The geek film world has been thrown into a tizzy recently with the release of the teaser for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Previous to that, it had been shown to a small collective audience that stood in line for six hours at Comicon’s Hall H. Now everyone’s excited, and I’ll admit, it looks cool, the operative word being “looks.”
I’m not a huge fan of Snyder as a filmmaker. When you look over his resume, it seems impressive: Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen. He’s built his geek cred, especially debuting his last two movies to the same audience at Comicon. My problem with Snyder is that I don’t think he knows how to tell a story. He can put in elements that are really cool, he’s a fantastic visual stylist, and he knows how to pick his projects. But he also has no concept of pacing outside of individual scenes and seems pretty uninterested in the actual story part of his movies. His style and abilities would seem to be better suited to shooting commercials than feature films. Up until now he’s been able to rely on the source material of other people to carry his storytelling deficencies (Dawn of the Dead was a remake, and 300 and Watchmen were both graphic novels) but Sucker Punch represents the first time he’s made an original film from his own original material.
What’s interesting is I haven’t seen people get this worked up about a film they know nothing about since the months leading up to Inception. Okay, granted, that was pretty recent, but before that what was there? The collective internet community has been freaking out about this and now with a teaser trailer it’s starting to reach a fervor, and yet no one has any idea what the hell they’re seeing. So often the response is “I don’t know what it is, but it looks cool!” I think the problem is that people are thinking there’s more there than there really is. The more you look at it, it’s hard to say there’s much more than Snyder throwing all of geek culture into a blender and cutting it together with a lot of speed ramping and a shitload of CGI. It would seem the basic storyline is a bunch of super hot young girls are locked up in a mental hospital and their only way out is to battle their demons inside their world of imagination. What strikes me as interesting is that this is a very male way of having young girls battle their demons. A teenage female method of catharsis probably does not involve a bunch of sexy anime uniforms and fully automatic weapons. It’s very clear to me this is a movie about 14 year girls for 14 year old boys.
But the thing that bothers me most of all is how rapidly tired I’ve become of this cinema of the unreal. Really you can blame Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but the mere existance of the technology made it an inevitability. I’m talking about these movies that made the decision to shoot solely on a green screen and add everything in digitally after the fact. The one film I can think of that’s really used the technique in a positive way is Sin City and I might argue that being comprised of three short stories prevents it from becoming tiring and overstaying it’s welcome.
No matter how good visual effects become, the human eye can still pick them out as false, and it will be a long time before that’s not the case, if ever. So when your entire movie is built using visual effects, sure it allows someone like Snyder to inhabit a stylistic world that only exists inside the artist’s minds, but it is also constantly slapping the audience in the face with how fake everything is. One could argue that it’s just like animation, but that’s not true. With a film like Sucker Punch, you’re anchoring the audience in with real actors giving real physical performances and compositing everything else around them after the fact. It’s inciting a schizophrenia in the audience asking them to invest emotional capitol in these characters but forcing them to populate a world were nothing is real and the rules can be adjusted to suit the filmmaker’s visual whims. In the end, you’re left with something that feels like a lot of visual noise and a story that feels like it completely lacks the tension of consequnce.
To a similar end, I find the same problems in doing animation using mocap like Robert Zemeckis has adopted. You can watch a fine film like Polar Express or an impressively flawed film like Beowolf and buy into it as an animated story, which it is. But there’s always this element where because Zemeckis is doing motion capture of real actors and then animating them in the movie to look like the real actor with the purpose of trying to fool us into thinking it’s the real actor that it becomes that cinematic slap in the face. Seeing that creepy CGI Tom Hanks in Polar Express is horrifyingly disjointing and completley removes all possibility of enjoying the story because you’re concentrating so hard on trying to either see Tom Hanks or not see Tom Hanks. Alternatively, the animation of Angelina Jolie in Beowolf was top notch and looked very close to live action, but not enough, and still it became incredibly disorientating taking me right out of the story. I still don’t remember a single line of dialogue or what her scenes were even about because my mind was too busy trying to reconcile the animation.
So for now I’m going to reserve judgements on Sucker Punch and as the months go on to it’s release we’ll see more footage and get more of a sense of this film. As it is, it’s hard for me to see this as being much more than another example of style over substance in the absence of story.
You’re welcome,
Ashley
