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Sucker Punch was released in 2011

The movie Sucker Punch was released in 2011, starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung. It was written and directed by Zack Snyder, who has also directed many of the recent and upcoming DC films. Sucker Punch had an estimated Budget of $82,000,000 but only made about $19,058,199. Although Sucker Punch has received many poor reviews over the years, it is one of my favorite movies of all time. Set in what seems to be the 1950's, Emily browning plays Baby Doll, a girl who is institutionalized by her abusive stepfather. She escapes into an alternate mental reality to cope with her situation and forms a plan to escape from the asylum.

In the opening credits the story is set through a pantomime of actions showing the terrible acts inflicted upon Baby Doll. She is then taken to the mental asylum, where she over hears her step father bribe a ward to give her a lobotomy. The essential structure of the plot actually happened to tens of thousands of people, particularly women, through that time. All it took was an accusation of insanity by a significant male, which would typically go unquestioned, and a woman could find herself in Baby Dolls place: committed to an institution full of mental, physical, and sexual abuse. On the day of the procedure she slips into an alternate reality, reliving the past five days in the hospital as if she was being sent to a club to be a dancer. She meets the girls from the asylum as other dancers in the club. One of whom is Sweet Pea, who claims to be the star of the show. We are now faced with two layers of Baby Dolls fantasy world. In one, she is being placed not in an institution, but in a 1930s bordello. When Baby Doll is told to dance she slips further from reality and enters a world of action. An old man in a temple tells her she has a quest to complete. He says she must become free and tells her a list of items she needs in order to escape. Baby Doll then must fight stone giants with a samurai sword. Once her dance is over she is back at the club and all the girls are impressed. Since she has gained the trust of the other girls Baby Doll reveals her plan to escape and invites them to join her. With no other tools (or weapons as the film euphemistically calls them), they are forced to use their sexuality to attempt escape. When Baby Doll dances to distract her captors, we never get to see her moves. She dissociates from a distasteful, unpleasant use of her body, the way many victims of sexual assault do to survive the physical and emotional pain. Throughout the rest of the movie the girls help Baby Doll get the items on the list through other actions scenes. The third layer of fantasy, where they are powerful warriors capable of destroying dragons and steam-zombies. Her sexual power transforms into real power. The other girls are likewise equipped with symbols of male power: machine guns, shotguns, knives, swords, and perhaps most threatening of all (to the male hierarchy), technical expertise with helicopters and airplanes. In the end Baby Doll sacrifices herself so that Sweet Pea can escape on her own. The director uses these alternate realities to shows how the human mind copes with traumatic situations. It is a deep psychological web that can be seen many different ways. You are joining a girls fantasy, created to protect her mind from the terrors she will experience in a mental institution in the early 20th century.

I believe it is a vastly misinterpreted film. Many people have said that this movie is sexist or that the acting is bad. Emily Browning is mesmerizing as the hero of this movie. She fills the screen with soulful looks that make you understand the pain behind her character. Reviewers can blame the writer and director for the situation these girls are in, but Zack Snyder merely holds a mirror up to our own society. Many dont like what they see, and even fewer understand, and so they are left squirming, vaguely aware that something is not right. But when one in four women in America are sexually assaulted, many before the age of 18, we need to make films, to expose the seriousness of these crimes towards women. Perhaps, like Baby Doll, society itself likes to dissociate, fantasizing of a world in which women are happy with their lot, where females are really powerful, and where rape doesnt exist or doesnt hurt anyone. We want our movies to support these fantasies, and when they do not, like in Sucker Punch, we fail to comprehend it and criticize it as done by a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say. (New York Post review) And yet this is one of the most original and thought-provoking movies Ive ever seen.

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