Here is the perfect example of a currently in demand director/writer being given far to much money and every employee attached to said project looking more towards their payday than the actual story audiences are expecting to be shown. I can't imagine that people working on this project, even in it's earliest stages, read this storyline and didn't find themselves confounded as to what was actually going on on screen. I can only imagine this pitch going over similar to a kid I knew in college rambling about some acid trip he'd taken and the jumble of images he awoke with and commendably remembered . . . loosely.
Sucker Punch was written by Steve Shibuya and Zack Snyder as well as directed by the slow-motion obsessed Zack Snyder. Let's start off with what the trailer proposed to audiences all throughout this fall's advertising campaign. We saw hot and scantily clad girls, with kick-ace all era weapons, traversing a highly stylized backdrop including and not limited to WWI trenches, dragon infested castles and a futuristic high speeding train. On top of this we heard the slamming Lords of Acid tune titled The Crablouse.
And now the film's breakdown. The full extent of this film added nothing to what I just told you.
Very simply the trailer is more entertaining than the actual storyline. The act of stringing together scenes from the trailer in one's mind attempting to connect this explosion of images and hot girls is wildly more entertaining than what Zack Snyder came out of production with. So in theory, doing what the thesis of this movie proposes, just making shit up in your head, is the way to experience the most from this TRAILER.
There is a loose storyline revolving around a girl on lobotomy row, due to her Step-Father's ill will. She meets a group of girls that are being whored out within their insane asylum, but have this wild ability to seek solace in their imaginative scenarios. So, there you, the audience will retreat at every possible moment into these girls' dreams. The 30 foot samurai, not real. The massive dragon, not real. And that is all fine and good. But, there needs to be some bit of actuality in the pay off.
There was another alternate reality film that came out this year that accomplished my proposed style of imaginative reality. You might have heard of it, . . . Inception.
In Sucker Punch there is a video game aesthetic to it. This mindless tromping through a made up reality with nothing actually posing a threat, due to the fact that the main character "Baby Doll" is quite literally stripping during all of these action scenes. Yes, you read this right. Where as our Inception characters have consequences and elements to their alternate realities which tie their actions all together, these girls have nothing aside from their end goal, to get some object (map, knife, key & a lighter). The aforementioned 30 foot samurai, WWI pressurized zombie soldiers and fire breathing dragon all go without some actual real world counterpart. One could claim that this Dragon parallels as some Mayor in the crowd puffing on a cigar. Here is my point. As Baby Doll strips, another girl is pilfering a lighter off of this Dragon Mayor. The epic on screen air battle involving every character in all reality required two girls, one stripper and one pickpocket.
That is my biggest problem with this movie. Never mind the fact that the end game is escape from the asylum, but not of the character the writers spent 10 seconds in the opening music video to introduce audiences to. I stress here that viewers don't get to actually connect with any of the characters in this film, so the twist at the end isn't significant at all.
Why couldn't Snyder have left this one in story-boarded form and have released it as a comic book. That at least would have saved me the $12 spot I wasted on this movie. Fingers remain crossed Snyder doesn't spoil another Superman reboot, but this mishmash of music video and storyless slow-motion further confirmed that 300 was just about as good as Snyder might get.
