Sucker Punch

Evan and I have an irrational dislike for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Maybe it's because of the first trailer and we couldn't get over first impressions. Maybe it's because of the math – a discussion last night estimated the number of combat-capable simians at roughly 5 million. They would be theoretically armed with stone-age weapons. Currently, the United States has a bit less than 3 million people on active and reserve status in their armed forces. They are armed with the best weapons money can by, missiles that can be precisely targeted from a continent away, and whatever latest killing gadget that DARPA has invented. Basically, the humans would kick ass, and the movie would be very short.

Anyway, it was the only big movie opening this week that would have qualified for our list. So pride intact (or hubris intact), we decided to skip it and watch Sucker Punch instead. It's been on our list ever since I saw a trailer for it that had a Samurai wielding a chaingun.

The movie starts with the death of a mother. Babydoll (Emily Browning) rushes into the room that the doctor came out of. Her younger sister comes into, and both of them collapse in tears. Their step-father doesn't seem too broken up about his wife dying, until he reads the will and finds out she bequeathed her estate to her kids. He locks Babydoll in her room and (possibly) kills the younger sister. Babydoll breaks out and finds a gun, threatening her step-father. But she drops it and runs when she sees her sister's body. The step-father calls the police, who drug her, and then he drives her to an institution for the insane. Oh yes, one more thing. It's all shot in slow motion, with a remix of 'Sweet Dreams' playing overtop of muted sounds.

Anyway, the administrator of the facility extorts the step-father for more money in return for a promise to lobotomize Babydoll (with her sister dead, she can't inherit her mother's estate if she's mentally incapacitated ... or something like that). Then we get a few short scenes of various objects that take place over five days. They end right before the critical portion of the lobotomy procedure.

Then we cut to the main fantasy, which most other fantasies are based in. It's a bordello/brothel/burlesque house. The girls dance on stage, and if a patron is impressed enough, he will pay for the girl for the night. Babydoll is new and hasn't danced before, but she's soon called upon at practice. The teacher puts the music on, and after one false start, she closes her eyes and a deeper fantasy sets in.

She opens her eyes to a snow swept scene, just outside a temple. Inside, she meets a wise man (seriously, he's credited as 'wise man') who asks her what she wants. She wants freedom, so he gives her a list of four known objects to retrieve (at this point, Evan and I were blatantly comparing it to video games), and one unknown one she'll have to discover for herself. "Oh yes, one more thing," he adds. "Defend yourself."

As she exits the temple, 3 giant, faceless samurai appear. The first one sends her flying back into the temple with a well placed foot to the face. He lays the smack down with a polearm for a while before Babydoll gets her bearings and opens a can of whoop-ass of her own with a katana the wise man gave her. She ends up decapitating him (he doesn't bleed, so there's no gore, just a bright light shining from his neck that winks out). The next enemy is the samurai with the chaingun that I have looked forward to since March. Dodging streams of hot lead and hiding behind temple columns, Babydoll advances on her opponent before leaping atop him (she may have spun as well. There was a lot of jump-spins) and giving him two shots to the face with her pistol (the other weapon the wise man gave her). The third samurai is dispatched quickly, and Babydoll closes here eyes, opening them again to the dance studio.

It's obvious that her battle fantasy has been her dance. Everyone was enraptured by it, except for Sweet Pea, who thought it was too erotic (you work in a whorehouse - you don't have a leg to stand on).

Babydoll shares her plan to escape with the other girls there (Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie, and Amber). They have four objects to steal, which they can do while the owner of that object is distracted by Babydoll’s dancing. All are on board, even a reluctant Sweet Pea.

When Babydoll dances for each of these thefts, her fantasy slips into a military setting, with a squad made up of her and the other dancers. The item is the mission objective, given in a briefing by the wise man. None of the opponents that they face are fully human (reanimated dead, orcs, and robots), which is pretty interesting, because it hints that Babydoll has issues with death. Well, that should be obvious given her mother and sister, but it also casts doubt on her presumed innocence. Maybe she feels responsible for the deaths of her family, and can’t cope with the thought of taking another life.

There are a lot of stray thoughts like these that come up during and after the movie. I don’t think critics were really expecting any thinking moments from this, and then panned it because they didn’t give it a deeper analysis. Which is really to their detriment, but my beef with critics will wait for a later post.

Music is a really big part of this movie. Each particular fantasy setting has its own particular song, although there are some orchestral cues thrown in if the song isn’t long enough, or if they need to shift the tone temporarily.

The settings are amazing. The main fantasy is kind of dreary, but the combat realms are awesome. There’s a steam-punk second world war, then an orc-filled castle straight out of Mordor (only our heroines are armed with assault rifles) and then a robot filled train on one of the moons of Saturn.

The movie was less exploitive than I thought. It’s still exploitive, though – it’s still mainly set in a burlesque house. Even the combat uniforms manage to show a lot of navels. But most of the stuff shows far less than what we’d see on a beach these days. It’s more reminiscent of 60’s bathing suits, which is pretty obvious since its set in the 60’s (maybe).

The main conceit of this movie is that were never really sure if what we think is reality is actually real or only exists in someone’s imagination, and whose imagination it exists in. It’s like Inception that way, but didn’t get the buzz because Emily Browning is not Leo DiCaprio and Zach Snyder is not Christopher Nolan.

Anyway, I liked this movie. It’s a theatre movie for me, because of its mix of awesome action (and I now realize I haven’t said much about the action – it’s super-awesome) and reality bending ideas. I usually don’t like those (I just want to enjoy the action), but somehow Snyder slipped past my defences, and now I’m waking up in the middle of the night and wondering “Wait a minutes, what if she imagined the whole thing?”