"Snyder tells a serious story of a girl dealing with her own mind in a way of accepting her fate through dark scenarios and epic battle scenes."

Rating: 8/10 (3 April 2011)

Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is unlike anything you will have ever seen before. Despite similarities to Inception, Kill Bill, Alice in Wonderland and about a dozen other action movies it truly is a new type of story. Snyder tells a serious story of a girl dealing with her own mind in a way of accepting her fate through dark scenarios and epic battle scenes. The cinematography is great and the story is put together with thought.
The film opens with a brilliant sequence portraying the protagonist's situation. Her mother has died and she and her younger sister are left in the care of another man. The stepfather comes close to abusing the daughters, but the protagonist fights back, however, in the confusion her little sister dies. The protagonist is than sent to a mental institution and is arranged to be lobotomized in five days time.
To deal with the pain and preparing herself for what is to come she retreats into the solace of her own mind. She imagines that the institution is an orphanage, and that the orderly is the villainous man who runs the show. When I say show I mean a real show, as the orphanage is a cover for the man's real intentions. Her and some of the other dancers join together to try and escape. During each stage of the escape, for example stealing a map or a knife, the protagonist imagines herself and the other girls in a fantastical world assigned with the task to capture objectives. This includes a scene on an enormous battlefield where the girls must cross no man's land and steal a map from the enemy and another scene in which the girls have to stop a bomb on a train in a futuristic world on a distant planet.
Each of these sequences allow for Snyder and his team to display the special effects they are known for from such movies as 300 and Watchmen. The effects are great and certain sequences really made me wish I could've seen this movie in IMAX. The direction by Zach Snyder is great. He captures the large battle scenes with terrific imagery, and each of the levels of her imagination contains a different sort of color contrast on screen. Snyder is also great at scenes contained in a smaller environment, focusing on aspects such as a spinning button on the floor or a smashed light. He also directed a magnificent opening scene, which despite the lack of dialogue, is very powerful.
The acting and storyline are also good. The leading girls are never given real names, they are simply called Baby Doll (Emily Browning), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens). All of these girls give solid performances, perhaps the weakest being Vanessa Hudgens, or Jamie Chung. The story is well thought out, for example how the effects of the real world carry through to her imagination.
Sucker Punch is definitely Zach Snyder's best film yet, while it does have some problems, it maintains a high quality of film making. That being said, it still isn't a movie for everyone. It discusses serious themes through the gray interpretation of the world, but most of the film is set in the fantastical worlds of Baby Doll's imagination, making nothing impossible. Some of the scenes won't be for everybody, but this is a movie worth seeing, especially in theaters.