Battlegrounds: A Review of 'Sucker Punch'

‘Whose subconscious are we going through, exactly?’ says the aptly named Ariadne at some point during last year’s crowd-pleaser Inception.  Dress this same character up in stockings, a short skirt and Kevlar, give her a samurai sword and a gun, and trot her in front a series of imaginative but depthless digital backdrops, and the answer is ‘Zack Snyder’s, of course!’ The Visionary Director™ behind Watchmen and 300 has only gone and made himself a fully-fledged Visionary Writer-Director™, crafting here a tale of psychological phantasmagoria and female empowerment.

Or so Sucker Punch would like to be.

Snyder’s films have only ever had the most passing of acquaintance with reality, and there is some considerable promise in the premise here, which turns his predilections for hyper-stylisation and combat display into potential strengths.  However, barely out of the starting gate, the film suffers a conceptual problem: protagonist Babydoll’s lapses into outrageous videogame combat scenarios serve to assist her in getting out of her mental asylum/brothel/prison-house, helping her discover an escape plan at the same time as transfixing onlookers with an intoxicating dance display.  Does retreat into simplistic fantasy serve empowerment and freedom?  Or is it a tactic the mind employs to escape unpleasant truths?  Freud would certainly think the latter.  Yet here we have a woman whose mental withdrawal during moments of heightened sexual objectification are celebrated.  Somewhere in Sucker Punch’s barely audible superego is an awareness of the falsity of this arithmetic concerning trauma and catatonia.

This is instead a two-hour surrender to the id.  But not even the female id – which would at least maybe offer something fresh – but rather the id of a fifteen-year old boy, whose excitement over hover trains, CGI samurai warriors, and zombie Nazis is matched only by his interest in Abbie Cornish’s décolletage.  Now, I may not be fifteen, but I’ll confess readily to finding all of those things appealing in their own way.  In which case, the frenetic fantasy sequences (yes, the whole film is a frenetic fantasy sequence, but you know what I mean) should be the moments the film flies in its own headless, deranged way.

Unfortunately, striking though these moments are, they lack even the vaguest thread of logic.  Wholesale adoption of mythical constructs for allegorical ends can work, and is perhaps the perfect approach to this kind of shallow spectacle, but Snyder takes things both too literally and not literally enough.  The same problem bedevilled Inception, appropriately enough – a paradoxical commitment to clunky literalism amongst visually incongruous dreamscapes.  It goes without saying that I think Tron: Legacy managed to chart a steadier course through these problematic waters, but so too the Matrix sequels, in their own way, did more interesting things in a similar gambit involving the recognition and pastiche of a narrative template, even if they did suck all the life out of it in the process.

‘If you don’t stand for something, you’re likely to fall for anything,’ says metaleptic mystic helper Keith Carradine Scott Glenn, seemingly not realising that neither he nor the film he is in stands for much of anything, although maybe he’s being mystically ironic.  Sucker Punch, after all, manages to equate losing one’s virginity with losing one’s mind, and as life-changing as your average lobotomy can be, the film fails to convince that it’s thought through, or even considered, the ideology it espouses, seemingly by accident.

But then no one is here for ideology, or even story.  That makes the tameness of the effects sequences all the more disappointing, rigorously sticking as they do each time to the same boilerplate, and even committing the cardinal sin of petering out: too late you realise the film is rounding itself up without any more battleground ballistics, and the feeling that you’ve just put your hand in an empty cookie jar when you were sure there were a couple left in there is hard to shake.  The cookies weren’t that great to begin with, but still.

In the recent run of psycho-subjectivity films like Shutter Island and Black Swan, Sucker Punch will be a minor entry, if remembered at all.  Which is a shame: Snyder came up with a genuinely fruitful idea here, one which could even be augmented by his particular hang-ups of high stockings, big guns, and slow motion sword-slicing.  Yet the film is never delirious enough to properly entertain, nor sensible enough to intrigue, which came as a genuine, dismaying surprise.  Consider that, and this, the worst kind of sucker punch.

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of ‘Watchmen’

...and I feel fine: Faithfulness to the quintessentially novelistic source material turns out to be the weakest link of Watchmen.

A joke: a man in the midst of a deep depression visits the doctor in an attempt to alleviate his malaise: he can find no solace in a harsh world and its vague future. The doctor prescribes a visit to world famous clown Pagliacci, which is sure to cheer him up. The man bursts into tears – I am Pagliacci, he explains. What hope do we have when the distractions we have assembled to take our minds off the nastiness of the human condition become themselves afflicted?

This anecdote appears in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel ‘Watchmen’, released in the mid-eighties, and evoking a M.A.D world on the brink of nuclear armageddon, peopled by a citizenry who are fanatical about anything but love or truth, burying their heads in gang-culture, nostalgia, and even comic books so as to avoid sensible engagement with an increasingly eschatological world. Masked avengers in this work are not emblems of justice in a gothic metropolis, but are rather symptom of personal gratification and the power of consumer branding.

In adapting the novel to the screen, director Zack Snyder and his team have retained this grim yarn, as well as most of the words and images, translating them sometimes slavishly onto the screen in a similar, if with a more varied palette, manner of the Snyder’s popular version of Frank Miller’s 300. But this is not a story about Spartans and Persians and constant mythologizing and bloodshed. Moore’s novel, and by extension the script of the film, is an attempt to strip away myth and grandiosity, replacing it with troublingly deep psychology and an acute examination of why people dressing up in masks and fighting crime appealed and appeals so much to the American psyche, and how this appeal is tied up with the outcome of the Second World War and the unseen forces at work in the subsequent Cold War. That’s a lot to squeeze in, even with Watchmen’s two hours forty minutes running time. In making the attempt, the film reveals the massive potential of its own medium – unfortunately, by failing to fulfil it.

As with the novel, there are a wide variety of characters, themes, alternative histories, flashbacks, locations, plots and sub-plots. Without the structuring of chapters, and even the careful positioning of cells on a double-page layout, many elements lose their force. A cannier director may have made more of an attempt to translate the visual and thematic language which Moore and artist Dave Gibbons worked with so carefully into the filmic dimension. Instead, he transliterates. Snyder reproduces, rather than reinvigorates. The narrative feels like a constant plateau of meaning and emotion, only rising and falling by tiny increments, rather than tightening the nearer the metaphorical doomsday clock gets to midnight. Never mind that the surprise reveal of the villain is undermined by fresh framing and sequencing, the finale fails to flare the imagination more than the rest of the film because it is handled in the exact same manner as the rest of the film. Shot, reverse-shot, slo-mo punch, smashing of a glass table, repeat. The title sequence, in which ideas and referents from the novel are presented as Wes Anderson-like tableau’s to the unmediated tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, manages to avoid this flattening-out, as does the depiction of a trip to Mars (don’t laugh) and the metaphysical anguish one character feels by his very existence and responsibilities, all set to some of Philip Glass’ music from Koyaanisqatsi (a 1984 film concerning the disharmony and unsustainability of modern life).

These interesting and unexpected musical cues are not alone: also used are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, some more successfully than others, but all adding some cultural heft otherwise absent: no use listening to Rorschach, a single-minded vigilante, bitch about the state of New York (“this city is like an open sewer with sidewalks of blood”) when the film makes no effort to ground itself in the streets he walks. Like the back-lot of a Spiderman film, or the digital sets so beloved of late, even constant views of the Twin Towers on the skyline fail to position the audience as anything other than outsiders looking in on a fish-tank, our perception warped, the objects we study unreal. This quality might suit the plotline involving two retired Watchmen who re-don their costumes for the thinly-veiled sake of some soft-core action and empowering beat-downs (focussing as this strand does on the infantilism and egoism inherent in the genre), but the sheen does not sit well with either the intensely violent and uncompromising Rorschach or the corporeally challenged Doc Manhattan, a scientist turned to pure energy in an experiment who can eviscerate opponents and used this skill to win America the Vietnam War. These two characters, as well as the fallen comrade who opens the film and the truly Machiavellian adversary who was behind the whole scheme (nothing less than saving the world from itself), are all embodiments of moralistic outlooks, each embedded strongly with American (and human) history. Watching such lofty personifications duke it out at one-quarter speed is disappointing, at best.

What then of that poor, existentially troubled clown? Perceived wisdom is that the superhero comic book is an escape, a fantasy of masculine power and ethical simplicities in which good triumphs and no thanks ma’am, no need to thank me, just doing my job. Comics may not be the opiate of the masses, but they help the opium go down. In examining this phenomenon in such detail, and stressing the danger it poses not just to American foreign policy but also to the basic human ability to relate to one another, Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ bit off more than it could chew, but asked questions about the nature of escapism, and the danger of fabulist story-telling and mis-used imagination. Snyder’s Watchmen, through the configuring of an invisible Russian threat and a caricature Nixon, fails to exhibit the same apprehension about its own medium, instead settling on being a spectacular, morally swampy distraction.