Hanna Shows What A Jason Bourne Prequel Should Be
Hanna contains many familiar elements of the Bourne franchise but it works as a better pseudo-Jason Bourne prequel than USA Network’s Treadstone.
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Warning: SPOILERS for Hanna Season 3.
Now that Hanna has ended with season 3, Amazon Prime Video’s action-thriller series is essentially the Jason Bourne prequel Treadstone failed to be. In Hanna season 3, Hanna (Esmé Creed-Miles) teams up with Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos) to take down UTRAX and its villainous Chairman, Gordon Evans (Ray Liotta). Hanna’s coming of age story as a super-soldier bred to kill by the CIA echoes the story of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) but Hanna is a more successful story than USA Network’s Treadstone, which was canceled after one season.
Movie audiences were introduced to Jason Bourne in 2002’s The Bourne Identity. Jason was an amnesiac who learned he was a CIA assassin. Worse for Bourne, the secret program that made him a killer, Treadstone, decided he was a target that needed to be eliminated. Throughout the Bourne trilogy, which encompassed 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, Jason discovered his real name – David Webb – and the truth about his origins. Bourne also took down Treadstone and its replacement program, Blackbriar. The Bourne saga continued with 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, which was the story of a different Blackbriar assassin, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner). Matt Damon returned for another sequel, 2016’s Jason Bourne, before USA Network’s failed Treadstone, a 2019 prequel series depicting the origin of the CIA’s Treadstone program told through the eyes of multiple Bourne-like assassins in different timelines.
The three seasons of Hanna do a much better job as a pseudo-Jason Bourne prequel than Treadstone. Taken as a whole, Hanna is the story of the teenage super-soldier’s journey from an innocent child into an independent young woman told in three acts. Like Treadstone, Hanna is adapted from a successful feature film but, as Hanna progressed, the show quickly moved beyond the story of the 2011 Hanna movie directed by Joe Wright into intriguing new territory. Amazon Prime’s series opened up Hanna’s world by introducing UTRAX and the reason why Hanna was genetically engineered with wolf DNA from birth to become a super-assassin. But Hanna was focused on the title character’s growth and maturity as Hanna was forced to fend for herself after she became orphaned. By contrast, Treadstone wasn’t about Jason Bourne. Plus Treadstone’s bouncing back and forth between Treadstone agents in the 1970s and present-day was confusing and didn’t allow audiences the same intimate character story as Hanna did with its eponymous young super-soldier.
The similarities between Treadstone and Hanna are hard to miss. Both shows involve top-secret CIA operations trying to create the perfect government killers. Their best assassins then attempt to take their organizations down from the inside. But Hanna season 2 struck upon another ingenious innovation by creating the Meadows, a school for UTRAX’s female teen assassins that ultimately recruited Hanna into the fold and remade her as their agent named Mia Wolff. The Meadows took the idea of highly-trained killers and merged it with a Harry Potter-like boarding school in the United Kingdom. Hanna also introduced compelling teenage foils for Hanna like her archrival, Sandy Phillips (Áine Rose Daly), and Sandy’s best friend, Jules Allen (Gianna Kiehl). Sandy was essentially the perfect schoolgirl/psychotic assassin and she was everything Hanna didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, Jules developed a conscience and she ultimately joined Hanna and turned on UTRAX in season 3.
Hanna’s relationships with her key parental figures, her late father Erik Heller (Joel Kinnaman) and Marissa Wiegler, are more deeply personal and emotionally nuanced than Treadstone’s agents’ interactions with their CIA overseers like Ellen Becker (Michelle Forbes). Ultimately, Treadstone’s disappointment proved that audiences aren’t interested in the Bourne universe if Jason Bourne isn’t at the center of the action. This is a mistake Hanna didn’t make because Amazon Prime’s show told its story completely about Hanna, how she came of age, and how she got to choose her own destiny. If the Bourne franchise ever attempts an actual prequel origin about Jason Bourne, it would do well to follow the lessons of what made Hanna a successful series about the young super-soldier.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/hanna-show-jason-bourne-prequel-better/