Sucker Punch: More Game Than Film?
No sticker for Zack Snyder - why is Hollywood picking up so many videogame habits?
Why is it that while videogames try harder and harder to be like films, films are trying harder and harder to be like videogames? I only say so because I was thinking back to when I saw Zack Snyder’s vixen circus Sucker Punch (in the IMAX, no less, zing), and the entire experience felt like I was watching someone else play Black Ops. There are few experiences less fulfilling for the viewer than watching another person play a videogame, yet Hollywood has decided that this is a suitable narrative model for movies.
Sucker Punch follows the attempts of pin-up ladything Baby Doll to escape psychiatric hospital by retreating into the fantasies of a fourteen year-old Zack Snyder. Aided by a crack team of corseted sex dolls, Baby Doll must flee an imminent Don Draper-administered lobotomy by imagining her breakout as a series of battles with robot samurais, dragons, cyborgs, sexy writhing and other things that a young girl afraid of losing her virginity wouldn’t dream about.
And Sucker Punch adheres to the structure of a videogame so clinically that there were times when I wondered whether the film may have originated in Zack Snyder’s head more as an idea for a game than for a movie. Maybe it was the main protagonist not saying anything for the first twenty minutes of the film like she was Gordon Freeman or something. Maybe it was the incomprehensible action scenes, which felt like watching the girls waste bad guys in an endless series of corridors. To be honest, I was surprised I didn’t have to press START and choose a difficulty setting before the opening credits would roll.
Comparable to a game, it had “levels,” like the gattling gun dojo or the Dungeons-and-Dragons meets Apocalypse Now barn dance. The characters (am I the only one that thought Baby Doll’s tidily ethnic girlsquad resembled co-op characters in games like Gears of War?) unlock new “levels” by returning to a central hub – the nightclub – with an arbitrary MacGuffin from each level. “Go to the steampunk zombie Nazi fortress,” commands Scott Glen (of what-the-hell-is-he-doing-in-Sucker-Punch fame), “go and retrieve the…um…thingy.” The film follows the structure of a videogame so precisely it doesn’t even give you any real context for the action scenes. The Princess is in another Castle.
So I spent all of Sucker Punch wishing I could play it. Not since Inception have I watched a film that I thought would have worked so much better as a videogame. Interactivity would make the drab, uninspired pandering of Zack Snyder’s fanboy worlds fun. And when films feel videogamey the way Sucker Punch did they feel kind of lifeless to me, like they’re on autopilot, and I feel a bit cheated that I can’t pick up a controller and shoot an orc with a machine gun for myself.
NOTE: I am also reminded by the girl who came up with the title for this article (@_katemoore) that the idea of Don Draper trying to sex you up being portrayed as threatening, or in any way a bad thing, is a fundamental flaw of Sucker Punch
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