Obsequiousmelon got Sucker Punched!

Name of the Film:  Sucker Punch

Starring:  Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jenna Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung

When a 20 year old girl accidently shoots her little sister, after the death of their mother, she is committed to an insane asylum.  Once there, her evil step father pays a corrupt orderly to send for a Doctor to come to give her a lobotomy in five days.  Can she use her imagination to block out the horror of her situation whilst trying to find a way for her and her new friends to escape?

What is Manga to you?  Ninjas, daemons, fantasy, school girls, sci- fi all wrapped up in nonsensical story lines?  Well, yes it is that, but it is so much more than that too.

And that is the same with this film.  You can dismiss it as eye candy with a silly plot but then, I think that is too easy.  I think that the film has some hidden depths to it.  To me it is live action Manga and I really liked it.

Throughout Manga comics and films the extreme use of metaphor is widely acknowledged as being a good way to convey emotion through a visual medium.  It can be a way to take a gritty and dark story and inject excitement and visual wonder.  That is what Zack Snyder does in this film and he uses his metaphors well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself...

It is important to separate out what is real and what is fantasy in this film.  Baby Doll has clearly been abused and when she gets to the asylum she is in a male dominated world.  Even Doctor Gorski has her power usurped by Blue the male orderly as he doesn’t even hide the fact that he openly forges her signature whenever he feels the need.  It is made clear as the film goes on that in the real world the male orderlies are very obviously abusing the female patients.  This makes the first step into fantasy believable.  It makes sense that she would see the place as a brothel.  If she has been abused then why wouldn’t she see the use of sex by men as a way for them to dominate her.  That theme runs further into society at large.  The film is set in the 50’s/60’s when the world was still incredibly chauvinistic.  She is in a world where she is being dominated by the men in her life so why wouldn’t she sexualize it.  Especially as every guy in the film is trying to penetrate her in one way or another (even the threatened lobotomy is a metaphor.)

But I don’t see her vision of the asylum as a brothel as a step into fantasy for her.  It clearly is for us but for her it is a literal translation of how she feels and sees the world.  This is a clever idea especially using the idea of her dancing to transfix the men.  In the real world she is clearly not dancing.  She is clearly challenging the orderlies, or making some kind of disturbance to be a distraction or even exploiting Blues interest in her by adding juicy details in her ‘stage therapy’ with Doctor Gorski.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter what she is really doing, in every way she is ‘dancing for the man.’

Speaking of dancing that brings me on to the ‘dream’ sequences.  Each time Baby Doll is about to dance we get a third level of reality where the girls battle against dragons, robots, giant stone samurai and Nazi zombies (I love the idea of Nazi zombies even if it isn’t original.)  Again it doesn’t matter what the girls really have to do to get the items they need and it is important to remember that we are presented with not the fantasy of a young girl but a metaphor of the horrors they are facing portrayed as the fantasy of a young girl, a subtle but important difference.  

The real world interferes with her fantasy.  She is told to fight and so the girls become soldiers but the real world interferes and affects her.  She feels like a sex object and so on some level she becomes one.  However, never is she overtly seductive or in her behaviour does she attempt to be anything other than bad ass.  Her clothes reflect how she feels... Alluring to men but vulnerable.  The real world affecting her subconscious.  The school girl outfit is not a coincidence, she feels like a child, dominated and controlled.  This may seem like an awkward fit to a westerners concerned about the male reaction in the audience but it is a staple of Manga and if you think the outfits they wear only objectify the girls then you have kinda missed the point.  It’s her fantasy, she chose those clothes and she chose them for a reason.  They do objectify them but only to shine the light back at us the viewer, she uses a sword for a reason, symbolically reclaiming the penetrative act, taking it away from the men she faces.

To put it another way Baby Doll spends most of the film mentally penetrating the guys that want to penetrate her!

Look at how the enemies in the fantasies reflect the real world issues she has.  There is a theme of the automaton (the robots and Nazi zombies) which seems to fit well with the orderlies who are just going along with what Blue tells them to do.  There is the mother dragon who is absent from the nest when they have to kill the child, similar to Baby Dolls own experience at the beginning of the film in that she would have felt abandoned by her mothers death leaving her children in the nest to fend for themselves with predictable consequences.  Her choice of enemies in this way reveals to us her psyche.  Note that aside from the mother dragon all the enemies she faces are male.  Now you can argue that her guide is also male, yes but he represents her hope, he is the ‘white knight’ if you will.  And after all in a patriarchal society the only way a woman can gain her ‘freedom’ is if men will help her.  She can’t take her rights back.  She can only walk away and be truly free if a man lets her.  Tragic in a way, but he does give her the emasculating tools by which she sets about reclaiming her freedom.  He gives her a sword and a gun both intrinsically and aggressively phallic.  Note that he doesn’t give her a shield and some armour, that would be too passive and this is not a story about a girl defending herself.  It is a film about a girl taking back control, violently at times.

Of course the risk in having a film that spends so much time in metaphors and a characters imagination is that the threat can not seem real and that can make the audience feel abstracted from what they are seeing.  Why do we care that there are a hundred steam powered zombies chasing them, we know they aren’t real?  Well yes but Snyder addresses that point very cleverly in the final dream / fantasy.  The girls cut their way through a train of robots and my interest was starting to flicker but then he cuts between the dream and Baby Dolls interpretation of the real world where the girls making mistakes have very real repercussions.

This scene is very important.  In a film where you can get swept up in the visuals you need to be reminded that there is something at stake here.  This scene grounds the audience and prepares them for the ending that justifies the title.  I can understand though that for some viewers this overt link to what is really happening may come too late but for me it just underlined what I already saw.

Now the film isn’t perfect by a long way.  Apart from Baby Doll the girls are little more than stereotypes.  They do try to give Sweet Pea and Rocket a more interesting back story but it is mainly hinted at and Doctor Gorski, late on in the film blossoms into a more interesting, conflicted character. Even though, still these are moments rather than story arcs that are genuinely involving, although they did enough with the characters for me to make the ending pay off.   

Also, Zack Snyders penchant for using music that doesn’t always quite fit (Hallelujah in Watchmen any one?) rears its head early on in the film and Baby Dolls back story suffers slightly for it.  In fact the beginning of the film is slightly mishandled resembling a dodgy music video for a crap emo band more than the introduction to a major motion picture.  The problem is mainly that we have heard most of these songs in lots of mainstream films before and those associations are distracting.

However these are small quibbles really because as soon as Baby Doll gets sword and gun in hand the film settles down and begins to hit it’s stride.

I really liked it (and I am very aware that I am in the film reviewing minority there) and I look forward to owning it.

I have read unfavorable comparisons to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Christopher Nolan’s Inception.  I understand why people have done that but I don’t think the comparisons are completely true.  Sucker Punch is doing different things than both those films, but if the fantasy/dream sequences mean that these films have to be compared, then it is more accessible than Brazil and not as convoluted as Inception (not a criticism of either film, I like them both).  

Sucker Punch works on several levels, you can sit back, switch off your brain and enjoy the awesome visuals or you can lean forward put on some half rimmed spectacles and debate with Germaine Greer about the objectification of woman in modern cinema.  

It’s up to you, but for me it works on both levels.

  

Did I enjoy the film?  Yes.

Would I recommend it to my friends?   Yes, but they didn’t enjoy it like I did.

Will I buy it on DVD/Blu Ray?  Very definitely.

If it was a mate would I let it date my Sister?  Yes but I would be fascinated to know if she wanted to date it (what did you think KD?).