Because someone asked for it
Apr. 12th, 2011 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenI threatened a review of Sucker Punch. I'm going to keep this simple. There's one thing Sucker Punch does well, and that is catering to the fantasies of 13-year-old boys. And Zack Snyder--I forget who said it this weekend, but someone suggested that a studio gave him money to make two hours of masturbation material for...Zack Snyder. I think that's probably accurate. But this movie has everything anyone has ever thought was cool in a movie: faux-retro costumes, steampunk, zombies, mecha, robots, alien worlds, orcs, knights, dragons, hot girls with guns, samurai swords, giant stone warriors, mystical mentors, girls in schoolgirl getup, asylums...let me think, am I missing anything? The battle scenes that make use of these masturbatory objects are well done, and were you to chop them into standalone segments, you'd have a handful of interesting music videos. Not that songs as old as "White Rabbit" need them, but still.
The problem with Sucker Punch is, well, everything else. The basic conceit of the movie is that a girl, Babydoll, is dragged, unwilling, off to an asylum by her stepfather who has bribed an orderly to see to it that she is lobotomized so she can't testify against him. In the asylum, she and we ever-so-briefly meet the other ladies who will be our heroine's cohort. And by "briefly," I mean that we really only ever see one of their faces. I have to take it for granted that one or another of the ratty-haired, dirty, screaming women in the short introduction to the asylum make up the team. The only one we make eye contact with is Sweet Pea (if that is her real name).
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a five-day window that Babydoll has in order to escape before she is lobotomized. To deal with her trauma, she escapes into fantasies, the first of which is into a reality where she, the other girls--Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie, and Amber--are all stripper prostitutes. Problem #1 right there. I didn't actually find this as horribly offensive as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
viridian did, though, naturally, the first "fantasy" Babydoll has being one in which women are sex slaves--sexy, sexy sex slaves who walk around in burlesque get ups even while peeling potatoes (ACTUALLY HAPPENED)--is grating to say the least. But it's not surprising or even all that exaggerated beyond what we assume--from what little we see of it--is going on in Babydoll's real reality. The idea that she would spin a bunch of women, held against their wills, tested and provoked by doctors and bossed around by corrupt male orderlies, into a scenario of pimps and whores isn't even that much of an exaggeration.
This is all annoying, don't get me wrong, but it's really irrelevant to why Sucker Punch fails as a movie. It fails because the emotional drive--must rescue Babydoll before Day Five!--is completely undercut by never knowing what the hell actually went on in Days One through Four. The movie spends exactly ten minutes in reality--the asylum, the creepy orderly, the lobotomist is coming!--and the rest of the time in fantasy. When the highest flights of fancy spin down--when Babydoll et al. come back from fighting dragons--the fantasies end inside of another fantasy. Everything returns to the fantasy level of the girls being strippers. Go kill a great stone warrior with your bare hands? Great, now get back to dancing for the customers.
This causes two problems. The first is that the movie ultimately returns, over and over, to the strippers. These women? Are whores. Just in case you forgot, what with their demonstrating incredible abilities to kick ass. The second is that everything we learn about Babydoll and the others happens in a fantasy whose connection to reality is suggestive at best. The movie wraps with, in reality, us learning that a lot of what happened in the stripper-world fantasy happened in reality. However, people were murdered in the stripper-world. Despite the orderly being corrupt enough (and the doctors blithely unaware enough) to fudge getting Babydoll brain-neutered, I seriously doubt that he could shoot or otherwise maim and kill the people in reality that his fantasy-level, mob-boss self could. So what happened to those victims? Are they alive? Are they dead? We've spent the whole time in fantasy. I don't know the people in reality well enough to care that they are dead in Babydoll's imagination because they certainly cannot be dead in reality.
This undermining of reality makes the film's end completely nonsensical. The movie resolves by Babydoll giving up and saving who she can instead of herself. In what we see from the fantasy level, there is no need for this. But, despite the fact that the fantasy in no way resembles reality, we just have to trust that what looks like an easy escape in the fantasy is somehow actually impossible. Babydoll resolves to help Sweet Pea escape. When we come back to really-real reality, we see a lobotomized Babydoll and Sweet Pea--whoever she really was--has, in fact, escaped the asylum.
Our heroine is, for all intents and purposes, dead, and a possibly insane person is walking around and that is our happy ending. Sweet Pea has a tragic story that makes you empathize with her in the fantasy. In this reality, her life is a series of question marks. She doesn't appear to be dangerous. So fucking what? We don't know this woman. We can't care that she's free because we don't have any reason to root for her. For all we know, she walks off into the sunset with someone else's head for a hat.
Uh, massive SPOILER warning for that cut.
There, it's done. Now back to my daily scheduled drooling over other movies more worth my time.
The problem with Sucker Punch is, well, everything else. The basic conceit of the movie is that a girl, Babydoll, is dragged, unwilling, off to an asylum by her stepfather who has bribed an orderly to see to it that she is lobotomized so she can't testify against him. In the asylum, she and we ever-so-briefly meet the other ladies who will be our heroine's cohort. And by "briefly," I mean that we really only ever see one of their faces. I have to take it for granted that one or another of the ratty-haired, dirty, screaming women in the short introduction to the asylum make up the team. The only one we make eye contact with is Sweet Pea (if that is her real name).
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a five-day window that Babydoll has in order to escape before she is lobotomized. To deal with her trauma, she escapes into fantasies, the first of which is into a reality where she, the other girls--Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie, and Amber--are all stripper prostitutes. Problem #1 right there. I didn't actually find this as horribly offensive as
viridian did, though, naturally, the first "fantasy" Babydoll has being one in which women are sex slaves--sexy, sexy sex slaves who walk around in burlesque get ups even while peeling potatoes (ACTUALLY HAPPENED)--is grating to say the least. But it's not surprising or even all that exaggerated beyond what we assume--from what little we see of it--is going on in Babydoll's real reality. The idea that she would spin a bunch of women, held against their wills, tested and provoked by doctors and bossed around by corrupt male orderlies, into a scenario of pimps and whores isn't even that much of an exaggeration.This is all annoying, don't get me wrong, but it's really irrelevant to why Sucker Punch fails as a movie. It fails because the emotional drive--must rescue Babydoll before Day Five!--is completely undercut by never knowing what the hell actually went on in Days One through Four. The movie spends exactly ten minutes in reality--the asylum, the creepy orderly, the lobotomist is coming!--and the rest of the time in fantasy. When the highest flights of fancy spin down--when Babydoll et al. come back from fighting dragons--the fantasies end inside of another fantasy. Everything returns to the fantasy level of the girls being strippers. Go kill a great stone warrior with your bare hands? Great, now get back to dancing for the customers.
This causes two problems. The first is that the movie ultimately returns, over and over, to the strippers. These women? Are whores. Just in case you forgot, what with their demonstrating incredible abilities to kick ass. The second is that everything we learn about Babydoll and the others happens in a fantasy whose connection to reality is suggestive at best. The movie wraps with, in reality, us learning that a lot of what happened in the stripper-world fantasy happened in reality. However, people were murdered in the stripper-world. Despite the orderly being corrupt enough (and the doctors blithely unaware enough) to fudge getting Babydoll brain-neutered, I seriously doubt that he could shoot or otherwise maim and kill the people in reality that his fantasy-level, mob-boss self could. So what happened to those victims? Are they alive? Are they dead? We've spent the whole time in fantasy. I don't know the people in reality well enough to care that they are dead in Babydoll's imagination because they certainly cannot be dead in reality.
This undermining of reality makes the film's end completely nonsensical. The movie resolves by Babydoll giving up and saving who she can instead of herself. In what we see from the fantasy level, there is no need for this. But, despite the fact that the fantasy in no way resembles reality, we just have to trust that what looks like an easy escape in the fantasy is somehow actually impossible. Babydoll resolves to help Sweet Pea escape. When we come back to really-real reality, we see a lobotomized Babydoll and Sweet Pea--whoever she really was--has, in fact, escaped the asylum.
Our heroine is, for all intents and purposes, dead, and a possibly insane person is walking around and that is our happy ending. Sweet Pea has a tragic story that makes you empathize with her in the fantasy. In this reality, her life is a series of question marks. She doesn't appear to be dangerous. So fucking what? We don't know this woman. We can't care that she's free because we don't have any reason to root for her. For all we know, she walks off into the sunset with someone else's head for a hat.
Uh, massive SPOILER warning for that cut.
There, it's done. Now back to my daily scheduled drooling over other movies more worth my time.
