We watched Hanna the other night, and I simultaneously enjoyed it very much and was very unsettled by it. Given that it's a movie about a teenage assassin, the former is probably more surprising then the latter, but oh well. Part of the appeal for me arose from the fact that it is filmed in several different countries, including Finland, Morocco, and Germany, and that we see them through the eyes of an innocent yet lethal girl, who has been completely isolated from the world for her entire life. Somehow the sights are more captivating, the people more fascinating, and the colors more intense, juxtaposed as they are with the primitive white wilderness where the film begins. Towards the end of Hanna we encounter an abandoned theme park in Berlin that I found especially haunting... especially because I vaguely remembered that it was an actual place called Spreepark, photos of which I had seen online in the past (I'll just confess now, I have a morbid weakness for urban decay). So after the movie ended, I went and googled them up... and spent the next 45 minutes weirdly entranced. Take a look!
In case you're too lazy to click a link, here's a peak:
In Hanna, this rollercoaster is a wolf's mouth, a la Little Red Riding Hood.
I'll just tell you now, an evening of Hanna + an hour spent glued to photos of abandoned Spreepark = really, REALLY weird dreams that night.
As it turns out, Spreepark has quite a sullied history, complete with a bankrupt owner who smuggled amusement park rides to Peru, which seems rather fitting given the violence it witnesses in Hanna. Abandoned in 2002, the amusement park's website is even still in existence. It's currently fenced off rather thoroughly as I understand it, and there may or may not be a caretaker who lives there with a dog to keep out nosy tourists and photographers, so if you're planning a spur-of-the-moment trip to Berlin to investigate you may want to keep that in mind. I wish they would open it for walking tours or something. As a piece of history and evidence of how nature takes over once people step out, it really is an intriguing site... and of course, it's deliciously creepy too. Even aside from Hanna, Spreepark certainly will capture the imagination!
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I just came across this when i was researching spreepark after watching hanna myself...i am fascinated by it and want to go so bad! im weirdly obsessed with abandoned theme parks right now but this is the best!
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