A very complex and demanding film

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 2011)

When I saw the trailer for Sucker Punch I just knew Zack Snyder had something hidden up his sleeve. The film seemed to be an action-fest with hot, young girls in short skirts. It seemed degrading to say the least and that's why it left me so intrigued. Zack Snyder didn't fail to amaze me as usual and presented me with one of the best films I've seen this year.
Sucker Punch has many layers in both a real and a metaphorical sense. It starts as a film about a young girl sent to an insane asylum to be disposed of, suddenly that was all a strange dream sequence and we have the same girl being sold to a brothel and yet again we're sent into another alternate fantasy land where she is fighting dragons and steam-punk Nazis. The exact meaning of all this is hard to grasp but it certainly kept me thinking about it hours after watching it. That's when the genius behind it began to surface. Fantasy. It's all a huge, incongruous fantasy.
The ending should have caught anybody paying attention by surprise. It's quite a twist and there seems to be no point to it, however the futility of the ending is the whole point.
If you watched the trailer you should have imagined a story about young women struggling against an oppressive society with their weapons being their fists and their attractive physiques. You don't have to be a woman to understand how offensive this can be as a representation of the feminist movement. That's part of the point.
So you have the hot girls, the guns, the cruel sexist oppressors and the skimpy outfits. What's left? Obviously a lot of violence and fan-service along the way to victory. But do they succeed? *SPOILER* Of course not, they all die which is perfectly logical given that they are a bunch of teenage girls trying to fight their way out of a jail guarded by brutish, burly men.
This film served as a great wake up call to writers everywhere. A large percentage of the audience is tired of this pseudo-feminist, sexploitation garbage. If you want to write films where women succeed it's better if you start by writing about realistic women who achieve their goals with believable means. We don't want films about ninjas who happen to have nice legs. How are you supposed to look up and admire that? Those girls aren't even human. They're just idealized puppets of a writer's imagination. You want an example of a action woman you can look up to? How about Sarah Connor? How about Ellen Ripley? What's that? Oh, they haven't got the cute outfits or the pantyshots, I forgot about that.