Sucker Punch (2011)

I really liked the beautiful, dialogue-free opening sequence of this film, which shows the chain of tragic events that lead to Baby Doll (Emily Browning) being committed to a mental institution by her evil stepfather and a crooked orderly (Oscar Isaac). As I've explained in other reviews, I'm a sucker for gothic, spooky mental institutions, so I was a little disappointed when it turns out that this setting is just a bookend for the bulk of the movie, which takes place in a Weimar-esque bordello of Baby Doll's own imagination (I think) where all of the orderlies, doctors and patients are recast as brutal pimps, sympathetic madams and dancers/prostitutes. Baby Doll is but one of the pretty young girls with silly names like Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie etc, who are forced to dance for the amusement of rich assholes and, by PG-13-approved implication, bone them.

It turns out that Baby Doll has a super power to hypnotise men with her seductive dancing, so she comes up with a plan to distract the clients while the other girls gather up items for their escape (a map, a lighter, a key etc). It's a repetitive set-up that seems like a perfect basis for a shitty Hollywood musical, but instead of dance sequences, Baby Doll's internal struggle on the dance floor is symbolically represented by crazy action sequences involving giant stone samurai, Steampunk WWI soldiers (incorrectly identified as Nazis by many reviewers), orcs, robots and whatever other crazy shit that Zack Snyder thinks is awesome. Scott Glenn plays a wise mentor who appears as an expository device to set up each of her fantasies, which play out like mini (wo)men-on-a-mission action movies with Baby Doll and the other girls.

So, it's basically a series of crazy fantasy sequences that take place inside another fantasy sequence that takes place inside the mind of a young girl in a mental institution that is so exaggerated and stylised it might as well be a fantasy sequence. There's about ten levels of fantasy without any recognisable reality to grasp onto, and it's never really clear how or if things that happen in Baby Doll's head affect the real world. With Inception Nolan was careful to lay all this shit out, but Snyder just dumps you in it and expects you not to notice/care. I really enjoyed the action sequences as pure spectacle, but without consequence it's hard to build the tension and suspense that underlie a truly great action movie.

It's also pretty grim and relatively joke-free. Some people have complained about that but I really appreciate the sincerity of it. It's a lot easier to couch your movie in cynicism and self-referential snark, lest people accuse you of "taking yourself too seriously", but Snyder laid everything out in the open and exposed himself to the world. Even the creepy, fetishy bits that he probably should have kept private, like underage-looking girls swordfighting in miniskirts, pigtails and high heels. This movie has been accused of being a cynical attempt to bait the Comic Con crowd (a gamble that seems less and less of a sure thing every year) and maybe it was for some people higher up the food chain, but for Snyder it seems like it was a labour of love.

It doesn't surprise me that this film is getting terrible reviews, but it does surprise me how vitriolic a lot of them are. Yeah, the film has plenty of problems, but a lot of internet nerdos are acting like Zack Snyder fucked their dog and wiped his dick on their mint condition Star Wars action figures. Somewhere along the line people turned on Zack Snyder, and I don't really know why. Against all odds I actually liked the Dawn of the Dead remake, I enjoyed 300, I thought Watchmen was pretty good. None of them were all-time classics, but I can list plenty of things I liked about them. I didn't see that owl movie, maybe that's what did it. Some people are even dropping the atomic bomb of film criticism and comparing him to Michael Bay. Come on guys, I rolled my eyes as much as anyone when they called him "the visionary director of 300" on movie posters, but at least the guy knows how to put an action sequence together.

Anyway, I doubt Snyder-haters will have their minds changed by this film, as it's full of trademark Snyder-isms such as over-obvious, distracting musical choices and lots of slow motion ramping. Haters of the latter will be particularly annoyed by an action sequence where the girls fight robots on a train, which is a solid ten minutes of slow motion leaping and shooting, all done in one continuous take thanks to the sorcerous magic of pixel wizards. I loved it though, as I did all the action sequences. They are more chaotic than in his other films, but really well choreographed and edited. Snyder has this action stuff on lockdown. If he could figure out human emotion he would be unstoppable.

A lot of criticism seems to be centered about the sexual politics of the movie too. Snyder may have invited it on himself by using the word "empowerment" about fifty times in every press interview, but I don't really know why this is the movie where people have decided to take a stand. They showed the trailer for Furious Five before this movie, which had girls in shiny booty shorts waving their asses at the camera every four seconds (I timed it). Just because this film is centered around women people want to unpack every bit of creepy subtext. Honestly I think Snyder genuinely cares about these characters, but he also likes the aesthetics of comics books and anime, including pretty girls in skimpy outfits making cool superhero poses. This is something we have in common.

This is Snyder's first film that isn't an adaptation or a remake, and he must have sensed it would probably be his last because it seems like he put everything he had into this one. It's not great and it's too shallow to have any lasting impact, but I like that it's so ambitious and extreme. Snyder may not have proven himself beyond being, as every review seems to call him, a "bold visual stylist", but at least I dig his style and I can respect the care that went into it. Next it's back to adaptation with his Superman movie, which should at least have one up on Superman Returns in that it's bound to feature Superman actually punching a guy.

Moon (2009)

If Dark Star got 2001: A Space Odyssey pregnant, Silent Running delivered the baby and Solaris was also involved somehow, maybe teaching Lamaze classes or something, we'd have Moon. It's the kind of intelligent science fiction film that they stopped making after Star Wars came out. It's very small story with little to no CG. There aren't any laser guns or aerial battles or weird aliens. It's directed by David Bowie's son Duncan Jones, but Bowie doesn't appear as Ziggy Stardust or contribute any songs or anything. Not even Space Oddity. There are robots but they are friendly and voiced by Kevin Spacey.

The movie takes place at a mining station on the moon that uses some sort of fusion technology to generate energy for Earth. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole occupant of the station and it's his job to oversee the day-to-day operations and occasionally collect the little tubes of energy from the moon-harvesters and shoot them back to Earth. So much of it is automated that you wonder why he's there at all, most of the time he's just sitting around carving models or watching TV. He's got two weeks left on his three year contract and he's looking forward to seeing his wife and kid again so much that he's getting space madness.

Obviously it's a pretty lonely job. Sometimes he gets pre-recorded messages from his bosses or his wife but long range communications have been broken for a while so his only real companion is a robot named GERTY, a big, white boxy thing that travels around suspended from a ceiling track. Science fiction movies have taught us to be wary and suspicious of robots but GERTY is actually really nice. His voice is monotone but warm and friendly (Kevin Spacey does a great job naturally) and he's got a little screen with a smiley face that indicates his mood. He even defies Sam's boss in order to help him out and it's not like he breaks his programming to do it, it's just that he is programmed to look after Sam and that requirement trumps everything else. You are awesome GERTY. HAL could learn a thing or two from you.

The look of the interior sets is quite interesting. It's obviously inspired by the white, functional aesthetic of 2001: A Space Odyssey but it looks grubby and lived-in, proving what I've always thought about these sterile, all-white interiors: They must be a bitch to keep clean. The technology looks bulky and dated, almost retro-futuristic. Most of the monitors look like CRT screens instead of LCD panels. Maybe I'm just picky but I found it a little distracting, like the film was trying too hard to replicate the look of older science fiction films, but overall it was a good compromise between spiffy futurism and working-class functionality. Much of the exterior stuff was done with models and it ends up looking way better than if they'd spent it on CG.

Here on in it's spoilers up the ass, so stop reading if you haven't seen it. Okay, is he gone? Just between you and me, what the fuck is up with that guy, he hasn't even seen Moon? I know, right? Anyway, clones. What I liked about the way they revealed things was that it wasn't done Shyamalan-style, whipping the sheet off the big twist with a drum roll and an orchestral sting. I've heard people say it's too easy to guess but I think they are missing the point. The twist comes relatively early and leaves plenty of time to contemplate what it means in context. Using it show the conflict between the "young" Sam and the "old" Sam was a clever way of illustrating how he had grown and changed after three years of isolation. Sam Rockwell gives several great performances.

I was a little disappointed to learn that Sam(s) had only been up there for 15 years or so. There must be some serious quality control issues if things are going so wrong this early in the operation. I was expecting that Sam had actually been up there for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, firing the energy canisters back to an Earth that is long since cold and dead. That would explain why he couldn't contact anyone on Earth, which brings up another point. If you're going to build a bunch of jammers for long range communications so Sam can't contact Earth, why have long range coms accessible to him at all? Just put in some dummy software. What kind of morons are running this evil corporation?

Okay, so maybe if the human race had been wiped out the film would probably have a bummer of an ending, but I'm not sure how his escape plan was supposed to work anyway. I think these canisters are pretty important so no doubt he'll be discovered (and probably killed) by a Lunar Industries Retrieval Team a couple of minutes after he lands. Either that or he lands in the middle of the ocean and drowns before he's picked up. Plus I'm pretty sure that someone back on Earth must have noticed that an extra clone had been woken up. Someone must be monitoring their status, it's not like they're pop tarts.

Anyway I'm being kind of nitpicky here because this is a pretty great film. Probably isn't going to change your life but it can sit proudly alongside the other films I've mentioned. I've heard complaints that it's too derivative of other science fiction films and I can definitely see that, but intelligent science fiction films are as rare as fuck these days so I'm willing to give it a pass due to extenuating circumstances.