I went to see SuckerPunch last night at the midnight showing at the Douglas Theaters IMAX.
I walked into today and read a review written on io9 by (what seems to me to be) the most hateful, feminist writer ever. No disrespect. I’m just commenting on the lady’s style and the tone of her review. I don’t know this woman, I won’t ever meet this woman (probably), so all I have to infer who this person is is from how we perceive her writing.
I thought the movie was great. I’d recommend it to my readers. I’ll sum up to you why:
1. The Action. Holy shit, the action was over-the-top explosive, dynamic and unbelievable. Every action scene made me lean forward, waiting to see what happens next. Every action scene was non-stop!
2. The Soundtrack. Much like the action, it was over-the-top expressive and just meshed perfectly with each scene. And the sound itself! I was nearly deaf by the end of the Zombie Nazi scene, but I thought it was great!
3. The Inception Effect (aka a Dream Within a Dream). Perfectly done. I’ll go more into why it totally went over the head of the author of that io9 article below. But I totally understood what was going on, and it had nothing to do with women being prostitutes. I went to be entertained, and I was entertained without being bored to death.
4. The Visuals. Everything from the rundown asylum, to the dream hostel, to the action scenes was perfectly expressed in the visuals. Especially the action scenes. You thought they were actually in those environments, fighting the bad guys. Reflections, shadows, lighting, scenery. Very well done. CGI genius.
5. The Story. Told in small blurbs through the eyes of (SPOILER) another girl not Babydoll (/SPOILER), the story was alright. It wasn’t awesome. In fact, that’s my one complaint – too much drama. But the drama parts didn’t last long as they immediately threw you into another action part before the drama affected you.
So – how did this go over Annalee Newitz‘s head? Honestly, I’m not sure. Save maybe she had a little bias upon going into the film. Here’s the plot in a non-spoiler nutshell: Girl gets framed by abusive father, girl gets sent to asylum with other crazy girls, girl choses to invent a reality to cope with the horror of the asylum, and invents another reality when dancing (which is yet another analogy for her pretending to have an insane fit to distract people) to validate her own actions. END OF STORY.
Annalee writes this –
A few possible interpretations are:
1. Insane people and sex workers are interchangeable.
2. Women can only triumph over adversity in their dreams.
3. Action movies spring from the imaginations of enslaved, mentally unstable prostitutes.
No. No. No. Annalee’s totally obtuse.
It’s not about insane girls acting like whores who can only achieve anything through dreams. It’s about women being sexually abused in an insane asylum, so to cope with the horror and still fight to be free, one of the girls goes into dream mode. A dream mode inspired by this thing they do called “Theater.” And kicks ass. END OF STORY. It’s not meant to be a deep, engrossing plot with tons of character development and introspection. That would make it a drama flick. Anything more weepy and prude, and it would be a chick flick.
This movie was made by a guy for geeky guys (and geeky girls) and I suspected long ago that the femme Nazis would totally hate on it for that. But this lady tried to write something that sounded like it was intelligent. It’s an action flick, with a plot built to feed a dream within a dream story about tackling horror with imagination. JFC, how oblivious do you have to be to not see that?
Man, I’m glad I consciously avoided the io9 review, now. I watched MovieBob’s review on the escapist, and quite enjoyed the movie itself. I’ll probably buy it, or at least have intentions to when it comes out.
Just like Scott Pilgrim.