They coulda been contenders

Rating: 3/10 (2 April 2011)

A young girl is locked in a mental institution. In other to avoid being lobotomized, she devises a plan that involves a series of missions in fantasy territories she must fulfill with the aid of other female inmates.
Zack Snyder has loads of talent for visual wonders. His forte is a breathtaking cocktail of stylized violence and eroticism. He makes bloodshed pretty and sexual. Which is okay with me as long as we don't mistake these dark juvenile fantasies for real life.
The problem is that, as far as one can judge from this his first original script, when left on his own, he simply has no story to tell.
The script feels like a five lines document that was pitched to the studio heads, containing a cool log line ("Alice in Wonderland" with guns, I've read somewhere else on this IMDb page), a sort of mythical structure borrowed from a Christopher Vogler lecture (The Heroine's Journey! wow, wow, this is deep!") and a couple of platitudes supposed to serve as the THEME, which as every how to write scripts manual reminds us is the most important thing in a movie. So here that would be umh... "fight for your dreams", "yes you can", "freedom is good, I guess".... And that was that. They went into production with those five lines. Who needs a full script when we have full lips and bucketfuls of style? I'm being intentionally mean cause this could have been sooo much better. To quote Elvis Costello: All this useless beauty. And the excellent actresses try and try like real troopers, but there simply is nothing to work with. They've been let down by the director/writer.
If Mr. Snyder and co. had cared a bit more about creating good characters and telling a story (a regular story would have been enough), and less about choking the movie with style and borrowed references, this could have been a GREAT fantasy movie.
Oh well, better luck next time.
One last thing. That awful soundtrack. with those sanitized covers of great rock songs. I mean, how wrong can you be? The rest can be forgiven, Zack Snyder, but that is the unforgivable sin.