What's really real in Sucker Punch?

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2011)

A lot of the conventional wisdom on Sucker Punch is that it's entertaining and loaded with eye-candy, but that it lacks a coherent story or character development and may even pander to the sexual exploitation that it appears to decry. I'd say the reviewers who came to those conclusions missed a pretty good movie.
Sucker Punch is like Fight Club - the whole movie is in the last few minutes. Also like Fight Club, it's an open question how much of the action is real and even how many of the characters and settings are real (in the context of the movie). We can begin by assuming that the video game sequences in which the girls fight giants and zombies and demons and robots are fantasy sequences, real only in the sense that fantasy is a real part of the life of the mind (and this is one of the themes of the movie that's easy to miss).
Conversely, we can assume that the bus and bus stop at the end of the movie are real in the context of the movie, that Sweet Pea really gets on a real bus (although maybe not, and without that assumption the movie is a vastly darker one). Is the asylum real? The staff and the lobotomy doctor are dressed in the style of the Sixties, but the bus stop was modern day.
Is the nightclub real? Most of the asylum characters are entirely different people in the nightclub, excepting the kitchen and the cook which are the same in both. But the "unreal" nightclub is where some of the girls are killed. So were they really killed? Or were they really real (in the context of the movie) to begin with? Consider how we meet Sweet Pea, in a role-playing session on a stage set pretty much identically to the first view we saw of Baby Doll's room at home. Sweet Pea then stops the lobotomy scene (which is also shifted to a theatrical scene on the "stage," this time in the club) to complain about the incoherence and lack of commercial possibilities in the story (i.e. Baby Doll's story).
Is Baby Doll herself really real, or is she a manifestation of a part of Sweet Pea's consciousness? Note how Baby Doll is dressed in the scene outside the asylum when she sacrifices herself so that Sweet Pea can escape. Also, remember the narration at the beginning, about how we find our guardian angels and how they find us.
This is a very complicated and interesting movie about consciousness and existentialism and the life of the mind, masquerading as a girl-power action flick. On that level, obviously, it's going to raise more questions than it answers, but it's far from cheap flash and exploitation. Don't sell it short.