oh sucker punch…what you could’ve been if you’d just taken the time to go thru…i dunno, 10 more script revisions? this isn’t to say i was necessarily let down by the movie. not at all actually…i knew exactly what to expect and got that and more. in fact, i was even surprised i had friends to go watch it with. i was entirely ready to go catch a matinee on my own at some point, since i wouldn’t subject my friends to what i anticipated to be essentially a tits and guns movie. but a friend (a female one at that) brought it up in a conversation and we decided to go catch it at imax. so there we are, sitting in a half empty imax theater (aside from the fact that it was a monday, i’d rarely ever seen an imax showing so empty) and i’m just waiting for the explosions to start.
the first “music video” intro to the movie was quintessential zack snyder. no matter what people criticize of his works…be it flimsy plots or odd pacing, no one could ever fault him for his skills in shooting reeeally pretty scenes. the guy knows his shit. where the intro ends however, the rest of the weakly defined and ill-connected plot begins. watching the movie, you can’t help but think of inception. no, seriously…they actually have vaguely similar premises of dreams within dreams (in this case, fantasies within fantasies). where the disconnect comes however, is that where inception always made it clear the connections between all the dreamscapes, sucker punch doesn’t. there’s nothing to connect them together really…one fantasy merely acts as a substitute for something that happens in the other. as if you’d run out of milk for your coffee and decided to try the soy milk for the first time. wait, that analogy isn’t entirely fair, as the inner fantasy is better tasting (seriously..soy milk in coffee is disgusting) and infinitely more interesting than the other fantasy, and most likely reality as well…but that’s moot given that hardly any thought (or screen time) is given to “reality”.
character development? nah…didn’t happen. even if it did, you’re never sure whether the characters are even “real”.
so then what was expected of the movie? sci-fi genre mash-ups, girls in teenage male fantasy outfits (predominantly schoolgirl outfits, plate armor, chaps, etc), alot of guns, and a fucking mech with a bunny painted on it. fuck did all those points come together well. from the first samurai scene, to the steampunk world war i fight (with the aforementioned bunny mech), to the sci-fi train close quarters gunfight, there’s no real shortage of eyecandy. which seriously…anyone with any common sense could only expect from this movie. for those expecting anything more than that…you will be disappointed (duh). if one were to be angry at this movie for anything, it should be for the movie not even bothering to try and become what it could’ve been.
