10 Movies That Explained Way Too Much

Hannibal Rising is one of a couple prequels on this list. Prequels are hard. They are penned in on every side by narrative events they have to lead into and expectations from people that liked the original. And, while getting background information on characters, worlds, and events we’ve grown to love can be exciting, it often ends up being disappointing. There’s a fine line between having our understanding and love for familiar characters and worlds expanded and having the very things we love about those characters destroyed in over-explanation. Hannibal Rising is one of the best examples of the latter.

Hannibal, as a character, both in the novels and the films, tended to get less interesting the more the post-Silence of the Lambs works focused on him and that trend reached its peak with Hannibal Rising: a film that tries to take a deep dive into a transgressive, mysterious character and ends up making him a pretty standard revenge-thriller antihero. One of the best things about Hannibal is that there is something otherworldly about him. Mads Mikkelsen and Anthony Hopkins both manage to expertly layer their performance with a hint of something alien, something not-quite-human. He’s a monstrous, Gothic villain, perhaps more like Dracula than an actual serial killer (in narrative effect, if not physiologically). Instead of preserving that mystique, Hannibal Rising teaches us that Hannibal became like this because of the Nazis.

The movie itself explains Hannibal’s origins through his quest for revenge against a group of German soldiers who killed his beloved sister. If you wanted to know what made Hannibal that fascinating villain who you could never quite comprehend, that’s it. Nazis and revenge.

I have nothing but sympathy for the people who had to make this film. They were making a film whose entire point is ultimately to undermine one of 20th century cinema’s most memorable villains. The NBC Hannibal series managed to engage with this material and salvage it, using it to bring us closer in sympathy to Hannibal without removing that sense of otherworldliness. Exploring Hannibal’s background, it seems, can be done in a way that respects what made the character great. Hannibal Rising just wasn’t the film to do it and, to even consider it canon is to mostly destroy the Hannibal Lecter we became invested in in the first place.