We know “Sucker Punch” is a passion project of Zack Snyder’s after the writer-director spent 6 years writing the fantasy-WIP-actioner but, at the end of the day, is the film any thing more than just a director exercising his Hollywood power to live out his fantasies?
“Zack obviously loves his toys and his action, really cool things that can be awesome, but then he can be really sensitive,” actress Jena Malone recounts. “He directs a scene between two girls in a bathroom on the floor, and he’s whispering, he’s very attuned. You can be genderless as an artist — I think it’s real ballsy of him to want to explore this aspect of sex, particularly after his last film.”
“You’re not just working with a director who found a script that they liked and maybe did a few storyboards a couple of months ago. You’re literally working out of his imagination — it’s all in his mind, the entire film. It’s so epic in his brain that he’s just our full resource. any question you have, you can go to him.”
Perhaps it’s an overreaction to “300’s” homoerotic undertones but it certainly sounds like Snyder is just pulling every fetish and fantasy that’s ever crossed his mind and throwing it all together in this film. We’ve seen it before, mostly covertly like Tarantino’s foot fetish, but is a 100 minute feature just over-indulgent? Especially when it sounds like the whole thing is loosely strung together.
Snyder doesn’t even deny it either, openly admitting that “though it’s fetishistic and personal, I like to think that my fetishes aren’t that obscure. Who doesn’t want to see girls running down the trenches of World War One wreaking havoc?”
“I’d always had an interest in those worlds — comic books, fantasy art, animated films. I’d like to see this, that’s how I approach everything, and then keep pushing it from there.”
Here’s a new synopsis to take in while you’re at it:
“Sucker Punch” is set in the 1960s, when a teenage girl (Emily Browning) is sent to an asylum by her nasty stepfather (Jon Hamm).
Once inside, the girl bonds with several other teen patients (Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung and Malone), and she retreats into a multi-level fantasy world where she and her friends are, by turns, the star attractions in a Moulin Rouge-esque night club brothel, and sexy warriors battling robotic Germans in a stylized version of the First World War. They also fight dragons and knights in a medieval world, kick alien butt on a futuristic planet, and battle giant samurai in an ancient temple.
The film hits theaters March 25th, 2011 and also stars Carla Gugino, Scott Glenn, Oscar Isaac and Michael Jai White.
