Hub 139 by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, Horror, Fantasy
Publisher: Right Hand Publishing

It is sort of a brilliant idea, and it definitely shows that Snyder is thinking far beyond the normal confines of big budget summer fare. He is also bright enough to understand that combining starlets clad in army surplus stripper chic with a bunch of big action sequences is going to sell tickets. After all, who wouldn’t want to see Victoria’s Secret models dungeon bashing? Unfortunately, he never moved beyond the halfformed thoughts, instead running off to polish the sumptuous visuals. Think of it as a fetish Inception, in which layers of reality are peeled back to reveal a great and deep truth. Actually, don’t think of it like that. Sucker Punch is more like a roll of bubble wrap. It briefly looks complicated, and it’s fun to play with, but start to straighten it out and you can see right through it.

The end result could have been the lovechild of Kill Bill and Moulin Rouge. Instead, it’s more like their joint walk of shame. Something just feels off about the whole madcap affair. It doesn’t make any sense that a 20

year old girl in the 1940’s would dream about steam-powered Nazis or clockwork shoguns. However, Snyder would. Frankly, it just looks like he went through his own movie collection, slammed together Lord of the Rings, Samurai Jack, Hellboy, Sailor Moon and some of the tamer Japanese pinku movies, then turned that hodge-podge of images into storyboards. It’s an amazing piece of fan service, but that’s exactly what it is, and nothing more.

Is it pretty? Undeniably. The last time anyone threw this much raw image on the screen was probably Transformers 2 (reviewed in Hub #97). However Snyder replaces Michael Bay’s incoherent visual babble with a true sense of art direction. As Baby Doll wanders through a series of high fantasy and science fantasy set pieces (robot samurai, trench warfare zombies, dragons, and finally a jet-propelled train full of mirrorfaced robot killers), the entire FX crew brings their A-game. But plotwise, it’s hard to see where Snyder was going. Any viewer paying even a modicum of attention will know that this is just dream sequences within a dream sequence, so there is no reason to become emotionally invested. At that point, who care how pretty it is?

It is a weird moment in cinema. Snyder and Bay were actually classmates at Pasadena Art Center College of Design, along with The Cell’s Tarsem Singh, and all three have been accused (rightly or wrongly) of reducing movies to gorgeous junk. Or inflating them to gorgeous junk. It’s really hard to tell whether this is a blow to spectacle on the big screen or its perfect moment. This is not dumb film making: The script deals, if obliquely, with the fact that society has often dealt with ‘troublesome’ females by sticking them in mental homes. Yet it has no intellectual or narrative heft, so if Snyder was trying to make even a quasi-serious statement then it’s a disaster with a baffling coda. If he

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