There was no way that a follow-up to "Silence of the Lambs" was going to be anything but a disappointment. That film is perfect. And it was clear when the novel was released in 1999 that people were going to fall on one side of the divide or the other. (Some critics hated the book while Stephen King lauded its intensity and scariness.) Most of the talented folks behind the "Silence of the Lambs" movie, too, opted out, either disagreeing with the levels of violence of the material or the direction that Clarice took (in the book, she runs away with Hannibal at the end in an uneasy romantic union).
When the film version of "Hannibal" was handed to Ridley Scott (working from a script by Steve Zaillian and David Mamet), he seemed to understand the material immediately and crafted something bolder and more operatic than the earlier film, sidestepping some of the controversy while stoking it other places. (Julianne Moore took over for Jodie Foster.) This is one of the most violent movies ever released in mainstream cinemas and also one of the most bleakly funny; the climactic dinner scene is a Grand Guignol tour de force. But if another filmmaker (David Cronenberg comes to mind) had really engaged with all the nastiness of the novel, it could have maybe been a masterpiece to challenge "Lambs."
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