Sucker Punch; or, what did I just watch
So... I'm trying to process Sucker Punch. I don't usually do this, but sometimes I see a movie and it takes me a long time to figure out exactly what I just witnessed, and I feel like I need to rant/review/discuss. So here we are.
Spoilers ahead, and to be safe, possible trigger warning.
Before I get into the content, I do have to say the stylistic aspects of the movie did have some good stuff to offer. It had a good soundtrack, for one thing, though there were a few points of the movie that I thought the music really detracted from. Most of the lyrics were very specific and ~poignant~ to whatever was happening at that point. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it was like WE GET IT. Music was sort of central to the story, in some ways, so I'm glad it had a good soundtrack, and there were moments where it worked well with the on-screen action. But half the time it was beating you over the head with the mood, which I think reflects poorly on the story-telling. It says to the audience either "we're not actually confident we're getting our point across enough" or "we're not confident you're smart enough to get what we're trying to say," and either way you get beaten over the head with something completely obvious. Again, not every time, but enough that it was annoying and invasive. Especially in the first half of the movie, at least two or three songs were just image montages where explanation would have been way more helpful.
The graphics. I'm one that still enjoys slow-mo action sequences, as much as they've been abused. I do have to admit that I liked the slow-mo in 300, for example. I know that probably says I have terrible taste in action movies, because it was extremely overused in that movie. I'm certainly not going to argue it had quality, I'm just saying I was entertained lol. But I do think, when used in the right way, and used sparingly, it can still be a cool effect. I think there were a few moments it managed to pull that off in Sucker Punch, but for the most part, it was pretty obvious that the slow-mo was compensating for the fact that these girls are not action stars. Sucker Punch fortunately does not have 300 syndrome in the amount of slow-mo used, but to me it's an obvious attempt to smooth over the clunkiness. The girls did their best, but their fighting, at least in the most highly choreographed moments, was very choppy and borderline awkward to me. When they were shooting or sniping, it was better, but hand-to-hand combat was lackluster.
Also this movie abused the orange/cyan juxtaposition like CRAZY. To me, it went past visually interesting to visually monotonous. And as a side note, I really wanted to wash everyone's face. The makeup was fucking CAKED ON. And I get it, whorehouse metaphor, blah blah, but there's a way to do it. It was obviously MAKEUP.
And I guess that brings me around to the content. And I'll try to be coherent, I apologize if I'm not. I'll just kind of say things as I think of them.
The beginning... was horrifying. And I suppose it needed to be, given the subject matter, so I'm not necessarily objecting to the fact that it was horrifying, but I don't know that that was a good way to begin the movie. Here audience, here's this monster of a stepfather attempting to rape and probably kill his stepchildren, and here's the older one attempting to murder him to keep him away from her little sister and killing the little sister instead. And then she gets shipped off to a mental institution by this guy, to be lobotomized in a few days' time. ENJOY THE SHOW! I just... okay. This is part of the story, a necessary, essential part of the story. But it's thrown together in an image montage, letting the song pretty much speak for everything that's going on, and it's just sort of slammed in your face and you're left to deal with it. But they don't give you time to process it, because now they're launching into the next thing, and so on.
And I think... if they'd used that particular ten minutes of the movie later, as an exposition tool, the movie might have improved a lot. Exposition on the whole would have been appreciated. Because essentially, the movie has three levels. (Comparing it to Inception is the easiest way for me to explain it). There's reality - the mental institution, Baby Doll's fantasy/possible way of dealing with being in the institution - the whorehouse/strip club, and then there's Baby Doll's second fantasy/way of dealing with having to do sexy dances - the World War I/post apocalyptic fusion battle zone. They never explain this. They throw you into the middle of it and leave you to figure it out on your own. Sometimes, this can be pulled off nicely. This is not one of those times.
After Baby Doll is admitted to the mental hospital, you see a scene of all the girls sort of congregated in this large room, with the evil doctor/male nurse/supervisor guy telling the stepfather that he'll have her lobotomized in a few days, and explaining that this psychiatrist lady, Dr. Gorski, is using these odd methods of therapy with the girls (he doesn't explain, but it briefly shows her turning on music and telling one of the girls to let of her pain and guilt and go into her own world). This is the last we see of the mental hospital/reality until the last ten minutes of the movie, with the exception of a few brief flashes that vaguely establish a tone of threatened sexual abuse and maltreatment in the mental hospital, but nothing concrete. The rest of the movie takes place primarily in Baby Doll's fantasy of the mental hospital as a whorehouse, with the patients as girls being forced to work as strippers/dancers and whores, and Dr. Gorski being their "madame" and dance instructor. The evil male nurse is suddenly the owner, and becomes the main antagonist.
There is no clear transition. It just sort of happens. With one exception (that I'm not 100% sure about), they never return to reality until the end, never compare what's happening in her fantasy to reality, never explain what exactly the fantasy is supposed to be a metaphor for. I honestly still don't understand how forcing the girls to perform for various crowds and patrons connects to them being patients in a mental hospital. And this is the central metaphor of the movie. It also doesn't make sense to me that Baby Doll would escape her horrible reality by fantasizing that she's inside an equally horrible alternative. If it's supposed to be her way of processing what's happening to her, then we're back at the fundamental lack of connection between the reality and the fantasy. Not only that, but her fantasy is so bad that she has to invent a second one to escape that one. And I think if they'd at least interlaced the whorehouse fantasy with doses of reality, like possibly using that opening sequence later in the movie to explain what she's dealing with, the movie might have become a little more coherent in terms of connection between the various worlds.
The second fantasy is is the only part of the movie that vaguely made sense, and one of the only story-telling choices I did like. Every time Baby Doll is forced to dance in her whorehouse fantasy, the movie cuts to the battle zone fantasy. I take this as a metaphor that her dancing is actually part of her fighting to get out of what she's being subjected to (the dances are used specifically as part of a larger escape plan), and in her mind she plays it out as these intense epic battle sequences. If this had been the main thrust of the movie, either with the whorehouse or the mental hospital as the main reality and the was as the escape fantasy, I would have liked it a lot better. That's a plot device that makes sense, and while it's overdone movie action violence, it still would have been more coherent. But adding these extra layers to it that don't connect make it difficult to completely appreciate what they're doing here.
Aside from all the story-telling dissonance, I'm bothered by the way the movie seems to be attempting to have a "girl power" and "women taking control of their sexuality" message, but it's still filtered through male gaze. These girls are scantily clad for almost the entire movie. Now, you could feasibly argue that this makes sense in the whorehouse context, and they're taking what they're forced to wear/be and using it to fight back. (I should explain here what I mentioned above, that part of the plot is that in order to escape, they need five specific objects, and in order to get four of them, Baby Doll distracts certain people with her striptease dance so the other girls can use various wiles to get what they need.) But they are still scantily clad in Baby Doll's battle zone fantasy, which is supposed to be her escape from the other reality. And I'm sure it's still an attempt to say "fuck yeah we'll wear whatever we want and claim our sexuality," but really, it's the audience being titillated for ten or fifteen minutes, there's nothing empowering or fierce about it, there's no point to it. It's just them using big guns and swords with their boobs hanging out and their skirts constantly riding up. And while I appreciate beautiful ladies as much as the next person, it's just obviously for the benefit of horny nerdy guys who'll come to see the movie specifically for that.
I mean I could see it happening while I was watching the movie. There were five or six guys behind me constantly making stupid remarks about wanting to see the striptease (and an especially tasteless remark in the initial mental hospital scene, where, when two girls break out in a fight, one guy was like "SIGN ME UP!" It's a fucking mental hospital you asshole, with abused and dejected looking women filling the entire scene).
Anyway, other random observations... Rocket's death in the battle zone made no sense. There's no reason why she couldn't have escaped the train with Sweet Pea. I get that it was a parallel to her being killed in the whorehouse fantasy, but it didn't work when she clearly could have escaped in the battle fantasy, and just chose not to. It was poorly done, I suppose is what I'm saying. And it just pissed me off because Rocket was my favorite.
Also, what the fuck was up with that first battle zone fantasy? Randomly, old wise white dude in a giant Japanese pagoda thing in Japanese robes? And then more randomly, three colossus-like monster dudes? Clunkiest battles of the movie, too, trying to marry her live action moves with the CGI of the monsters. But back to that guy, where did he suddenly come from?
And god, just so rapey overall. The interesting thing about the movie is that it really isn't graphic at all. There's stylized violence with the war zone parts, but in terms of blood, gore, and sex, it's actually really tame. But they constantly hit right up against the limit. They push all the way until it's practically the beginning of rape and then just manage to get away from it, but it's enough to be disturbing and uncomfortable. Which serves a purpose in some ways, but it's definitely not easy to watch, especially in the beginning. That opening sequence just... uggggh. The implications are horrifying. And I guess that's what this movie is constantly trying to do, leave things to your imagination... it's just not doing it in the right way. It's dragging you along without really giving you much of a context to begin with.
Anyway. That was my extremely lengthy rant. If you read all that, wow, thanks. I'd really, really love to hear other people's opinions on this, or if you disagree, or if I was completely oblivious to something, or whatever.
Spoilers ahead, and to be safe, possible trigger warning.
Before I get into the content, I do have to say the stylistic aspects of the movie did have some good stuff to offer. It had a good soundtrack, for one thing, though there were a few points of the movie that I thought the music really detracted from. Most of the lyrics were very specific and ~poignant~ to whatever was happening at that point. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it was like WE GET IT. Music was sort of central to the story, in some ways, so I'm glad it had a good soundtrack, and there were moments where it worked well with the on-screen action. But half the time it was beating you over the head with the mood, which I think reflects poorly on the story-telling. It says to the audience either "we're not actually confident we're getting our point across enough" or "we're not confident you're smart enough to get what we're trying to say," and either way you get beaten over the head with something completely obvious. Again, not every time, but enough that it was annoying and invasive. Especially in the first half of the movie, at least two or three songs were just image montages where explanation would have been way more helpful.
The graphics. I'm one that still enjoys slow-mo action sequences, as much as they've been abused. I do have to admit that I liked the slow-mo in 300, for example. I know that probably says I have terrible taste in action movies, because it was extremely overused in that movie. I'm certainly not going to argue it had quality, I'm just saying I was entertained lol. But I do think, when used in the right way, and used sparingly, it can still be a cool effect. I think there were a few moments it managed to pull that off in Sucker Punch, but for the most part, it was pretty obvious that the slow-mo was compensating for the fact that these girls are not action stars. Sucker Punch fortunately does not have 300 syndrome in the amount of slow-mo used, but to me it's an obvious attempt to smooth over the clunkiness. The girls did their best, but their fighting, at least in the most highly choreographed moments, was very choppy and borderline awkward to me. When they were shooting or sniping, it was better, but hand-to-hand combat was lackluster.
Also this movie abused the orange/cyan juxtaposition like CRAZY. To me, it went past visually interesting to visually monotonous. And as a side note, I really wanted to wash everyone's face. The makeup was fucking CAKED ON. And I get it, whorehouse metaphor, blah blah, but there's a way to do it. It was obviously MAKEUP.
And I guess that brings me around to the content. And I'll try to be coherent, I apologize if I'm not. I'll just kind of say things as I think of them.
The beginning... was horrifying. And I suppose it needed to be, given the subject matter, so I'm not necessarily objecting to the fact that it was horrifying, but I don't know that that was a good way to begin the movie. Here audience, here's this monster of a stepfather attempting to rape and probably kill his stepchildren, and here's the older one attempting to murder him to keep him away from her little sister and killing the little sister instead. And then she gets shipped off to a mental institution by this guy, to be lobotomized in a few days' time. ENJOY THE SHOW! I just... okay. This is part of the story, a necessary, essential part of the story. But it's thrown together in an image montage, letting the song pretty much speak for everything that's going on, and it's just sort of slammed in your face and you're left to deal with it. But they don't give you time to process it, because now they're launching into the next thing, and so on.
And I think... if they'd used that particular ten minutes of the movie later, as an exposition tool, the movie might have improved a lot. Exposition on the whole would have been appreciated. Because essentially, the movie has three levels. (Comparing it to Inception is the easiest way for me to explain it). There's reality - the mental institution, Baby Doll's fantasy/possible way of dealing with being in the institution - the whorehouse/strip club, and then there's Baby Doll's second fantasy/way of dealing with having to do sexy dances - the World War I/post apocalyptic fusion battle zone. They never explain this. They throw you into the middle of it and leave you to figure it out on your own. Sometimes, this can be pulled off nicely. This is not one of those times.
After Baby Doll is admitted to the mental hospital, you see a scene of all the girls sort of congregated in this large room, with the evil doctor/male nurse/supervisor guy telling the stepfather that he'll have her lobotomized in a few days, and explaining that this psychiatrist lady, Dr. Gorski, is using these odd methods of therapy with the girls (he doesn't explain, but it briefly shows her turning on music and telling one of the girls to let of her pain and guilt and go into her own world). This is the last we see of the mental hospital/reality until the last ten minutes of the movie, with the exception of a few brief flashes that vaguely establish a tone of threatened sexual abuse and maltreatment in the mental hospital, but nothing concrete. The rest of the movie takes place primarily in Baby Doll's fantasy of the mental hospital as a whorehouse, with the patients as girls being forced to work as strippers/dancers and whores, and Dr. Gorski being their "madame" and dance instructor. The evil male nurse is suddenly the owner, and becomes the main antagonist.
There is no clear transition. It just sort of happens. With one exception (that I'm not 100% sure about), they never return to reality until the end, never compare what's happening in her fantasy to reality, never explain what exactly the fantasy is supposed to be a metaphor for. I honestly still don't understand how forcing the girls to perform for various crowds and patrons connects to them being patients in a mental hospital. And this is the central metaphor of the movie. It also doesn't make sense to me that Baby Doll would escape her horrible reality by fantasizing that she's inside an equally horrible alternative. If it's supposed to be her way of processing what's happening to her, then we're back at the fundamental lack of connection between the reality and the fantasy. Not only that, but her fantasy is so bad that she has to invent a second one to escape that one. And I think if they'd at least interlaced the whorehouse fantasy with doses of reality, like possibly using that opening sequence later in the movie to explain what she's dealing with, the movie might have become a little more coherent in terms of connection between the various worlds.
The second fantasy is is the only part of the movie that vaguely made sense, and one of the only story-telling choices I did like. Every time Baby Doll is forced to dance in her whorehouse fantasy, the movie cuts to the battle zone fantasy. I take this as a metaphor that her dancing is actually part of her fighting to get out of what she's being subjected to (the dances are used specifically as part of a larger escape plan), and in her mind she plays it out as these intense epic battle sequences. If this had been the main thrust of the movie, either with the whorehouse or the mental hospital as the main reality and the was as the escape fantasy, I would have liked it a lot better. That's a plot device that makes sense, and while it's overdone movie action violence, it still would have been more coherent. But adding these extra layers to it that don't connect make it difficult to completely appreciate what they're doing here.
Aside from all the story-telling dissonance, I'm bothered by the way the movie seems to be attempting to have a "girl power" and "women taking control of their sexuality" message, but it's still filtered through male gaze. These girls are scantily clad for almost the entire movie. Now, you could feasibly argue that this makes sense in the whorehouse context, and they're taking what they're forced to wear/be and using it to fight back. (I should explain here what I mentioned above, that part of the plot is that in order to escape, they need five specific objects, and in order to get four of them, Baby Doll distracts certain people with her striptease dance so the other girls can use various wiles to get what they need.) But they are still scantily clad in Baby Doll's battle zone fantasy, which is supposed to be her escape from the other reality. And I'm sure it's still an attempt to say "fuck yeah we'll wear whatever we want and claim our sexuality," but really, it's the audience being titillated for ten or fifteen minutes, there's nothing empowering or fierce about it, there's no point to it. It's just them using big guns and swords with their boobs hanging out and their skirts constantly riding up. And while I appreciate beautiful ladies as much as the next person, it's just obviously for the benefit of horny nerdy guys who'll come to see the movie specifically for that.
I mean I could see it happening while I was watching the movie. There were five or six guys behind me constantly making stupid remarks about wanting to see the striptease (and an especially tasteless remark in the initial mental hospital scene, where, when two girls break out in a fight, one guy was like "SIGN ME UP!" It's a fucking mental hospital you asshole, with abused and dejected looking women filling the entire scene).
Anyway, other random observations... Rocket's death in the battle zone made no sense. There's no reason why she couldn't have escaped the train with Sweet Pea. I get that it was a parallel to her being killed in the whorehouse fantasy, but it didn't work when she clearly could have escaped in the battle fantasy, and just chose not to. It was poorly done, I suppose is what I'm saying. And it just pissed me off because Rocket was my favorite.
Also, what the fuck was up with that first battle zone fantasy? Randomly, old wise white dude in a giant Japanese pagoda thing in Japanese robes? And then more randomly, three colossus-like monster dudes? Clunkiest battles of the movie, too, trying to marry her live action moves with the CGI of the monsters. But back to that guy, where did he suddenly come from?
And god, just so rapey overall. The interesting thing about the movie is that it really isn't graphic at all. There's stylized violence with the war zone parts, but in terms of blood, gore, and sex, it's actually really tame. But they constantly hit right up against the limit. They push all the way until it's practically the beginning of rape and then just manage to get away from it, but it's enough to be disturbing and uncomfortable. Which serves a purpose in some ways, but it's definitely not easy to watch, especially in the beginning. That opening sequence just... uggggh. The implications are horrifying. And I guess that's what this movie is constantly trying to do, leave things to your imagination... it's just not doing it in the right way. It's dragging you along without really giving you much of a context to begin with.
Anyway. That was my extremely lengthy rant. If you read all that, wow, thanks. I'd really, really love to hear other people's opinions on this, or if you disagree, or if I was completely oblivious to something, or whatever.