Occasionally, and by that I mean most of the time, the world doesn’t make sense to me. Why Hanna wasn’t an instant mainstream-via-left-field success is baffling. But then, my country just re-elected a robot who eats kittens for breakfast. That just shows to go ya, the world is the kind of crazy place where a film of this calibre can’t seem to find its audience.

Or perhaps it did find its audience. This audience is the intersection of a Venn diagram showing “film snobs” and “action movie fans”. I feel like this should really encompass most of the film-going public. But perhaps I’m being idealistic.

Okay, I’ll put my cards on the table right here. Hanna was nearly tailor-made to my exact tastes in movies.

Revenge; preternaturally intelligent children; chillingly cold-blooded natural born killers, genetically modified superbeings; chase movies where the protagonist has to improvise weapons to survive; the CIA reduced to a cartoonish stereotype; Cate Blanchett with red hair and a tight skirt; euro-flavoured coming of age road trips; overuse of selective focus … all these boxes get checked off.

And they’re not checked-off in typical Hollywood slap-dash fashion either. The film is paced immaculately, it’s well-acted (Saoirise Ronan is enchanting in the titular role), the cinematography is excellent, the Chemical Brothers score is perfectly matched to what’s happening on screen. Though it’s ultimately one long inevitable trainwreck of violence, the train makes frequent stops in picturesque locations to explore the human condition.

And, really, this is why stories of super-human beings trying to find their place in the world are so popular. From Superman to Spock to Buffy (or any given Milla Jovovich character), they give us an exaggerated, blown-up, pre-digested, easy to read view of ourselves. Hanna gives us the opportunity to muse about what it means to be human for 90 minutes. Well, 30-40 minutes, the rest of the movie, the part people will tell their friends about, is punch-kick-punch and bang-boom-bang.

It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say Hanna is basically The Bourne Identity meets a teenage La Femme Nikita. When that description was inevitably voiced at the pitch meeting, everyone in the room must have had one thought: “We’re going to make bank.”

With the current popularity of the Hunger Games book series (is it a coincidence both Hanna and Katniss prefer a bow?) as well as riding on the immense hype of the concurrently released Suckerpunch, I’m sure executives thought this was an ace in the hole. Since Kick Ass, the popularity of lethal teenage heroines has been riding an all-time high and seeing as how well-made this film is (it’s no Suckerpunch) it should have been a hit. So what went wrong?

It could be a tale of two trailers. One that made people sit up and say “Holy shit this is gonna be awesome!” and one that made people say “meh.”

Months in advance of the release date, I got chills watching the Apple Trailers clip three times in a row. I started posting my excitement on every social media outlet available to me. Twitter, Facebook, forums, and message boards all got a taste of my unusually high level of excitement. The reaction I expected, one of general agreement, was not forth-coming. Instead people said, “Hanna? Really? I thought the trailer I saw looked pretty cheesy and kinda boring.”

Needless to say after watching the below trailer a few more times I was utterly baffled.

Okay. Maybe it’s not everyone’s exact cup of tea—as it happens to be mine—but surely “cheesy” and “boring” aren’t words anyone would use to describe what they just witnessed.

It wasn’t until a week after the film opened I learned there was another trailer. One that does indeed make the film appear contrived, hackneyed, cheesy, derivative, laughable and generally pretty crappy. The world started to make sense again.

Guess which trailer most people saw?

This happens from time to time. A poorly cut trailer targeted to the wrong audience kills a movie as succinctly as a preternaturally intelligent, genetically modified teenage assassin.

Ironically, the studio didn’t take the film’s own tagline to heart: Adapt or Die. When Hanna didn’t slay at the box office they didn’t adapt their attack, they let just left her out in the cold to die.

Which is too bad. If not already the best film of 2011, it’s certainly going to be in the top five at year-end. And as far as sci-fi/spy/action thrillers go, it’s one of the best of the last five—if not ten—years.

Assuming you can ignore Blanchett’s somewhat silly Texan accent, of course.