Visual feast

Rating: 9/10 (9 April 2011)

Snyder, the director, continues to amaze me. His big-budget movies, including this one, are and stay highly entertaining. None of them are movies to satisfy deep thinking, but I'm rarely so glad to have spent the money. Dawn of the Dead delivered an updated Zombie experience. 300 did what it promised to do (putting the graphic novel into fitting visual form) and then came Watchmen. The only comic adaption that didn't leave me dissatisfied by "blockbuster changes" to the source material. The things that were changed were for the better (ending), the things left out (island of artists, pirate comic) I didn't miss at all in the context of a movie.
Hence I looked forward to his first original work. (Snyder directed and scripted Sucker Punch). The trailer itself pretty much forced me to go and catch this movie, and did it ever deliver.
The movie plays out in different realities. There's the "real" world, institutionalizing the main heroine into an insane asylum by her evil (possibly child-molesting) step-dad after the death of her mother. Once there the movie enters a fantasy world, reflecting the real one, but taking place in a burlesque, moulin-rouge with-further-pleasures- sort of establishment. Here Babydoll (the heroine) meets four other girls and wins their aid to escape their imprisonment. To do this they need to find five things. Each of those five missions is presented in a third reality. A reality were giant samurai and orks and dragons are just as real as WW1 Germans and Zeppelins and Mechas and robots. Its sort of Inception but with babes and about 50 different sailor-suits for Babydoll. Its not as confusing as it sounds, and for a movie thats basically a B-movie affair, the story is pretty good. Especially the ending, making a nice tie to the beginning, comes as a surprise, but makes sense in a very satisfying way.
The director obviously played a lot of video-games and saw a lot of anime. There are visual references all over the place.
And this is the biggest flaw I see in this movie. There's too much of it. Its like KillBill on steroids. There's so much going on, so many different sceneries to explore, that I found myself actually tired after two thirds of the running-time. (And I didn't even tire with the Matrix sequels) A second, more relaxed view might be needed to appreciate the sheer mass of visuals that went into this. It is, as many have written before a video game that you don't play, but watch and it is a pleasure to do so.
In the end, this world wouldn't be a worse place without Sucker Punch, but its something that wasn't there before, and demands to be seen by anyone interested in a ride thats nowhere near to anything seen before.