In “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) Anthony Hopkins, in just 17 minutes of screen time, scared the hell out of a generation of moviegoers in his role as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Lecter was evil incarnate — and all the more terrifying because he came in the form of an articulate, civilized psychiatrist turned unapologetic serial killer. Anyone inquiring as to how he got that way hit a brick wall: “Nothing happened to me,” he tells Clarice Starling. “I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.”

“Hannibal Rising” aims to reduce him to just that. The new film, directed by Peter Webber, with a screenplay by Thomas Harris from his novel, gives us an elaborate back-story of how Hannibal acquired his taste for human flesh. The film is a sort of Epcot extravaganza, with the young Hannibal romping around the world picking up various culinary tips along the way (the French will prove particularly helpful, teaching him how to prepare succulent brochettes involving human cheeks).

We first meet Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) in war-torn Lithuania, where he and his sister Mischa are growing up in the idyllic Castle. It’s a bad time to be a young Lithuanian noble: Soviet tanks are closing in and retreating Nazi forces are taking no mercy. The Lecter family hides in their carriage house, where they are besieged by a hoard of local SS recruits led by the scrofulous Grutas (Rhys Ifans). Hannibal escapes but his sister is devoured by this band of henchmen (“She had pneumonia — she would have died anyway,” one of them will later claim as an excuse before his execution). These sequences in the ramshackle house, filmed in the green tint Hollywood reserves for World War II, will become the source of Hannibal’s traumatic flashbacks that he (and we) will be pummeled with for the rest of the film.

After escaping Soviet Lithuania, the teenage Hannibal makes his way to France and meets up with his uncle’s widow, Lady Murasaki, played by the beautiful, ineffectual Gong Li. Not exactly a citoyenne, Lady Murasaki seems to have dropped into the film directly from the Tokugawa shogunate: She operates a shrine in the basement of her chateau which is dedicated to her relatives who died in the 1614 Seige of Osaka. “Memory is like a knife,” she tells Hannibal (and she should know). She teaches her feral apprentice the basics of martial arts. When a French butcher insults his aunt during her shopping errands, Hannibal ritualistically disembowels him. It’s only then when Lady Murasaki sees that he has skillfully prepared the Frenchman’s head in 16th-century samurai fashion that she knows she is in love.

The previous Hannibal films thrived on the charged conversations between Hannibal and his interrogators. Whether it was Jodie Foster or Edward Norton, the scenes gave the coiled-up Dr. Lecter, played by Mr. Hopkins, a chance to expound on his inhumanity with all his rhetorical brilliance. Nothing in “Hannibal Rising” approaches those moments, which makes it only more troubling to know Mr. Harris wrote the script. Lady Murasaki and Hannibal communicate in clichéd proverbs and meaningful glances. The only worthy complement to Lecter is Inspector Popil (Dominic West), who is tracking down war criminals, including the men Hannibal is after for murdering his sister. But Mr. West doesn’t get the screen time he needs to develop his character sufficiently. The inspector’s presence in the film raises heady questions about justice and revenge that the script doesn’t have the resources to answer.

When Hannibal starts to track down the men who dined on his sister, the film shifts into higher absurdity. Grutas and his cronies turn out to be living in nearby Fontainebleau, where they own a quaint restaurant, a struggling brothel, and, most disturbingly, a house that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright knock-off. Lady Murasaki tries to keep Hannibal from killing them all (despite the fact that she’s lent him a sword and loves him for his killer instinct). Mr. Ulliel plays Hannibal as a joyful killer — with a looping smile at ease with bloody feasts — but he wins not so much sympathy from the audience as a campy satisfaction. His key lines — “You ate my sister,” “I have come for a head,” etc. — inspire more amusement than horror.

Mr. Webber’s mastery of visual imagery suited him perfectly in “A Girl With a Pearl Earring” (2003), which was, after all, a movie about painting. But visual effects are not enough to sustain a thriller that demands more than imagery to move it along. Hannibal’s fascination with human anatomy, for example, is communicated only with accentuated lighting on exposed flesh throughout the film — we never hear him speak in any detail about it. Even the richest backdrops — the Lecter castle, the Soviet dormitory, the French market, the Paris Opera — are swallowed up by the embarrassing absurdity of the plot. Hannibal trudges through this movie trying to elicit our sympathy when all you want him to do is grow up.