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Yeah, nobody cares about this movie any more. I just watched it, so you get my thoughts anyway. In the end I'm glad I watched it but I didn't have a super good time doing so. I can see why some people love it and others hate it.
Overall: A cheesy, clunkily written, exploitative film with some cool visuals and action overlaying a moderately successful story of women making a small but determined effort to fight back together against degradation and oppression while being kickass. I felt that the degradation was laid on a bit thick, I can see the film being pretty triggery for a lot of people.
I thought that might be the thing that put me off but actually my main issue is that there's scenes that are clearly meant to be symbolic/metaphorical where 90% of the stuff that happens doesn't actually seem to be symbolic/metaphorical for anything, it's just there to look cool. Which made them feel empty and meaningless, even if they did look pretty.
I thought it got some gender things right and some others wrong, it could have been much better and much worse in that respect. It did pretty badly on race, though (POC and non-Western cultures are very much the background to the stories of pretty blonde white girls), and I didn't like the treatment of mental illness. (Or fat people with skin conditions, what is it with stuff set in asylums…)
Also: There were no positive portrayals of romance or sex, except as ways of asserting power. All positive relationships were platonic and between women. That was interesting.
I've seen Sucker Punch compared to Madoka Magica and I can definitely see the similarities, though I liked Madoka Magica more.
Cam didn't like it at all, he thought it was voyeuristic and shallow.
And now, spoilers!
Ok…why did the closing credits have the male villain singing a love song with one of the female characters? That was just weird.
I liked that it had women working together (including Dr Gorsky, who I really liked), but the "maybe it was all in her head!" aspects really took away from that for me, I actually ended up fast forwarding through parts of the battles since I didn't care, it wasn't real, and I wanted to know what was happening in reality. If the fantasies had felt more obviously connected to events in reality and the other women had been able to experience and interact with them I would have been much more invested. Once it became clear that Babydoll was incorporating, for example, Rocket getting stabbed I was more interested. But I have this problem with a lot of "maybe it was all a dream!" plots, I find it hard to care about interactions between mental constructs (even though that's what all fiction is!) That said, "all the other characters may have been imaginary but necessary parts of Babydoll creating a happy mental place for herself" is relatively emotionally satisfying as "maybe it was all a dream" endings go. And I like to think that Sweetpea and the others were real, just that Babydoll overlaid events in the asylum with her brothel fantasy (and maybe the final scene was entirely imaginary). That or it was ALL a dream and Baydoll's actual reality is different again, and eventually she'll realise she is as deserving and capable of being saved as anyone else (shutup, I can believe that if I want)
I really disliked the idea that Sweetpea was the only one who was "able to survive in the real world" with the implication that the others are ~irreversably broken~. Bah.
And oh look, the white girl got a tragic death scene, the two brown girls got shot off camera after one of them turned out to have stabbed everyone in the back. I SEE.
I'm glad that while there was a constant oppressive atmosphere, you didn't actually see much happen onscreen. The atmosphere was still a bit much for me though.
I liked that while it was VERY EXPLOITATIVE in terms of sexy outfits and sad girls in corsets holding guns etc, the battles were mostly shot like action, not sexy gun themed porn.
Wish the guardian angel or whatever had been a woman too.
It really was not a well written film. Parts were very incoherent, it was annoying.
Oh, and I watched one of the animated shorts on the dvd and it had NO FEMALE CHARACTERS AT ALL. It was all about "Man and his attitudes to belief". Way to miss the point, animator dude.
…and that's about all I have to say. Here's some vids, the director got his start in music videos and the visuals really suit being vidded.
Overall: A cheesy, clunkily written, exploitative film with some cool visuals and action overlaying a moderately successful story of women making a small but determined effort to fight back together against degradation and oppression while being kickass. I felt that the degradation was laid on a bit thick, I can see the film being pretty triggery for a lot of people.
I thought that might be the thing that put me off but actually my main issue is that there's scenes that are clearly meant to be symbolic/metaphorical where 90% of the stuff that happens doesn't actually seem to be symbolic/metaphorical for anything, it's just there to look cool. Which made them feel empty and meaningless, even if they did look pretty.
I thought it got some gender things right and some others wrong, it could have been much better and much worse in that respect. It did pretty badly on race, though (POC and non-Western cultures are very much the background to the stories of pretty blonde white girls), and I didn't like the treatment of mental illness. (Or fat people with skin conditions, what is it with stuff set in asylums…)
Also: There were no positive portrayals of romance or sex, except as ways of asserting power. All positive relationships were platonic and between women. That was interesting.
I've seen Sucker Punch compared to Madoka Magica and I can definitely see the similarities, though I liked Madoka Magica more.
Cam didn't like it at all, he thought it was voyeuristic and shallow.
And now, spoilers!
Ok…why did the closing credits have the male villain singing a love song with one of the female characters? That was just weird.
I liked that it had women working together (including Dr Gorsky, who I really liked), but the "maybe it was all in her head!" aspects really took away from that for me, I actually ended up fast forwarding through parts of the battles since I didn't care, it wasn't real, and I wanted to know what was happening in reality. If the fantasies had felt more obviously connected to events in reality and the other women had been able to experience and interact with them I would have been much more invested. Once it became clear that Babydoll was incorporating, for example, Rocket getting stabbed I was more interested. But I have this problem with a lot of "maybe it was all a dream!" plots, I find it hard to care about interactions between mental constructs (even though that's what all fiction is!) That said, "all the other characters may have been imaginary but necessary parts of Babydoll creating a happy mental place for herself" is relatively emotionally satisfying as "maybe it was all a dream" endings go. And I like to think that Sweetpea and the others were real, just that Babydoll overlaid events in the asylum with her brothel fantasy (and maybe the final scene was entirely imaginary). That or it was ALL a dream and Baydoll's actual reality is different again, and eventually she'll realise she is as deserving and capable of being saved as anyone else (shutup, I can believe that if I want)
I really disliked the idea that Sweetpea was the only one who was "able to survive in the real world" with the implication that the others are ~irreversably broken~. Bah.
And oh look, the white girl got a tragic death scene, the two brown girls got shot off camera after one of them turned out to have stabbed everyone in the back. I SEE.
I'm glad that while there was a constant oppressive atmosphere, you didn't actually see much happen onscreen. The atmosphere was still a bit much for me though.
I liked that while it was VERY EXPLOITATIVE in terms of sexy outfits and sad girls in corsets holding guns etc, the battles were mostly shot like action, not sexy gun themed porn.
Wish the guardian angel or whatever had been a woman too.
It really was not a well written film. Parts were very incoherent, it was annoying.
Oh, and I watched one of the animated shorts on the dvd and it had NO FEMALE CHARACTERS AT ALL. It was all about "Man and his attitudes to belief". Way to miss the point, animator dude.
…and that's about all I have to say. Here's some vids, the director got his start in music videos and the visuals really suit being vidded.