What would you do if you had 5 days to live and no way out?

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2011)

Here is the problem with the Sucker Punch. It is a very complicated psychological drama using symbolism that, at least in the in Western culture, is not commonly used to express one's internal anguish and mind's ways to cope with unimaginable terrors of reality.
Even though I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the story, a few reviews here on IMDb proved me wrong, I still missed a lot.
The movie happens on 3 levels of reality. The actual Real Life story of the movie is horribly sad and violent and all its full horrors are mercifully not obvious until the very end of the movie.
Baby Doll kills her sister by accident while trying to protect her from an abusive stepfather. Oh, the cruel irony She gets committed to an insane asylum, where the stepfather arranges for her to be lobotomized, i.e. effectively murdered - turned into a veggie. She has 5 days to try and save herself. Now, she is not the narrator of the story. It is Sweat Peas who tells us the story. I think now that the first layer of allegory is the projection of Sweat Pea's mind. It is a dance club / luxury brothel; however a lot of shots of that reality clearly use the insane asylum setting. Took me some time to realize that this projection is what it is because the girls are being sexually abused by the orderlies, behind doctor Gorsky's back. Of course I am only about 75% sure of that, really In any case, the items the girls have to obtain are real, and the dangers are real. The Baby Doll's dance sequences are a third layer of reality allegory and they represent her way of dealing with reality. They both express her emotions and what is actually happening in the real world/first allegory while girls work on getting items.
The symbolism used here is targets a very narrow group of people, namely 30-40 yrs old folks who spent a lot of time playing the computer and video games of the 90ties. That or experts on Japanese Manga
The visuals of the epic struggle scenes are amazing, I am still not entirely clear about the real-world link to the 3 Fighting Samurai Statues is. The other scenes were a little bit clearer to me.
I still cannot get over the fact that Baby Doll got eventually lobotomized, but unfortunately this is not your usual happy end story. This movie reminds me a lot about stories of people in the Nazi Concentration Camps and how they mentally dealt with the complete lack of control over their lives and daily inhumane, mind-bending horrors. All in all it is beautifully crafted, but a sad and very dark story.