Trying to avoid reading too much about a heavily-hyped movie rarely works. Because I was unable to see Sucker Punch until today, and I have the impulse control of a four-year-old with a drug problem, I've been reading a lot of reviews, and was fascinated by what little consensus there was. Where I at first was like, “Ah, Zack Snyder's biannual March action picture, should be good for a lark,” I spent a couple weeks reading about how it was, variously, a—
Misogynist jerkoff fantasy fetishizing teenage girls
Limpdick fagmo waste of time all about stupid chicks and their stupid feelings
Sensory overload
Snoozefest
Thrillingly visceral experience
Thought-provoking advocacy of sex-positive feminism
Call to arms for a new, empowered female
Crassly, cynically exploitative act of objectification
—and I was like, “Wait, what the fuck is this picture?”
I am not without my own prejudices regarding Zack Snyder. I never saw his Dawn of the Dead remake or his owl picture, but had deeply complicated reactions to his other two features, 300 and Watchmen. 300 was this big, booming, incredibly irresponsible thing about crazy people who kill the shit out of everything, and I really fucking enjoyed it, though I do think the young people need to be reminded, gently, that the Persians were not 8 foot tall drag queens with pet monsters. Just as long as we all understand it's not meant to be taken literally, and don't screen it in Iran, it can exist all it likes. It looked and sounded awesome, and for all the shit Zack Snyder catches about his slow-it-down-speed-it-up action scenes, the first time watching Gerry Butler put like forty dudes in a row to the sword with no visible edits ruled.
Watchmen, I maintain, is unfilmable. Zack Snyder tried like a sonofabitch, though, and his heart was in the right place. The result, if you didn't spend 20+ years wearing out multiple copies of the graphic novel, is a perfectly serviceable comic book movie, and the action scenes are stellar, even if they're a bit “yay awesome” for what in the graphic novel were brooding meditations on the ugliness of violence and the necessary moral ambivalence for those who must do violence in order to do their job. Still, it's skillfully executed.
I was intrigued when I first heard about Sucker Punch, because I came in with Zack Snyder with 300, a movie so male it was frankly a bit gay, and here he is doing a movie starring all women. I liked that willingness to try something new, and I got the sense from both 300 (where Lena Headey was awesome) and Watchmen that he'd avoid turning his Sucker Punch cast into total fetish objects, at least intentonally. That was my big sticking point with Zack Snyder; I'm very cerebral, he's very “Gosh! Let's blow stuff up! With swords! It'll be cool!” Not saying the guy's dumb or anything, he just seems emotional and exuberant. Not all artsy fartsy intellectual.
This is why it was such a pleasant surprise that Sucker Punch is so ambitious. I have no idea what picture the critics who thought this was a brain-dead action picture were watching; maybe some of the things Snyder is trying to do are telegraphed, maybe it's a little difficult to follow in places, but make no mistake: this is a movie with a purpose, and it deserves to be regarded as such. I don't think every single movie requires a full, multifaceted critical appraisal. Movies that are made as commodities can be consumed and discarded. But when a movie's director comes right out and says his picture is a critique of fanboy sexism and objectification of women, I say we take a look and see how he did.
Wouldn't you know, it's all right there. Sucker Punch, for all its flashy visuals and sequences of girls machine-gunning steampunk zombies and having sword fights with dragons, is a sincere and quite sensitive look at the way society traps women. Look hot. Be submissive. Don't be emotional. And it doesn't provide any easy solutions. Sure, there are some cathartic revenge fantasy sequences where the girls go and put high-heeled feet to a great deal of ass, but they do not make it out entirely unscathed. Sucker Punch feels for its fallen, and is cautiously optimistic about the future, but posits that first we must see a person as a person, not as an object, and not as a means to an end.
A friend of mine saw Sucker Punch with her boyfriend (neither of them liked it very much) and said that they spent the next day making jokes about how the action sequences were like video games. This, it must be said, is true: Sucker Punch's action scenes are like a hallucinatory feminist steampunk shoot-em-up video game, with Scott fucking Glenn as mentor. Putting aside the fact that I would play the living fucking shit out of that video game until my PS3 filed a restraining order against me, the rules are different in cinema. With the rise of increasingly sophisticated computer-generated effects—many of which are the same ones used in creating video games—this is a common thing with many action scenes, and it's a little surprising at first, that Snyder, with his genuinely unique eye for action sequences, would fall into this trap.
This, though, ties into the larger intent Snyder has for the audience to feel empathy for his heroine(s). The movie starts with Emily Browning's stepfather (probably) killing her mother and, enraged that Emily Browning is going to inherit mom's money, railroads her into a really fucked up mental institution and bribes people to have her lobotomized within the week. She's escorted into what the smarmy head orderly dude calls “the theater” (the movie's motif of performance and theatricality begins before the studio logo), where Polish shrink Carla Gugino (sigh . . . Carla Gugino, how I adore you . . .) is doing some experimental therapy on patient Abbie Cornish. The camera lingers on Abbie Cornish staring fascinated at Emily Browning, whose stepfather openly discusses his plans for her demise with the orderly as if she's not there.
Now. It does not take a terribly astute moviegoer to determine that this isn't exactly naturalistic, and it is not much of a jump to think that Snyder might not intend this opening to be taken literally. For one, the story of how Emily Browning came to be institutionalized is told almost entirely with images, not words—and really fucking well, too; Zack Snyder is one articulate sumbitch cinematically, let no one say otherwise—and then the dialogue when she's standing there in “the theater” with Abbie Cornish (Sweet Pea) staring at her is so on the nose, it's almost as if it was a story Abbie Cornish was told: a little over the top, with some details and all the nuance omitted.
It was at this point that I realized it was actually Abbie Cornish's movie. Everything we know about Emily Browning, from that somewhat fanciful backstory, to the way she's casually called Babydoll by some sexist dude and then everyone calls her Babydoll for the whole rest of the picture, to the fact that Emily Browning is the one who thinks of the plan to escape that Abbie Cornish is too cautiously risk-averse to embrace any other way than reluctantly and nervously, to the fact that Emily Browning is the one whose dancing is so mesmerizing that dudes' worlds just fucking stop, to the fact that at the end, when they make good their escape and the fantasy heroic alpha female is no longer necessary—since Abbie Cornish is, herself, free at that point—the fantasy character is the one who sacrifices herself.
If Abbie Cornish is the actual heroine of the picture, the action sequences' “now sit here and watch the most elaborate video game of all time for ten minutes” feel makes a little more sense, since the audience takes the role of the heroine and watches sequences that Emily Browning's samurai swordswomanship and machine gun prowess drive. This itself can be read as a statement about how women are always being asked to take a backseat and forswear their own desires and be passive and all that fuckin shit, and if there's any Rosetta Stone to translate the fanboy hatred, it's this: the movie itself deliberately makes the audience take a “feminine” perspective in order to watch it.
Now that right there makes me want to buy Zack Snyder a fuckin beer. That takes fucking balls. To go and spend $80 million on an action movie and be like, “Hi, guys! It's Zack. So, like, we're going to subvert the male gaze and examine a group of girls who bond together in the face of the crushing societal oppression they face. Oh, and by 'bond together' I don't mean lesbian stuff. There's no lesbian stuff. Cuz ya know we're subverting the male gaze. See ya in an hour forty-five!” Of course fanboy dudes are going to hate this picture. It's a direct repudiation of their entire view of women, which consists of varying shades of fear, resentment, insecurity, and scorn.
Even if you get past the fanboy fear and loathing of women, there's another layer of moviegoers who judge the movie on the fact that it's a thing where lots of shit blows up and the girls are all in short skirts, and subsequently dismisss it out of hand. These are largely professional critics who are not accustomed to having to think, like Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel, author of some of the most violently stupid reviews in contemporary cinema criticism. Moore calls Sucker Punch “an unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold” and goes on to declare it “The Last Airbender with bustiers.” Books could be written about how lazy and stupid Roger Moore is, but suffice to say the only relevant words in those two selected quotes are “video game,” which he uses as a pejorative, trading on the fast-fading fallacy that video games are somehow beneath the notice of sophisticated society, failing to realize that it was a deliberate artistic choice that made a philosophical point. But that requires paying attention, and that really cuts into one's pandering time.
My take on Sucker Punch as a movie is that, beyond its empathy toward women, it's a very well-directed action picture, deriving its visual inspiration from comic books, video games, and a touch—just a touch—of classic film noir, that telegraphs a couple key plot points and, beyond Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, and Jena Malone (who's quite good in the classic “she's your favorite character so you know her ass is getting killed” role) doesn't develop its characters as fully as it might. The other two main girls, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung, are perfectly agreeable but distinctly secondary, and they're both killed rather blithely. Jon Hamm, who cannot help but rule, does so in a small part as the one dude in the picture (well, apart from Obi Wan Scott Glennobi) who feels any sense of guilt about brutalizing the girls (seriously, Jon Hamm must spend at least two hours a day thinking “what's the next randomly awesome small role I can take? How can I rule even more? Is it possible? Well, nose to the grindstone, Jon old chap, vigilance is all, we've got a rep to maintain, old boy.”)
I'm most impressed that Zack Snyder, who I'd previously thought of as a director whose concern was cool visuals and fight choreography to the exclusion of everything else, not only managed to make a movie about ideas but did so with such success. Sucker Punch is not mindless escapism. It's a surprisingly subversive movie about the need for escapism. The sucker punch of the title is Zack Snyder's greatest achievement to date as a movie director: “Hey, come see a big stupid action movie about hot chicks in fetish wear . . . PSYCH! You, audience member, are going to see through their eyes. Whether you like it or not.” It's unfortunate that in this cultural climate, that choice doomed the picture to commercial failure (well, until DVD, which could change everything). But, as the Dalai Lama told Bill Murray about total consicousness, Zack Snyder had the balls to try and see things the way people do who don't have them. So he's got that going for him.
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