Sparrow said:
The movie had "morals"? I found it kind of hard to see any deep meaning in it when the whole film was just an excuse to see stick-thin, Barbie-esque girls with schoolgirl fetishes blowing shit up. It was pretty, that's the only positive I can think of.
No, but see...that's the point. It's an explotative movie
about exploitation [http://inception.davepedu.com/]. My favorite part, though, is that you can actually believe it's
their fantasy world, not something a male writer dreamed up.[footnote]Ironically, since a male writer did.[/footnote] Sure they're dressed in the fetish clothes, but they don't
pose like it. They don't stick their asses out for no reason, they don't slink around like they're on a runway, and they don't lean waaaay over to let the camera see down their shirts, because it's their show, not yours. And then that fantasy gets contrasted with the bordello thing, where they have to do all that posing because, in that world, they're powerless again. It's subtle, but very, very deliberate.
Let me try to explain it another way: One woman, tired of being ignored by the film industry, came up with something called the Bechdel Test (you may have heard of it). In order to pass the test, a movie must contain:
1) at least two women, who
2) talk to
each other, about
3) something other than a man.
An unbelievable number of movies fail at this, but Sucker Punch passes with flying colors. But it gets better: Try putting it through an
inverse Bechdel Test (two men who talk to each other, etc). It fails. Hard. On purpose. Because Zak Snyder is making a deliberate statement, and because he really loves to fuck with people.
For comparison, I thought Watchmen and 300 were both fun, but not terribly impressive. Sucker Punch is the first Zak Snyder movie that I really loved. I also didn't think the "twist" was as clever as it wanted to be, but the movie as a whole was still great. With a fantastic soundtrack.