Overly Simplistic & Misleading

Rating: 1/10 (22 November 2011)

Oh boy, Suckerpunch...what to make of Suckerpunch...
The movie is basically about a girl who fights back against male oppression(?). The Point of the movie was supposed to be that "women can do...things...too", but I've came to believe that it failed on every aspect.
Why was that so? Well, the answer includes every single thing in the movie... I'll start by saying what I did like: The first sequences. The scenes are established by minimal usage of dialogue, and visuals are used very effectively to set up the tone, which is the most impressive thing about Zack Synder; he has a unique style of visuals & setting scenes up. Also, the fact that the movie was not afraid to get dark, was a positive trait. Most movies are afraid to do that, it's gotta count for something.
Now the hard part: The first and most obvious flaw of the movie was the characters. It portrayed every single guy as a villain who is "out there to get you". The film literally portrayed men as rapists. Trying to praise one gender by panning another, just does not work.
Also, the girls were supposed to be strong willed, independent characters, but they weren't really. They were just very fetishistic and attractive girls who only could overcome their problems in their own fantasy settings.
The characters didn't feel like real people, and were entirely one dimensional. Every single male character was a villain, and the characters lacked in depth, in general.
Number two, the story. The original idea could work, a troubled girl imagining a harsh setting as a hell-bound fantasy world, but it didn't. The main idea was that the girl fought her way out of 3 separate dimensions of a fantasy world, just like Christopher Nolan's Inception.
At first,she imagines the psych ward as a brothel, where the girls are forced to dance, and they plan an escape from there.
Supposedly the protagonist has a special dance that immediately seduces males (which we don't get to see). The film feels so much like a video game, and this just doesn't mend with the idea of the story. The rest is just some hot girls fighting huge monsters, creatures and other freaks.
It is true, special effects can be used to augment a story, unless it becomes ridiculous, and at this point, it really did.
Another major problem was the lack of any consequences. The tension in a movie is usually created by showing the audience what's at stake, why should we should care for the characters, and what the results would be if the protagonists were to fail.
In this movie, we really couldn't have the time to care for the characters, and the lack of any consequences completely drained the movie out of any tension, as the characters didn't seem to suffer any consequences if they were hurt/injured/killed in their fantasy worlds.
The fact that the girls were virtually indestructible instantly made the film boring. There should've been a line in between the real world and the fantasy world, just like The Matrix. Again, the whole thing felt like a video game.
One of the major points, was that the director's "real world", didn't really feel like the real world either, so it just felt like a very long dream (a bad one).
Zack Synder has a very unique & interesting visual style, but that is pushed way too far in this one. This movie was supposed to be, and I'm quoting here, "a female empowerment film", but it managed to become the exact opposite. The message it gave was "Women are seductive, and that's it, they can only fight back in their stupid fantasy worlds, and their imaginations". Women with tight leather clothes punching things, is really a man thing, nothing but a fetishistic sexual fantasy. "The only way women can access their inner strength, is by seducing men" was the main idea I could decipher out of this movie.
Women have intellect, speech, skills, and various other traits that they can use to overcome oppression, but this movie chose a misogynistic approach to all this, and it just didn't work.
I actually could recommend this movie just as another production line movie which is just for the visuals, but I really won't, as the CGI and special effects get ridiculous throughout the movie.
Sorry Zack, Watchmen and 300 were good, but this one was just pushing it.