Hipster Cat says only suckers pay box office prices for movies!!
Hey!! Back in your cage Hipster Cat your time will come!! So anyway, I watched Sucker Punch this week, the film directed by Zach Snyder who also directed "Dawn of the Dead", "300", "Watchman", Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, and is in pre production for "Man of Steel" which I think is a sequel to the Shaq film "Steel". Mr Snyder has also written "300" and wrote the screenplay / story for "Sucker Punch".
So where do I begin? Lets see if I can find you a synopsis for this film. Oh? Why thank you internet. Here we are courtesy of IMDB:
"A young girl is institutionalized by her abusive stepfather. Retreating to an alternative reality as a coping strategy, she envisions a plan which will help her escape from the mental facility."
Well that seems pretty simple doesn't it? I mean that sounds like a nice little movie. It may not be a feel good movie but it sounds like it could be kind of cerebral and may be a little bit like "Girl, Interrupted" . Why don't we take a look at the "Sucker Punch" trailer.
aaaaaaah what in the world was that? It doesn't look at all like the synopsis and I think saw a dragon and some sort of robomech and a samurai. That just doesn't even make any sense. I bet that once I actually see the film things will make a lot more sense. It is hard to tell what is going on from just the trailer and I do not like to jump to conclusions about important issues like popular culture.
The short concise answer to the question of whether or not the actual full movie made more sense then the trailer is this...nooooope. Not at all. I am really unable to explain my feelings about this movie. The story is interesting. The visuals are well done. But the core of it is that a young woman is nearly raped and her younger sister is raped and in the aftermath of the incident the older sister ends up in an insane asylum for girls. While she is in the asylum she takes herself to some sort of fantasy 1930's kind of prison/whorehouse but that isn't enough for the director. When the lead character "baby" yes that is her name. When she dances men are hypnotized by her and then she goes into a second fantasy world. So then we have a fantasy within a fantasy. Which is really just silly and one of the many reasons why I thought "Inception" was just dumb.
But back to Sucker Punch. At the core the story is pretty harrowing one but this film, whatever the reason and my money is on the studio, was afraid to take us to that place. The movie is PG-13. There is no profanity, there is no nudity, and if there is any blood it is very little. Now, I grant you that not every movie needs to have these things to be a good movie. But this is a story that could have been much like "Requiem For A Dream" a harrowing film that actually hurts to watch but is so amazingly done that you have to respect it for its honest look at how horrible drug abuse is and how it can wreck your life.
Instead this film is more like "Requiem For a Dream" for the "Twilight" generation and that my friends does not make for a good movie. It is soft and weak and afraid to takes its audience to a dark place that may just slap them in the face and say WAKE THE F UP!!! Which is horrible, because that is what this movie desperately wants to do. It shows its card in the final dialogue of the movie.
"who honors those we love for the very life we live
who sends monsters to kill us and at the same time sings that we'll ever die
who teaches us what's real and how to laugh at lies
who decides why we live and what we'll die to defend
who chains us and who holds the key that can set us free
it's you
you have all the weapons you need
now fight"
Sadly what came before did not do this justice and as far as I am concerned that means that Sucker Punch was a miss. It missed high, wide and not very handsome. There was so much potential in it to be something great. Something amazing like "Fight Club" was and instead it became a film for fan boys and Japanese businessmen and that is a sad, sad thing.
2 comments:
From what I understand Sucker Punch wasn't trying to make any grand statement, he just wanted a structure in which he could tell wild, whackadoo stories and stage weird fight scenes and the story was just an excuse.
Sort of like how Scott Pilgrim Challenges the World was not about the love story, it was just an excuse to make a movie where the world was like a video game.
Well he blew a perfect chance to do something greater and better.
It is Scott Pilgrim vs the World and the graphic novels are very much about the love story.
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