Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)
Mar. 5th, 2012 03:13 pmSucker Punch attempts to tell a real world horror story (the main character is sent to an asylum by her abusive step father to silence her) using Epic Fantasy Battle imagery.
In several ways, it reminds me of Inglorious Basterds: both feel like a clever and artistic director saw a controvertial subject, and exclaimed "hey, I could tell something really thought-provoking with that", and ladled on a lot of artistic imagery, and made a film with a really interesting premise, but the notable flaws that:
(a) because he waded into a controvertial subject he wasn't already an expert of, people will be incredibly polarised whether they really like the interesting bits, or incredibly pained by having lots of evocative imagery of a painful subject metaphorically thrust in their faces with little excuse
(b) it felt like the interesting premise was enough, which means the interesting bits of both films are in setting up the characters and establishing the premise, but when we get to the Glorious Imagery bits of the film, he forgot to make up anything interesting to go _in_ it, so it's all rather boring.
On the first, I don't feel sure to comment. I saw aspects of both "look, gratuiously nasty things happening to people in skimy outfits is usually exploitative" and "basically no other films have a core message of 'normal people surviving horrible situations can be just as AWESOME BADASS as military heroes blowing up dragons and we can be sexy if we want without it being gratuitous' so we should treasure this one!"
On the second, I think this is why no-one liked it much, whether they were inclined to love or hate the premise. The fantasy battle scenes didn't really feel like they had much content: if they'd been more closely tied to things happening in the real world from the start and/or it had felt like there was some serious back and forth and/or there had been interesting opposing characters, they would have been a lot more exciting, but apart from the beginning of the first, and the end of the last, it just felt like "cinematic awesome stereotypes #57, go, yawn, yawn, yawn, done".
In several ways, it reminds me of Inglorious Basterds: both feel like a clever and artistic director saw a controvertial subject, and exclaimed "hey, I could tell something really thought-provoking with that", and ladled on a lot of artistic imagery, and made a film with a really interesting premise, but the notable flaws that:
(a) because he waded into a controvertial subject he wasn't already an expert of, people will be incredibly polarised whether they really like the interesting bits, or incredibly pained by having lots of evocative imagery of a painful subject metaphorically thrust in their faces with little excuse
(b) it felt like the interesting premise was enough, which means the interesting bits of both films are in setting up the characters and establishing the premise, but when we get to the Glorious Imagery bits of the film, he forgot to make up anything interesting to go _in_ it, so it's all rather boring.
On the first, I don't feel sure to comment. I saw aspects of both "look, gratuiously nasty things happening to people in skimy outfits is usually exploitative" and "basically no other films have a core message of 'normal people surviving horrible situations can be just as AWESOME BADASS as military heroes blowing up dragons and we can be sexy if we want without it being gratuitous' so we should treasure this one!"
On the second, I think this is why no-one liked it much, whether they were inclined to love or hate the premise. The fantasy battle scenes didn't really feel like they had much content: if they'd been more closely tied to things happening in the real world from the start and/or it had felt like there was some serious back and forth and/or there had been interesting opposing characters, they would have been a lot more exciting, but apart from the beginning of the first, and the end of the last, it just felt like "cinematic awesome stereotypes #57, go, yawn, yawn, yawn, done".