Zack Snyder's New Movie Sucker Punch Looks Insane, But Very Familiar

Fans and detractors of director Zack Snyder have long been looking forward to seeing what the geeky auteur can do when he's not adapting other people's material. He successfully updated Dawn of the Dead, faithfully re-created the comic-book worlds of 300 and Watchmen, and even his upcoming animated owl picture Legend of the Guardians is based on a children's book, so the idea of an original Zack Snyder joint had fans salivating and haters waiting. Well, the wait is over, and the first trailer for Zack Snyder's self-penned Sucker Punch has been released, and while it certainly is eye-catching, it doesn't look terribly original. It looks like he took a dozen existing movies, put them in a blender and hit "Puree." Granted, it still looks pretty tasty to a movie freak like me, but the film's tag line, "You will be unprepared"? If you've seen any of these movies, you just might be prepared after all.

Precious
The film follows an inmate in a 1950s mental hospital, who escapes into a dream world in order to escape the horrible treatment she undergoes there -- similar to how Precious pretends she's an actress or a model whenever she's faced with abuse from her mother.
See Also: Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, where two troubled girls escape into a shared fantasy world, and Paperhouse, where a girl dreams what she draws.

Inception
Snyder's description of the story explains that the girls of the institution, who all inhabit the same imaginary world, have to find five objects and avoid a "vile man" before they can escape. The team-oriented treasure hunt nature of the dreamworld sounds an awful lot like Inception, which was also the brainchild of a successful superhero film director.
See Also: Pan's Labyrinth, in which a young girl retrieves items and avoids monsters in possibly imaginary scenarios.

Kill Bill
Of all the fantasy worlds we see in the trailer, none stand out as much as the one where Emily Browning, in a sailor suit, holds a samurai sword and faces off against a bunch of giant samurai in a snowy Japanese courtyard. Put Uma Thurman in Gogo Yubari's schoolgirl outfit from Kill Bill (and make Lucy Liu 8 feet tall), and you've got a match.
See Also: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which a character also deflects bullets with Japanese swords.

Avatar
All the leaping around in slow-motion is a Snyder staple, but when one of the things people are leaping over is a giant battlesuit with a picture of a bunny on it, one can't help but think about the AMP suits of James Cameron's sci-fi epic.
See Also: Cameron's Terminator, because at one point the girls face off against what looks like a group of Terminator endoskeletons in an underground complex.

Reign of Fire
Dragons chasing and doing battle with military aircraft? That was the best thing about the post-dragon-pocalyptic action film Reign of Fire, although in that movie it was a helicopter and not a WWII-era bomber.
See Also: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, because we're pretty sure that Harry makes the exact same dive though an arched bridge to lose the dragon following him that the plane does in Snyder's film.

Showgirls
We're not if the scenes of the girls dancing choreographed numbers on stage are pure fantasy, or a glamorized version of an uglier reality, but Paul Verhoeven's tale of the trials of a stripper-turned-legitimate Vegas dancer ends with a bout of showgirl vigilantism that would not seem out of place here.
See Also: Bitch Slap, which intercuts a B-movie tale of scantily clad female thieves on the run with action/sci-fi scenes showing how they got there.

Inglourious Basterds
Other movies have featured a team of young protagonists killing Nazis, but Basterds is the most recent example, as well as the most gratuitous.
See Also: Shutter Island, in which a character in an insane asylum imagines himself back at a Nazi prison camp, where he was involved with the execution of the entire staff.

Any other films you see chopped up and thrown in there? Think we're reading too much into it? Let us know what you think below, then see what we think of the new Tron Legacy trailer!

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17 Comments

July 27, 2010 4:57 PM
Abe
Reply

When it comes out on DVD, I will have to have a Bitch Slap/Sucker Punch double bill.

July 28, 2010 1:23 AM
Jessie
Reply

I'll admit that "Begin your journey. If you do, it will set you free" was cheesy. But come on. Who cares if it's a rip-off when it just looks soooooo cool? I'm a sucker for the pretty. Plus, eye candy! Jon Hamm and Carla Gugino, so everyone's covered :P

July 28, 2010 2:40 AM
SnyderSucks
Reply

Which proves Synder is an overrated hack. Even his style of directing is getting old and boring...

July 28, 2010 4:39 AM
Robert
Reply

I think you may be stretching it here. Saying killing Nazis is a rip off of Inglorious Basterds is like me saying Basterds was a rip off of Captain America comics. Both killed Nazis after all. All the rest of these are the same kind of stretch.

July 28, 2010 11:46 AM
Glen
Reply

the list lost me when it mentioned Kill Bill which is a couple of films even Tarantino admits are very derivative of other meterial, then follows it up by mentioning Avatar (great movie but definitely nothing original there either)

July 28, 2010 3:02 PM
Staar84
Reply

I think you're stretching a bit with some of those. Inglorious Bastards and Showgirls? Really? And Harry Potter? Why not Dragonheart? Or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, then? Are you upset because he's using things other movies have done before? I imagine you haven't been to the theater in a decade if that's the case.

July 28, 2010 9:09 PM
Tabby
Reply

If you can think of seven movies it shares plot points with, it's not "ripping off" any of them. Especially when the connections are this tenuous.

July 29, 2010 2:05 AM
C_in_Chicago
Reply

As much as I loathe anime (and I very much do), I think that would probably be the source being ripped off with the mecha and sword-wielding schoolgirl scenes.

I think it isn't a matter of 'they are stealing from other works' because, well, everybody steals from other works. Almost nothing is entirely without precedent in creative endeavors. But the legitimate gripe is this: He's stealing from better movies and doing so badly to judge solely on the trailer.

July 29, 2010 11:33 PM
Tamz
Reply

The dragons, nazis, mechas, schoolgirl uniforms are all apart of her imaginary world. Hell, if my imaginary world didn't contain those things, I'd be worried.

I think it's going to be a great movie. Slow motion overused or not.

July 29, 2010 11:58 PM
Christina
Reply

Avatar? Inglourious Basterds? Now that is really trying desperately to invent similarities where there are none.

Seriously, why not compare Sucker Punch to Charlie's Angels (girls kicking ass), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (airships! sepia tones! giant robots! 1940s uniforms!), or to Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil?

Or to Piers Anthony's novel Kill-o-Byte. Sure, Kill-o-Byte is not about inmates in an asylum but about two people (both living alone) trapped in a virtual reality MMORPG where they have to pursue a hacker through the various game worlds (from fantasy to scifi and WWII ego-shooters) and force him to release them before they die of thirst, as they are stuck in their cybersuits.

Oh well. What breaks my willing suspension of disbelief is the question, if the framing story in the asylum is set in the 1950s, why would the girl invent dreamworlds filled with dragons, scifi mechas, Japanese samurai, and katana-fight scenes straight from Kong Kong kung-fu movies? Dragons and mechas became popular in the 1980s, and Asian martial arts movies and anime weren't really available in America in the 1950s either.

The trailer looks like a flimsy excuse to shove a mish-mash of settings from different genres into one action movie, like Matrix frontally colliding with Inception and Tomb Raider. Meh.

February 12, 2011 2:55 PM
Nestor Yan
Reply

I don't like the game engine they used to create this MMORPG. They use something else.

February 12, 2011 3:30 PM
Jackson Larkey
Reply

Why don't they make this Mac compatible?

June 17, 2011 5:00 PM
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