA built on mythos and the classic heroes journey. HANNA just offers ugly looks at pre-humanity and tries to pass them off as something more than the limited ravings of an untalented mind.
Clearly, David Farr, who was brought in for a re-write of the film HANNA, wasn't up to being the creator of this series -- or the writer of seven of the eight episodes.
It's a cheap show, as cheap as CNN's RELIABLE SOURCES which spent today whining about FOX NEWS and how it makes people not believe journalism.
Brian Stelter, still looking like the world's ugliest transvestite, basically spent the show repeating what S.E. Cupp had said to him on CNN the night before.
It made no sense on Saturday and even less on Sunday. If journalists aren't trusted, they've earned that. They do not produce hard hitting stories. They are not muckrakers. They are declawed tabbies writing up press releases and worse.
Trust?
They deserve none. The Iraq War has not ended and it has still not had a truthful accounting from the American media. The media lied to sell it and it still can't get honest about it. They have a long, long history of lying. Take Dan Rather reporting on the the assassination of JFK, specifically the Zapruder film, November 25, 1963.
He flat out lied to the American people -- as would become obvious with the 1975 release of the actual film. He was part of an organized deception by CBS NEWS -- as James DiEugenio explained in 2016 at CONSORTIUM NEWS.
Stelter was having a fit over an error FOX NEWS had made -- and corrected within hours -- where they mistakenly identified Central America as Mexico. But the problem isn't the stories they correct, it is the errors they never, ever own. That's what has eroded any trust the public might have in the media. Stelter's fact-free criticism was about as helpful as the "Hefty Shades of Gray" episode of FAMILY GUY.
Refusing to own the media's desire to overthrow President Donald Trump for the last two years won't make that reality go away nor will it excuse it. For over two years, the media has done everything but journalism. Those were their actions and their choices. They should own them and admit to them. Refusal to do so will only lead more people to doubt the media.
Before 2016, the media had given the public many reasons to mistrust it. But with the emergence of Donald Trump as a candidate for president, those reasons only multiplied. Pretending otherwise won't help anyone.