See only if you need closure - otherwise avoid!

Rating: 2/10 (2 April 2011)

So many plot holes to the point of distraction - why was Blue in makeup when it was supposed to be in the asylum? Why were the girls in the kitchen in their brothel outfits when they should have been in grey uniforms? Why was the music from 3 years ago - Bjork, Where is my mind youtube cover? What was the point in getting the knife, as per her 'insight' from the wiseman, when there was no use for it for the escape other than an excuse to kill off a character? What was the point in killing another two girls off? Why did Blondie tell on them - at what point did it seem as though the bizarre plan wasn't going to succeed, and what part of her 'personality' provoked such a stupid response?
The whole movie felt like a theme park ride on a rail, or the most banal video game with no free will and Zelda-like characters that have no voice and are only spoken to: "whats your story?...oh its complicated, i get it." The main female characters were simply a vehicle for a boring male director to exact his fantasies upon (not to say i didn't enjoy 300 or Watchmen), which only made it difficult for the actresses to perform in a descent fashion since there was absolutely no script or plot - baby doll probably said about 20 words for the whole 2 hours (few of which had any consistent or appropriate emotion, besides a flicker of sadness at slicing the baby dragon), and at no point did she exert any real passion in her 'real' life except when she rescued her friend from the cook.
What should have been a story exploring the plight of young girls fighting against slavery, corruption and sexual exploitation turned into a semi-erotic (but carefully designed to get views from the PG-13 demographic) and degrading depiction that essentially degenderized the characters - in what capacity does a young innocent and damaged girl dealing with terrors and haunting memories in the 1930s (one assumes) imagine orcs, dragons, nuclear bombs, robots and samuris based on her contextual upbringing?? One wonders. Yeah its fantasy, and yeah its kind of steampunk, but for the viewer to enjoy a movie they HAVE to have some sort of stability to relate to the characters in order to ground the narrative in something that feels like anything. Anything!
And then the fight scenes. Visually exciting? We have all seen every single scene before, minus the inclusion of a samuri sword in the trenches. Lord of the rings, any old zombie movie, a bog-standard WWI (no disrespect) epic, and Moulin rouge, and we've all seen Harry Potter being chased by an angry dragon and slipping under an old bridge to escape. Nothing made any sense, it was vapid, inconsistent, incoherent, chaotic (in its direct meaning), undirected, and generally felt like Snyder was on a deadline and stayed up all night with an army of cutters, editors, producers and CGI specialists, while telling the sound producer to bunk off for the night.
What's the point of exploring a dream sequence if they're always the same people (in no relation to the real people she knows), in the same costumes, doing the same inane and irrelevant tasks that have no relation to reality. What's the point of having 5 characters, except to flesh out the inglorious voids in the narrative to create some sort of texture. To make this 'visual experience' mean anything the director could at least have signed on a dance choreographer to integrate fight moves that related to the mysterious magical dance she performs repeatedly. That would have excited me – it would have been something a little more original and aesthetically stimulating.
Its OK to be inspired by stuff, but come on, have some originality. He took the worst borrowed parts of the best video games and movies and made a mash-up that has wasted our time and dashed our hopes for a highly anticipated film with excellent marketing and beautiful trailer slices.