Auteurism, Hollywood, and Zach Snyder

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I'll say this for Snyder: he knows how to create a world. While a few good steps forward from Watchmen, I still feel largely indifferent to a film that received so much bad press. While the action sequences are fairly lazy and interchangeable - even with dragons, robots, and Nazis (they get better incrementally even if they still look like video games) - the rest of the film has some spark. This is a story about a young lady trying to escape a disturbing, real world for an imaginary, symbolic realm and on that level I find the film to be an interesting experiment. It's been awhile since I've seen a film that dealt with psychological trauma so imaginatively. While I won't credit Snyder too much for any insight here, the attempt to deal with it such as he did is commendable. However, part of me feels that Snyder is trying to use the action sequences as his way of getting the audience to sympathize with Baby Doll rather than stressing the real danger she faces at the hospital. The nightclub scenes display a greater sense of camaraderie and concern (and greater dramatic tension and aesthetic invention) than the supposedly awesomer fight scenes. Easily, this is the most frustrating aspect of the film. Maybe "better" action scenes would overshadow the existing drama of the nightclub, I still feel that Snyder made a miscalculation here.

Colin delineated the three levels of story rather well and the film sticks to that scheme faithfully. It turns out to be an ingenious device for skipping around the center of the story. The sad center of the film. So why a night club for a fantasy? I'll take a guess that it's Snyder trying to please the fans even if he lets them down. I won't complain because the skeevy atmosphere of it all concerned me. Needlessly, as it turns out, because any creepy titillation I'd expected was absent. There's a lot of dark lighting or major use of cool-toned blues and aquamarine to reduce anything remotely sexy. The only warm lighting that I can recall - and it's all electric lights rather anything softer - takes place in the dressing room where the ladies plot. So rather than a creepy spectacle, Snyder makes the story a straightforward struggle for survival. That it ends as it does is sad or affirming depending on your outlook. The feminist message others saw in the film can be drawn from it, but it seems more like an afterthought as the ultimate victim of the system is claimed even if another escapes. It's an interesting film for trying to explore that system although much gets glossed over.

I don't feel like I can comment on the music, though. All in all, the film was an intriguing experiment to which I'd return, but its limitations are just as instructive/frustrating as its successes. Also, just for fun, trying watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence the day before.

[John Cope]

As luck would have it I only just this week got the chance to finally see the extended cut which was very satisfying and improved a film I already thought was superb. The additions are a mix of seeming odds and ends that do add up: they enhance certain aspects, making them more comprehensive, while others are distilled to their essence. Certainly the added Jon Hamm scene seems crucial now. At the same time it's all too clear why it was excised to begin with as it makes the film's whole point undeniably unbearable and utterly devastating.

I have to admit that I am still surprised by how little support there is for this one or how much support is either qualified by uncertainty or outright inadequate misreadings (the Nathan Rabin article posted above being a prime example of that). The uncertainty here, in this case, is a very good thing and, I would argue, fully intended by Snyder (there was a time when I was unsure of that but subsequent viewings have made it undeniable as well). Even if it wasn't Snyder's intention to leave so much ambiguity it is profoundly profitable ambiguity so why be bothered by that?

Each time I've seen this has tremendously enhanced my own appreciation of it; I really do think it is that rich a text. What struck me most this time was how deeply moving it was to me throughout. I hadn't been hit by that quite as much before. The fact that he manages that in a subtly crafted fashion in a picture that appears anything but subtle is admirable enough; that he does it while also entertaining overt and not so overt considerations of the nature of violence/spectacle/aesthetic remove/feminism what have you is staggering. It just contains so much.

I was also thinking more about the use of the music this time and paying closer attention to its application. Here too the picture rewards and reveals its subtle design. The fact that all these songs are covers isn't insignificant either. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint it refers to the layered world "lose yourself/find yourself" role playing in which identity is relentlessly fluid and boundaries more or less disappear. But they never do entirely disappear and that's the source of much of what is so moving about the film. Because even during the action set pieces we are constantly reminded with visual and aural cues of the genuine desperation out of which all this emanates (the survival drive JLG mentions above). And that alone acts to clarify and purify; crucially though it does not undercut Snyder's powerhouse momentum, his giving over to the spectacle as spectacle and that's crucial too for a myriad of reasons it would take awhile to explain. It's a complicating element and is meant to be, one that sketches out its own implied limits of imagination and, by consequence, transcendence.

The feminist championing of SP has been appreciated but much of it comes at the expense of overlooking the manifold complexities (political purposes, concessions to "realism", ironic awareness, Glenn's presence etc.) none of which in any way diminsh the picture but rather refine it still further, giving respect to individual claims by challenging all of them at every opportunity. The desperation alone is an ironic accent on the action (especially the amped up action) allowing us to see it partially for what it is: a wish fulfillment fantasy and yet one that is true in a sense in an outer world that goes unrepresented because it is conceived/perceived as unbearable and the victory there is equally so. In other words, the fantasy world victories are real victories transcribed into a preferred language but also an indicator of the self prescribed limits of what is acceptably representable. They are absurdist spectacles even within the context of the rest of the film (this is the primary distinction of the fantasy world stuff) because, for one thing, these are arenas which are interested only in bold, direct video game logic and brash spectacle (which is why the mish mash of influences is so pointedly irrelevant; it's all just decoration, it could be anything). We recognize their lack, importing an awareness of their paucity of human feeling in from the outside. The victories here pivot on hyper hysterical actions because this is both how Baby comprehends the meaning and weight of her outer world accomplishment and also because Snyder wants to imply the inherent, self limiting absurdity of this kind of concept of meaningful liberation/empowerment, both "this" victory and "that" one if you see what I mean. The violent acts in the fantasy worlds are rarely turned toward humans anyway and this is consequential, implying both that "they" are not sufficiently human but, again and ironically, that this is all mostly a pyrrhic victory at best, allowing for a feminist framing of what is essentially a pure palliative. Once again, the new Jon Hamm scene sums it up beautifully.

What counts though is that all is equally aestheticized from the start; the curtain/stage first image is not arbitrary or simply related to future events but, in fact, a positioning of how to read the whole experience of the film (Baby's "list of items" too is perfectly analogous to video game directives but it has the additional resonance of melancholy and despair in the outer world, melodramatized, equally aestheticized). There was a similar brilliance in the way the new Nightmare on Elm Street was shot, in which the "nightmares" were initially disorienting because they were aesthetically of-a-piece with the style of the rest of reality; there was never any hope for escape.

The cover versions of the songs also allow for an extreme fine tuning of material which demonstrates Snyder's supreme sensitivity to the moment, every moment, every cut. It isn't simply a case of cutting to the beat of some anonymous pop rock, it's a case of reacting to shifts in tempo and general orchestration, aligning his images to them to maximize (always, always ,maximize) their implicit power. And, of course, these songs are expertly selected. They are anything but anonymous and their rendering contributes to the picture's overall compounded emotionalism.

Another thing that's exceptional about what this film allows for is that super obvious images still manage to carry great weight. One of my favorites is the close up of the massive amount of ash falling from the mayor's cigar post Baby's dance. This is, on one hand, such a stupefyingly obvious image in terms of implication that it barely requires acknowledgment let alone comment. And yet here, in this context, it demands respect for being the perfect image, a resonant and calculated note as precisely tuned as all the rest.

But my favorite image, and the iconic one I think, is the much circulated one in which we see the women moving with power and authority through the quasi-WWI trench. This is so great for so many reasons. First, because, of course, it fetishizes them while they are presumed to be at their most autonomously strong and independent; a tension the film is always aware of, relentlessly addresses and never diminishes in its ironic import. Beyond that though, what makes this image truly extraordinary is the all around milieu. Take a look at the way the soldiers positioned flanking them on either side react to their presence as they move past, or rather fail to react. Is this the ultimate feminist fantasy? The male gaze rendered not only incapacitated but disinterested, a purging of lust and an establishment of disaffect as "respect"? Is it a pure image of total strength and hierarchical accomplishment, humbling these men? If the men are conscious agents at all and not just set dressing what does this image imply about their reaction to women positioned as having acquired such total and absolute power? Are they assumed to have been made docile to that? Soldiers? Or have they, on their own terms, lost interest (they seem indifferent not deferential)? Is this no longer what "men" want and is that okay? Is it an assumption of that or model for it? And, finally, what of their larger role as soldiers in a war unacknowledged except as fodder it seems for someone's fantasy of power. A whole world event reduced to solipsist background. Does that not make clear enough the point of how fanciful and limited in vision it really is? Maybe that is it and the women are just a ghost image passing through, impossible and unacknowledgable.

Once again, that Snyder manages to tap into and explore the depths of pathos in this scenario (going to the source of much modern anxiety) is incredible given how exceptionally controlled and calculated everything is. The fim concedes to complicity in its own super controlled and regulated fantasy exploitation. To give these subjects their due makes that unavoidable. Maybe that's much of it's towering achievement to me. He's found a way to have his postmodernist cake and eat it too.

[colinr0380]

Those are excellent posts. Jean-Luc Garbo's post does make me think that Sucker Punch is most interesting because it a rare action film that feels as if it is not defined by its set pieces, something which can be allow for the set pieces themselves to be stripped out entirely and not affect the film too much (as in a way they were in Watchmen, where the action set pieces almost felt like redundant restatements of themes that were covered elsewhere in the narrative, physical, empty echoes of more significant mental actions); yet which also allows those set pieces to become individual, elaborate works in their own right, with their own narrative engine driving them (which is something that I think Tarantino tackled in Kill Bill, though there he intertwined the narrative inside the particular thematic 'Chapters' as well)

I especially like the way that it feels not just a fetishisation of women but of the audience's gaze in itself - its not a film about sex (which a Jess Franco version of the film would have been! And why I feel in a way that a Jess Franco film fills in some of the 'gaps' that have purposefully been left out of this film in an interesting manner!) but about various forms of power. Are these dances liberating and empowering? 'Escapes' from reality? Or rather more purposeful and focused, achieving their twin goals of plot progression and audience satisfaction and bound up with elements that maximise viewing pleasure for the audience - either the cinema audience with the action or the audiences for the unseen dance routines?

The irony comes from the way that this is all done for the maximum appeal of the viewer. I suppose this is also all tied into the disturbing use of the 'daddy figure' throughout, from Baby Doll's repulsive (implied to be sexually abusive) uncle figure, Hamm's doctor and the predatory orderly on the top layer; through the various men that our band of sisters have to perform for in the nightclub layer (including the caricatured fat cook and fat client along with the pencil-moustached club owner and the uncle transformed into the Irish priest); down to the use of Scott Glenn in the action set pieces, giving the girls their orders. There's always a controlling male hand on the tiller, even in the final 'happy' ending (with the relative ineffectualness of the Carla Gugino psychiatric doctor/brothel madame playing into this).

It is also interesting that the 'Lord of the Rings' set piece is focused on killing a baby dragon and then its enraged mother. This seems to be part of a move in the set pieces from the hyper-masculine (the faceless samurais); through human, male but deformed (the clockwork nazi zombies); to killing an organic and female but inhuman dragon; then to the totally inhuman robots, which cannot be emotionally overpowered and therefore are the first foes that gain the upper hand.

Are the tropes of fantasy violence as constricting in themselves as erotic dances are - is Snyder himself trapped into having to dance for us and produce the action spectacles that we expect, nay demand of him, ever more grandiose and steadily more elaborate and featuring a highly considered and caclulated form of desperate insanity in the (s)mashing together of elements? If he satiates that craving does that then distract the audience from the deeply sad story surrounding the set pieces, or does it highlight the tonal shift even more?

[colinr0380]

While I was in a Snyder mood, I revisited his Dawn of the Dead remake as well last night. I've actually mellowed a lot to it, especially now that I've had a break through in thinking about it not as a remake of the Romero film, but as instead being another film influenced by James Cameron's Aliens, just with zombies swapped in.

If we think about Sarah Polley's Ana as this films Ripley (and Jake Weber's Michael as the Michael Biehn Hicks character), it would explain why the characters who would normally be considered the hero and heroine are left somewhat undeveloped (which is particularly disappointing in Polley's case, since she gets the starring role in the excellent pre-credits sequence), since in Aliens Ripley is left as a traumatised/all-knowing presence in the background and Hicks for the majority of the film is just one of the larger group of Marines. The group of Marines here is turned into the general group of survivors, most of whom get gradually whittled down in the final escape sequence. The sequence in Aliens of Vasquez and Gorman being run down in the air vents after Vasquez is injured becomes the sequence in the sewers escaping from the gun shop where Tucker and CJ take on the same roles, with even some of the same actions of the injured Tucker shooting the horde whilst CJ pulls him along.

The whole zombie pregnancy sub-plot also therefore could be seen as a repurposing of the chest buster sections of Aliens in the way that Dawn is tackling the major theme of that film - motherhood and the horrific twisting of that illustrated by the alien's lifecycle - through the minor characters instead. The traitorous character of Burke in Aliens turns into the character of Steve who after the truck crashes cowardly runs off but ends up immediately getting eaten. The Ripley/Newt motherly subplot transforms into the obsessive relationship that the recently orphaned Nicole begins with the dog the group finds, which is something which ironically brings about the final collapse of the makeshift group into the final escape sequence.

Thinking about this film being a version of Aliens however even more damningly shows how poorly this works as a remake of the George Romero film - the shopping mall could be any place in the Snyder film, it is not used at all for any specific satirical point and easily could just be imagined as standing in for the corridors of the colony in Aliens. Instead the location is used for a few cheap gags (the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop) and the original film is only mined for a couple of cameos, the "Why do they come here?" exchange and the name of the Gaylen Ross fashion store. The driving forward pace and action-oriented structure of Aliens doesn't allow for any of the longeurs that make the Romero film so special, instead relentlessly forcing the characters forward into the next set piece. Every exchange in the Snyder film has to 'mean something' for the forward movement of the plot, not just be a meditation on the themes of a zombie apocalypse.

All of this also suggests that the final sequence on the boat that is intercut with the end credits and shows the deterioration of the hope of escape is not just a homage to the island ending of Day of the Dead or the island setting of Zombie Flesh-Eaters, but instead owes a lot more to the depressive opening sequence of Fincher's Alien 3.

[Thomas Dukenfield]

In Sucker Punch, I can see how there was an attempt to equate fetishized fanboy violence featuring hot chicks (the action scenes in total would appear to make up a compendium of Comic-Con wet dreams) with an evil, borderline-rapist "male gaze". However, this seemed like it was only developed to the point of saying "hey guys, enjoying this stuff might be, like, bad or whatever...you should, like, think about it and stuff". At the same time, the movie appears to be about female empowerment, in the sense that the female characters are sexualized captives that attempt to free themselves through sexually "empowering" action scenes. You could say that these themes contradict one another, unless you go with the idea that Snyder is also critiquing women who adopt these fetishized action scenes as empowering when they merely allow one to feel empowered within one's own imagination.

In that case, Sucker Punch might be seen as a double shot against fanboys sexualizing images of female empowerment and females viewing these same images as empowering, a dynamic that allows these images to be accepted by both sexes while they serve to only undermine feminism. However, I've seen 300, and I don't think Snyder is that smart. Unless you think 300 was a subversive attempt to sneak in as much homosexual subtext as is humanly possible to a right wing "warrior" tract. However, many an 80's action movie could be described similarly, and yet these undertones still go unnoticed by the macho sect still cheering on the destruction of the "other". So, in the case of Sucker Punch, even if it aimed for this double dynamic, it only does so at a facile level. Also, if Snyder really found fetishized violence morally questionable, he would have stopped making movies (or started making different ones) after 300.

Also, the action scenes only function on a fetishization level (even if this was intentional), as they lack context, grounding, or tension. They only represent "females kicking ass" within the context of the overall film, and don't work as dreams or imaginings related to the actual lives of the women (except for when there is mention of a specific plot device). There is nothing interesting about them on the level of a simple action narrative, and there's nothing particularly psychological about them, except on the level of "she lacks power in real life, but is very powerful within action scenes that take place in her mind."

So, in summary, what I saw was a pretentious, post-Inception attempt to elevate completely vapid action material (vapid both thematically and as a simple action narrative). However, there was at least an attempt to do something different with a big budget B-movie, and to say something about how action movie images are consumed, which makes it more interesting than any Michael Bay movie.

P.S. When I say "fetishization", I don't mean it in a strictly sexual sense (although there is plenty of that). It could be simply overemploying slow motion, which Mr. Snyder loves to do more than anybody it seems.

[swo17]

Who would have thought that this of all threads would end up having the forum's highest per-post word count?

[Thomas Dukenfield]

Who would have thought that this of all threads would end up having the forum's highest per-post word count?

Well, Sucker Punch does work on two levels. That means the posts are going to be twice as long. Naturally.

[colinr0380]

Three levels!

I do wonder whether Emily Browning took anything from Sucker Punch to apply to Sleeping Beauty (or vice versa)!

[Thomas Dukenfield]

Three levels!

I do wonder whether Emily Browning took anything from Sucker Punch to apply to Sleeping Beauty (or vice versa)!

I meant thematically. So yes, narratively, it operates on three levels. I hesitate to look at the Inception thread again and see where that monstrosity lead.

[colinr0380]

As luck would have it I only just this week got the chance to finally see the extended cut which was very satisfying and improved a film I already thought was superb. The additions are a mix of seeming odds and ends that do add up: they enhance certain aspects, making them more comprehensive, while others are distilled to their essence. Certainly the added Jon Hamm scene seems crucial now. At the same time it's all too clear why it was excised to begin with as it makes the film's whole point undeniably unbearable and utterly devastating.

I totally agree, the John Hamm 'high roller' scene feels essential to the film, and in being a lengthy dialogue scene works as a really nice contrast against the highly stylised visualisations in the earlier scenes, though I can probably guess the reasons for cutting it (if the character has just sacrificed themselves then this long scene feels like it is prolonging the agony of the inevitable. But then the whole film is about a world created in the moment of the lobotomy hammer's blow, a final creative act before nothingness).

It also complicates Baby Doll in a fascinating way. Whereas in the theatrical version it feels as if she purely makes a sacrifice in the extended one, when combined with those scenes which flesh out Sweet Pea and Rocket's sisterly relationship more, it has a feeling that Baby Doll and Sweet Pea have exchanged roles in some way. Baby Doll submits herself to the routine of the club, accepting the loss of her virginity and the extended seduction scene is both a scene of loss but also of her becoming just another one of the girls in the club, in a way taking Sweet Pea's place as the head attraction.

Whereas Sweet Pea takes on Baby Doll's mantle of escapee with a dead sister, but in the transferrence of roles Sweet Pea has at least been left with a way to move along with that burden - compared to Baby Doll having no mother (having died in the prologue) and having the weight on her conscience of having accidentally killed her sister, Sweet Pea can accept her sister's murder by another and, in not having the sister to care for anymore, can return to her mother both to give the bad news but also to carry on with a 'normal' life, which Baby Doll could never have returned to even if she had escaped. (This doubling has been prefigured in Rocket talking about the way that Sweet Pea never really had a problem with her parents, but follwed Rocket to the club to watch over her. In a way Baby Doll's predicament was caused by trying and failing to protect her sister, whilst Rocket's sacrifice becomes her older sister's liberation back to normalcy - along with another, less tragic, chance to 'forget')

But my favorite image, and the iconic one I think, is the much circulated one in which we see the women moving with power and authority through the quasi-WWI trench. This is so great for so many reasons. First, because, of course, it fetishizes them while they are presumed to be at their most autonomously strong and independent; a tension the film is always aware of, relentlessly addresses and never diminishes in its ironic import. Beyond that though, what makes this image truly extraordinary is the all around milieu. Take a look at the way the soldiers positioned flanking them on either side react to their presence as they move past, or rather fail to react. Is this the ultimate feminist fantasy? The male gaze rendered not only incapacitated but disinterested, a purging of lust and an establishment of disaffect as "respect"? Is it a pure image of total strength and hierarchical accomplishment, humbling these men? If the men are conscious agents at all and not just set dressing what does this image imply about their reaction to women positioned as having acquired such total and absolute power? Are they assumed to have been made docile to that? Soldiers? Or have they, on their own terms, lost interest (they seem indifferent not deferential)? Is this no longer what "men" want and is that okay? Is it an assumption of that or model for it? And, finally, what of their larger role as soldiers in a war unacknowledged except as fodder it seems for someone's fantasy of power. A whole world event reduced to solipsist background. Does that not make clear enough the point of how fanciful and limited in vision it really is? Maybe that is it and the women are just a ghost image passing through, impossible and unacknowledgable.

I think this may have been one of the additions for the extended cut but did you notice John that Sweet Pea has a moment during the 'iconic' walk through the trenches that you excellently describe where a young child soldier briefly looks at her. She stops and touches his face before moving on.

This young man comes back in the final scene standing just in front of Sweet Pea to get on the bus. In that scene he turns back briefly to look at her just before she is stopped by the policemen. It's another male gaze but feels less lustful and more acknowledging of Sweet Pea's difference, a separateness due to her experiences somehow.

[domino harvey]

After so much contentious discussion of the film's virtues, real or imagined, I knew I'd eventually have to see the film, so I went in to the director's cut of this film knowing full well that I'd hate it and at the very least hoped it'd be a relatively painless procedure. But God save and protect us, the film is brilliant. Brilliant.

On a purely sensory overload level, this is an astounding film, one that realizes if computer special effects are going to look unreal anyways, you might as well use them to manifest sequences so utterly bonkers that they probably could have been envisioned in a mental ward. What struck me while watching is that for as much as the film resembles a video game in its action sequences, it strongly co-opts the visual medium of comic books just as prominently outside of these moments, with panel framings and expertly realized shot-reverse shots. The resultant melange of visual stimuli is an unusually striking example of pure cinema-- from Zack Snyder of all people. All the discussion of who'd be a perfect match to make a modern silent film in the Artist thread is somewhat moot, as Snyder practically has and would get my vote for any future endeavor in that direction. As for this film, as pet projects go, at least this one is executed with the same furious energy and passion that no doubt fueled its inception in the back of Snyder's mind. I've often said there's nothing more interesting than someone talking about something they're passionate about, and Snyder is certainly in love with his film and gives it the same exuberant execution. I didn't want to like this film. I didn't want to be part of that contingent that screams from the back pews of its merit. But, well, here we are.

[colinr0380]

I get the feeling that this might become the new Showgirls - a film that every 'normal person' seems to hate but which stands up on its own and might legitimately have a chance of becoming a cult classic!

Domino, your point about the influence of comic books on the style reminded me that in the samurai battle it felt as if there wasn't just an allusion to the samurai battle in Brazil (with the first enemy bleeding light when slashed with the sword) but also to anime (particularly the sequence with the jumping up on the still-firing machine gun, which felt reminiscent of the jumping-from-missile-to-missile sequence of something like Project A-ko).

I'm also still amazed not only that the high roller sequence was cut from the theatrical version but also that the "Love Is A Drug" number showing the 'night in the life' of the club was removed from the body of the film, only being replaced for the director's cut. That would seem to put in place a number of ideas essential for the rest of the film to have the proper impact, in particular that all of the girls in the burlesque (including Gugino's madame) are doing mediated performances of 'empowering' routines of strong, almost Amazonian women whilst being dominated off-stage, something likely intended to add an extra frisson of pleasure to the client's dominance of the fiestiness on display once they are in the bedroom.

[knives]

Yes, but Charles Taylor also calls Sucker Punch the year's "most ambitious American film...also the strongest feminist film to ever come out of Hollywood" so nothing he writes can be taken seriously.

I wouldn't go that far, though none of the arguments for such have been convincing.

[CSM126]

Yes, but Charles Taylor also calls Sucker Punch the year's "most ambitious American film...also the strongest feminist film to ever come out of Hollywood" so nothing he writes can be taken seriously.

Anyone who says that needs to be summarily executed. There are wrong opinions, and that is one of them.

[John Cope]

I wouldn't go that far, though none of the arguments for such have been convincing.

I guess it depends on how much it takes to convince you and what it would take to do so. Having said that, I'm not convinced by it either and have said so here. Taylor isn't the only one who thinks this (his own view has been highly influenced by Kim Morgan's on the subject), but as far as I'm concerned the assertion actually diminishes the film's greatness on top of being misconceived to start, unless one defines "feminist" in the broadest possible sense.

[colinr0380]

I think it is more about empowerment than anything wider about 'feminism' per se, and wonder if the reviewers are getting confused between the two.

Although I think this might be why Tarantino wouldn't like the film (as noted in his bad films of the year list) since in comparison with Kill Bill Sucker Puch kind of works to remove, or at least undermine, some of the more facile things that Kill Bill has to say - especially when Sucker Punch deals with the way that personal self-actualisation can end up hurting others in the process and the notion of self sacrifice. In this film rather than the woman having to become hard, brittle and just as violent as men (with other tough career women being the ultimate obstacles other than Bill), the idea of the 'warrior woman' exists only in fantasy, overwriting the use of female sexy dances which are doing the real work of distracting all the men from the escape plan. The 'warrior woman' might be a useful trope to spur Baby Doll into her routine, but it is not the practical solution here, and even at the end the bordello/nightclub itself ends up being the more important fantasy construct than any of the Lord of the Rings/Nazi zombie/samurai hyper-masculine deeper layers.

[matrixschmatrix]

So, it's female empowerment in that it posits a world in which women have no access to power except through sexy dancing?

[colinr0380]

No, because even the bordello/nightclub is another construct overlaying the events going on in the mental asylum. Who knows what was going on in that layer of reality, apart from the glimpses we are given in the bookends - I doubt there were many sexy dances going on there!

[matrixschmatrix]

So they have no access to power at all, and imagine themselves accessing it through sexy dancing?

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I think it is more about empowerment than anything wider about 'feminism' per se, and wonder if the reviewers are getting confused between the two.

I'm confused by how the two can be separated. Or have I taken the idea "Buffy Summers = feminist" too much at face value?

[colinr0380]

In the wake of the Batman vs Superman thread, I'll weigh in on a different Zack Snyder film:

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

I enjoyed this a lot more than I had expected to, although as a film about anthropomorphised animals and their societal battles its still not a patch on Watership Down. The visuals are amazing, though that's really to be expected from a Zack Snyder film, and I was amused throughout to see a bunch of owls being lovingly CGI crafted with the same care and attention being lavished on the feathers and beaks here as on the abs sculpted on the Spartans in 300! Also the Synder-style speed ramps are hilarious, and kind of brilliant, here when applied to owls as opposed to superheroes, Spartans or the girls in Sucker Punch!

The drawbacks are the usual ones for a Snyder film: the adaptation process. For someone who has only done one original film (Sucker Punch, which I inevitably think is his best, and purest, work), I don't think Snyder is suited to adapting pre-existing material at all. It seems as if he expects the weight of the existing mythology (or fanbase) to do all of the narrative work for him while he gets on with embellishing the visual side. Maybe he'd work better as a co-director with someone more attuned to story elements?

This film really falls down in the way it dumps its convoluted mythology (and owl language, as forewarned by the unwieldy title) straight into the audience's lap and expects them to wholeheartedly and uncynically buy into the world and follow the lore from the beginning. Spend a minute sniggering about owls wearing little leather helmets and flying harnesses and you find you've been immediately ejected out of the movie before it has even begun.

And its also another in the long line of failed attempts at beginning a multi-part epic franchise in the wake of the success of Harry Potter and Hunger Games (although this perhaps bears more comparison to How To Train Your Dragon in terms of its story structure of overcoming family issues. I actually like it better than Dragon though as it doesn't have a hamfisted disability wish fulfilment metaphor unsubtly jammed onto it), in that its the set up for a franchise that will probably never continue in film form (like The Golden Compass, Ender's Game or the first Warcraft movie). Apparently this film is the first two books of a seven book series, but even with the first two books smooshed together it still only seems as if we are just starting to get past all of the exposition and character set ups into the good stuff (i.e. the 'middle, dark film of the trilogy' where these kind of film series are often at their best), just as it comes to a close.

(In some ways though these anthology films inevitably end disappointingly. They've been built up so much that when they fizzle to a close three to eight sequels later it just makes one nostalgic for the first films that showed so much hope and promise in the material. Perhaps these franchises that failed to make it off the launch pads could be seen more nostalgically for their unfulfilled promises than something like the Divergent or Maze Runner series that plodded onward, duty bound to finish what they started?)

But its difficult to dismiss it entirely. As well as the visuals its kind of worthwhile for having its talking animals voiced almost entirely not by Americans or Brits but largely Australians (aside from Helen Mirren inevitably playing the British baddie of the piece! But including one of the last roles for Bill Hunter) I found this surprisingly jarring at first, which perhaps shows how sadly rarely it happens, but then found it extremely enjoyable and it adds a bit of individuality to a film that otherwise struggles a little to be unique (even the moments of darkness in here, such as the "Moon blinding" scenes feel indebted to The Dark Crystal. Even if they're still daring in this context).

I'd have to put in a word for David Wenham as Digger, who is the much needed comic relief character who turns up about halfway into the film but immediately lightens the dark and oppressive tone (full of kidnapping, slavery, siblings being torn apart as they end up on different sides of a conflict, fleeing from oppressors and so on) up in just one scene. I appreciated that moment a lot - its kind of in the same vein as the Zero Mostel bit in Watership Down, but Wenham's role in this feels better handled than that!