When Sucker Punch first came out, and even before that when the trailers were first released, I dismissed it pretty quickly. Like it did to plenty of others, the movie looked to me like nothing more than fanboy wish-fullfillment, eye candy for geeks to masturbate to. Scantily clad girls kicking ass! Heavy weaponry! Zombie Nazis and genre mashing! A fucking dragon! It was everything you would expect a poll done at Comic-Con to come up with for what would make a good movie.
And while that sounds pretty awesome in theory, in practice it is a lot less interesting. That's one too many ideas fighting for air, and it looked like a mess of CGI set pieces thrown together at random. The trailer seemed to highlight all the things about geek culture I hate: things like the fetishization of women, and the style-over-substance mentality that is more concerned with things looking "awesome" as opposed to being part of an interesting and worthwhile story. Giant robots fighting are cool, but that alone does not make a good movie, Transformers.
Not to mention Zack Snyder is the epitome of style-over-substance fanboy directing. Coming from a background of music videos and commercials, Snyder is great packing a shot full of stunning visuals. He knows the importance an image can have. But when it comes to other things a story needs (that music videos and commercials don't necessarily), like dialogue or character development, he falls way short. It doesn't matter how awesome the visual aspect is, without the other things to ground it emotionally, all that visual bombardment starts to get kind of boring.
But I am still a geek, and I knew I would watch it eventually if for no other reason than to be able to say for sure that it was a piece of crap. This past weekend presented the best opportunity to so; I felt brain dead and didn't feel like doing anything else. And since my local library recently installed a Redbox-like vending machine to check out DVDs 24-7, I picked it up and popped it in.
And hole-ee crap, is that movie a mess.
To get the plot description out of the way, the movie is about girl (named both "Baby" and "Doll," depending on what character is addressing her at any given time) who's mother dies and is then placed in a mental institution by her step-father to prevent her for telling anyone about his part in the accidental shooting of her sister. This all takes place in some sort of alternate 1950's or 60s timeline. I say alternate because the music used in the movie is not even close to 50s or 60s appropriate.
And then all of sudden, she is in some kind of sleazy cabaret. It is here that she creates the CGI fueled fantasy world that is the reason most people went to see the film. In these sequences she and the other girls she befriends must find four items in order to escape, and a fifth one that remains unknown. And honestly, it's these fantasy sequences that really drag the film down. First off this sounds more like the plot to a video game than it does a major motion picture. Four objects = four levels, that's the overall structure. And this would be more forgivable if the sequences didn't seem so interchangeable. The baddies vary slightly (the above mentioned Nazi Zombies), but the bleak, scorched background remains pretty constant. Even though the actual settings technically change (war trenches, castle, runaway train) none of them feel fresh, and none of them really feel that different from the one before. This is due mainly to sensory overload. There is so much CGI, so much ass-kicking badassery going on, that it all blurs together. Everything is set to 11, and as a result, nothing stands out.
That's all purely aesthetics. There is also the question of why this would be the escapist fantasy of a young girl. It is entirely believable that she would escape to a fantasy where she is taking control of a situation, where she is not helpless and is in fact dealing out punishment on others. What does strike me as strange, however, is that her fantasies would adhere so closely to what a fanboy would want to see. If you are going to have a character escape to fantasy world that is in their own mind, that world should reflect in some way the character who is having them. Aside from it being something a 14 year boy would like to look at, why fantasize about fighting demon samurais and dragon's while wearing a school girl outfit? What makes that a practical choice for fighting, well, anything? It serves no purpose other than to make her a sex object, which is an odd thing to fantasize about being since being a sex object is what she is trying to escape from at the cabaret in the first place.
It is, in other words, very easy to write off as yet another example of geek culture pandering to an adolescent boy's mentality. Or it would, if I hadn't noticed something towards the end of the movie.
All of the action fantasy sequences occur when Baby/Doll is supposed to dance in the cabaret. As she begins to move, the scene transitions to whatever battleground she must conquer next. The dancing, while never shown, is implied to be very sexual in nature. So the film makes to give us sex, but then pulls the rug out and gives us violence instead.
This could actually make for a fairly sharp commentary on the general preferences for what American culture finds acceptable. It's no secret that the MPAA is much more lenient in their ratings when dealing with violence but much harsher in terms of sexual expression.
This got me a little more interested, so I looked around and found an interview Snyder did talking about the point of the film. It is here he proclaimed that everyone like me who thought it was just geeky objectification totally missed the point. It was actually a criticism of that fanboy gaze, meant to call them out for it. We all just missed the point.
I have no reason to think that Snyder is lying. But it would almost be better if he did, because if Sucker Punch is meant to be a critique, then it botched the job right and proper. It's commentary that plays it way too straight; like someone trying to get you to see how terrible murder is by murdering people, the message is drowned out by the fact that someone is being murdered either way. Sucker Punch might have worked as commentary had it gone for a satirical tone, and perhaps twenty years the smashing together of every fanboy fantasy may have been over the top enough to qualify. But genre-mashing has become common place in recent years. In a world where cowboys fight aliens and zombies can be inserted into classic literature, Sucker Punch just feels like a repetitive reiteration.
According to Snyder, there is a line of dialogue early on that is supposed to clue the viewer in on the film's real intention. As Baby/Doll is about to be lobotomized and we transition to the cabaret world, another character says "This is a joke, right? I get the sexy schoolgirl and nurse thing, but what's this? A lobotomized vegetable? How about something more commercial?" In Snyder's mind, this is him saying "Why are you making this movie? You need to make a movie more commercial. It shouldn't be so dark and weird." If his intent was to point out how sanitized mainstream movies can be in order to appeal to the broadest audience possible, this line works as a criticism. But it really says nothing about female sexual objectification, except that lobotomized vegetables are not as sexy as school girls. Not to mention one line of dialogue buried under mountains of computerized is easy to miss, and in actuality comes across more as a throw-away-joke than any sort of thematic statement.
This puts Sucker Punch in an even worse position. Not only did it fail on an entertainment level and in terms of not being sexist, it fails to present the director's supposed intentions in a way can actually be picked up by the audience. Sucker Punch doesn't just fail, it fails on multiple levels. The only bright side is the film's tepid box office performance, which suggests that you can only pander to the geek community's baser impulses so far before they abandon you. And hopefully it was a lesson that, if you want to critique something, you have to put a little more effort than simply doing that same thing really loudly.
No comments:
Post a Comment