jackpackage200 said:
and why does everyone think it is great? Sure the visual effects were okay but the bad script and acting just ruined it for me
Hmmm, not many people are saying it's "great", the reviews tend to range from average (or below) to horrible. I rated it as a "just ok" personally.
"Suckerpunch" is basically a really shallow FX movie making pretensions of being a deep movie. They literally explain the entire thing within the first few minutes.
Ultimatly the very beginning of the movie tells you that the story is about an "angel" being sent to save some girl. They then show the "end" of the story involving the girl you saw at the beginning getting lobotomized and are then told she isn't the star, and the story isn't really about her, but if she things she can do better go for it.
The entire movie is basically a giant plot to escape a crooked asylum (well crooked as far as one of them is concerned, I was never entirely convinced none of the girls had genuine problems). The action scenes represent a sort of vision quest, that form a rough analogy to what they are trying to do.
The big gimmick to the movie is that everyone you see in the dream sequences has an analogy to the actual events going on, except for the old guy who actually outlines the plan, and shows up in a vague leadership/mentor role in all of the dreamscapes. Your supposed to think it's entirely in Babydoll's head, except towards the end where she referances the first vision where she had the plan outlined and wondering why it didn't work out and that last bit that was missing before she gives herself up and gets lobomotized.
At the end the one girl who gets away winds up running into that dude driving the bus who saves her.
The movie is only deep in of the fact that you can speculate whether or not the girl getting away was ALSO in Babydoll's mind, but at the same time you have to remember that the events do pass chronologically, and certain referances and dialogue showing who knows what makes it clear that that bit being real is the only thing that makes sense, especially seeing as there is no clear answer to who the guy driving the bus/in the vision is... well unless you paid attention to the narration at the beginning. Basically god was intervening to save that one girl, and the story wasn't actually about the girl that the story focused on, things however are sort of confused due to seeing everything from her perspsective and that focus.
Really it's not that deep if your paying attention, and remember to put things into the perspective your given right from the beginning of the movie. Once you've got the basics down it's pretty much just a way of framing a whole bunch of "Macho Women With Guns" scenes of girls beating the crap out of creepy things.
Honestly, if I had to guess Zak Snyder didn't really pitch the idea as being some kind of magnum opus like some people think. I suspect given his style of cinema he had these really wild action scenes he wanted to do, but couldn't find a way to fit them into the projects he was actually being given. Thus "Suckerpunch" was an attempt to create a narrative for all of these collections of scenes he wanted to do, without bothering to have to find some way to create whole movies around them or find some way of sneaking them into another project. The pitch was probably that the action scenes would be so awesome nobody would care about the rest of the movie, and those that did would probbly be blinded by it's faux-depth. The plan didn't work, the action scenes were awesome, but they didn't carry an entire movie.
Any way it goes, I'd imagine his rep is still hurt because the bottom line is this movie didn't perform all that well. I'm sure his defense is probably going to be "well it was too deep for movie goers" but really I think the actual answer is that movie goers weren't quite as stupid as he thought. He would have done better to create a sort of anthology movie instead of using the approach he did.
I thought it was brilliant, and everyone I've talked to about the movie thought it was great. That movie had me drawn in from start to finish really.
