Warning: this essay contains spoilers for the movie Minority Report.
You can’t run, John!
One of the fundamental questions Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report poses is whether or not individual autonomy weighs more than the collective good. This question is particularly apparent in the finale, which, albeit conclusive, roots itself on a rather open-ended question:
Why exactly was PreCrime disbanded?
The most obvious answer assumes that once Lamar Burgess’s murderous past to establish PreCrime was uncovered, the public moral outrage was too much of a PR nightmare to deal with (presumably, PreCrime was funded on taxpayer’s money). However, such an assumption would be far too simplistic and naive, especially given America’s notorious history of violating human rights in the name of homeland security (think Guantanamo Bay, for starters). No, to assume that one woman’s death would sufficiently rouse public protest against a seemingly perfect system that creates a utopia of safety is, sadly, too naive of a notion to be sufficient a reason. Instead, let’s consider the alternative reason why PreCrime was disbanded – the possibility that innocent people may have been wrongly jailed.
While this second reason may seem obvious to the viewer, consider that, like many things hidden away from the public, PreCrime’s internal function was unknown to many outside its precincts: in one scene, a man giving a tour to school children claims that the three precogs – Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha – have their own rooms with toys, books, and exercise equipment, and that they must be kept in isolation because they are too sensitive to normal environmental stimuli; in reality, the precogs are kept in a narcotic state in an isolated, antiseptic room, never quite awake nor quite asleep, just so they can function 24/7 for PreCrime to predict any potential murder at any given time. So while the tour scene is a small one (and more of some background dialogue while we see John Anderton paralyze his own facial muscles to look twenty years older), we can assume that, like the naivety and outright ignorance of the touring school children and the tour guide, the general public in Minority Report really has no idea the intricate, internal workings of PreCrime beyond its ultimate result – that it stops murders from happening, and the numbers show.
So now let’s assume that once Burgess committed suicide and (presumably) Anderton testified to everything that happened – how PreCrime works, who Ann Lively was, why and how she was murdered, why he was set up by Lamar – would the reasons for individual autonomy and innocent until proven guilty still hold? Somehow, I find myself doubting either reason: Anderton states that there has not been a single murder in D.C. ever since PreCrime was established; additionally, most crimes after the establishment of PreCrime are spontaneous crimes of passion, which means the PreCrime officers more or less caught the perpetrators in the act of murder, as can be seen in the opening sequence of the movie. This means PreCrime 100% is efficient on paper – something unheard of in the real world. So would anyone dare to suggest disbanding such a system if there was even the slightest, most minute chance someone may have been jailed unjustly? Somehow, I find that very doubtful.
While the chances of a minority report (when one precog disagrees with the other two in a prediction) are never stated, we can assume that it happens infrequently enough that the original creators of PreCrime would design the system to erase said minority report (note: Wally, the caretaker of the precogs, only erases echoes, aka the instances when the precogs visualize past predictions. Presumably he does not manually erase minority reports because that could possibly lead to error, which PreCrime touts as non-existent, which means the erasure of minority reports is likely done by a computer). Even then, only a handful of people would know that such a mechanism existed – Anderton, himself the head police officer of PreCrime, did not know of this until consulting with the retired Dr. Iris Hineman, the other co-founder of PreCrime – so until the revelation about Burgess, it’s highly unlikely that anyone knew how to manipulate the PreCrime system to commit murder undetected. PreCrime, despite its intrinsic human error, is a perfect system.
You could argue that PreCrime was disbanded on the basis of human error, given it was touted as an absolutely perfect system. However, if you put it in perspective, there really isn’t any system that’s truly perfect: random error is inevitable, and the goal of a system designer is to minimize (ideally eradicate) systematic errors as much as possible. In this case, PreCrime is possibly one of the best systems you could ever ask for: minority reports (analogously random errors) are known to exist to only a few people, and beyond that everything is controlled with perfect, surgical precision.
The most feasible reason for PreCrime’s disbandment, then, must be because of the potential corruption of the upper echelons of PreCrime – the systematic error, per se. When Burgess’s motives and means of securing PreCrime became public, it became very clear that, with the right position, power and knowledge, anyone could manipulate the PreCrime system and commit murders any which way they want. Of course, such a manipulation takes quite the planning and proper time span – I could only imagine the intricate steps Burgess took to kill Ann Lively without being caught, or what sum of money he must have offered Leo Crow in order to imprison Anderton before the truth about Lively’s death and the inherent, systematic flaw of PreCrime became apparent – so presumably, Burgess wanted to silence Anderton and anyone who could potentially uncover the truth about PreCrime and minority reports before such knowledge became untraceable with subsequent generations (this assumes, of course, that the existence of minority reports was never documented and was known only by the co-founders of PreCrime). We could infer, thus, that Burgess effectively wanted to create the ultimate utopian country when PreCrime became a national establishment.
However, once it became apparent that the systematic flaw of PreCrime was not the minority reports themselves but in the way it dealt with random flaws (by erasing minority reports instead of allowing the PreCrime officers to consider alternative futures of the supposed perpetrators and/or victims), the disbandment of PreCrime was inevitable because such a systematic flaw not only rendered PreCrime as an imperfect system, but that such imperfection meant that this system itself could not justify its lack of “innocent until proven guilty” judicial processing. Even if hundreds of potential perpetrators were caught in the act of committing murder, it also means that those who were convicted of pre-meditated murder (those not caught in the act), regardless of their murderous potential, were jailed without due processing, thus violating their own civil right to testify in court. PreCrime is nothing short of an autocracy – a utopic one, but autocratic nonetheless.
Minority Report ends on a rather unique note. On the surface, it argues that individual autonomy and civil rights outweigh the needs of a collective – Arthur, Dashiell and Agatha are eventually released to live out the rest of their lives in peace in isolation – and that misdemeanor can only be rightly punished after the fact because the future, no matter how accurate a prediction may be, is never absolute. The more interesting implication stems from the fact that PreCrime, once its flaws become apparent, is no different than an autocracy, yet until its disbandment is fully supported by the American public. The remaining question lies once again in the question regarding the balance between individual autonomy and the collective good, and at what cost we are willing to sacrifice to fulfill the needs of one side of the scale; unsurprisingly, Minority Report argues for the former (it’s an American film after all) and ends on a rather hopeful, humane tone as well.
Everybody runs.
…
Old Writing on Minority Report and Recommended Reading:
It took me awhile to finally get into FLCL, and only recently have I finished the acclaimed six part anime OVA that inspired the creators of the series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The first few viewing tries were unsuccessful, mostly because I couldn’t get past the ten minute mark without growing impatient or irritated. For some reason, whatever made the series so appealing to so many people I know was making me feel like I was developing a hernia in my brain.
Then one day, as if the hernia had decided to develop somewhere else besides my brain, I realized what made FLCL work: it’s a modern take on gnostic suspense, where narrative logic and consistency is suspended and imagery and aesthetics take a front row. This runs contrary to circumstantial suspense, where regardless of what is not happening at a given moment of time, you are confident something will happen soon after.
Take Alfred Hitchcock, the master of classic circumstantial suspense. Known for his mastery of the genre film, Hitchcock knew exactly what and how to keep his audience in a continuum of suspense, where at any given moment sequences of silence, calm or non-violence would be interrupted with something jarring. A perfect example would be the shower stabbing scene from Psycho:
For a quick scene dissection to further demonstrate how Hitchcock creates a (relatively short) circumstantial suspense in this scene, here are a few screenshots to tip us off:
As Marion enjoys her shower, Hitchcock positions her on the (lower) left of the screen…
Then slowly zooms in as it becomes apparent that someone has entered the bathroom without her knowledge (we know she’s oblivious because she doesn’t turn around when Mr. Bates casually sashays in)
The camera has zoomed in even more, and now Mr. Bates shadow against the curtain is even more evident. For the virgin viewers, we’re not sure what exactly he’s going to do (Hitchcock has been mindful to highly eroticize Marion’s shower scene to perhaps suggest Mr. Bates is interested in her sexually…)
… and then we have the famous curtain-drawing plus dagger holding silhouette, thus dispelling the possibility of sexy time and letting us viewers watch a full on murder assault, with the famous music to accompany it as well!
Another masterful example would be the introduction to Fritz Lang’s M, where we are introduced to the murder of a young girl with Lang’s ingenious use of diegetic sound, light/shadow, and mis-en-scene/props:
A classic monster example of circumstantial suspense is the all-knowing Jaws, where little miss skinny dipping gives us a preview of mister fishy-fish as she gets dragged to and fro:
For a example involving prehistoric reptiles (?) with fangs and claws, we have the rather remarkable scene in Jurassic Park where Tim and Lex do their best to elude the velociraptors:
So basically, circumstantial suspense is a classic component of the traditional narrative, where the audience’s expectations are suspended just enough to keep us on edge, either in fear, anxiety, or excitement.
On the other spectrum, gnostic suspense is a auteur’s and surrealist’s wet dream, and is a fantastic way to test your patience with cinema. A master of gnostic suspense is Jan Švankmajer, the Czech filmmaker who made the famous short film Jabberwocky in 1971 and (the insanely grating) Alice in 1988 (arguably, he’s influenced modern filmmakers like Tim Burton and Henry Selick, and maybe even Wes Anderson to an extent). For a taste of what I mean when I say “a fantastic way to test your patience with cinema,” try and get through these six minutes of Alice without wanting to shove a chair in your eye:
A less testing but equally surreal clip comes from Jabberwocky down below:
Here’s the experimental short film Photographs by the talented Krishna Shenoi, brought to my attention courtesy of Mr. Roger Ebert (and I dare to say we may be seeing more of him in the future of filmmaking)
Now if you’ve been brave and watched the above clips, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone would sit through more than a minute of a film like Alice or Jabberwocky. That’s where the magic of gnostic suspense comes in: unlike circumstantial suspense where you know something must happen at a given point in time, with gnostic suspense you’re left hanging, and the only thing keeping your attention is that small, minute hope that after all of the inanity, all of the surrealism there will be something, anything to clear up what is otherwise a clusterf**k that’s messing with your sense of (and grasp on) reality. The deux ex machina-like hope is really what makes gnostic suspense appealing and infuriating at the same time.
So when it comes to FLCL, a anime that goes out of bounds in self-reflexivity, pop cultural reference and mishmashing animation styles into a greater hodgepodge, you might see why I consider it a more modern employment of gnostic suspense, though to some meager sense there is a logical (???) narrative connecting each episode into an overall story (whether you call it logical narrative really depends on if you’re familiar with how over the top some anime can go, which I won’t even divulge into here). FLCL is really an artist’s and musician’s anime, a series that throws reasoning to the wind and asks us to simply enjoy every anime cliche amplified and caricatured tenfold with non-diegetic rock music blasting in the background, reminding us that hey – it’s just a cartoon. I recommend this short series for any animator stuck in a rut, or really for anyone who likes driving vespas with a bass strapped to their back. It’ll take some patience, but if you could sit through six minutes of Alice I guarantee you can sit through this entire series – and enjoyably so (though I can’t guarantee the same for Transformers 2, Skyline, or Fantastic Four 2).
Some clips from FLCL if you’re curious for a taste of what the mini-series has to offer:
If you’re interested in watching FLCL for free, visit the Funimation youtube page here.
There are times in life where something is so bad, so utterly, terribly, outrageously bad that it is near impossible to react immediately afterwards. Such was the case a few weeks ago when I saw the video rant posted by Ms. Alexandra Wallace about Asians in the Library, and now again after reading this letter to the editor by a Mr. Jeffrey Parsons about Mr. Roger Ebert’s scathing review of Battle: L.A.
From Jeffrey Parsons:
I read your temper tantrum about “Battle: Los Angeles,” and just thought I’d send you a note.
First, I’m a former national merit scholar with a degree in engineering. And I’ve worked as an engineer and as a leader of engineers for well over a decade. So I feel very comfortable not only asserting my intelligence, but also in claiming to be smarter than you. My wife is a concert violinist and teacher who speaks three languages. I feel safe saying she’s also smarter than you.
We both enjoyed “Battle: Los Angeles.” It was exactly the movie it promised to be. And it was fun from beginning to end.
I could engage in a very detailed rebuttal of your ‘review’, pointing out things like your two-and-one-half star review of" Independence Day" (which seems to indicate that 'stick figure’ enemies faced by American heroes didn’t always drive you into a blind rage). More to the point, I could laugh at your idiotic four-star review of “Green Zone,” as that seems more relevant (I imagine if there had been a scene of a US soldier raping a stick figure alien, or perhaps it were revealed that George Bush set the whole thing up, you’d have loved “B:LA”).
But that’s all really beside the point. Because while I could point out your flaws as a movie reviewer – and they are numerous – and how you let your poorly-thought-out ideology infest everything you do now, like a child who has learned a new swear word, the real problem is that you’re just a joyless asshole. You clearly don’t enjoy movies anymore, if you ever did (there are many who think that even failed screenwriters such as yourself don’t become critics primarily because they can’t write, but because they’re narcissistic and believe their failure to be the fault of a 'system’ that does not respect their greater talent, so they channel that anger into nitpicking the work of more capable people … but I digress).
I’d wish bad things on you, Roger, but frankly I can’t imagine anything worse than what you are.
But just a few words of advice: when you find yourself in a position where your only argument is that everyone but you is an 'idiot’ (by the way, are all your readers idiots? Because they’ve voted the movie much higher than you), it’s time to retire. Then you can spend all day retweeting HuffPo headlines! Think how happy you’ll be.
“Well,” I thought to myself after it all sank in, “how about I just write a nice little faux letter back to Mr. Parsons, just to show him how appreciated such an enlightened and intelligent response such as his evoked the most intelligent of intelligent discussions possible only capable of smart people?”
So I did.
Dear Mr. Parsons,
There are times in life where someone’s stupidity shines so brightly on their forehead that I am forced to wear sunglasses as to avoid getting cataracts.
Mr. Parsons, you are by far one of the most incompetent writers I have ever read. It is almost out of sheer luck that you are a engineer since your idiocy in the realm of outstandingly bad ad hominem attacks would have crippled any self-respecting English or Rhetoric department that was as unfortunate as to produce you as an alumni, and would have forced them into seppuku or self-blinding for the sake of saving face and reputation. But even then I am being unkind to the Engineering department from whence you spawned from since I am confident they themselves are tenfold more competent and intelligent than you believe yourself to be.
Mr. Parsons, while I could point out your flaws as a writer and a person and how you let your poorly-thought-out ideology infest everything you touch like herpes, or that you are like a child who has recently discovered fart and boob jokes, the real problem is that you’re just a goddamn idiot. You clearly don’t appreciate the processes known as critical, logical, or even rational thought anymore, if you ever did (there are many who think that even poor excuses of smucks such as yourself don’t accomplish anything significant after becoming a national merit scholar over ten years ago because your life has since stagnated into mediocrity, but because you’re narcissistic and believe your mediocrity and insignificance to be the fault of a 'system’ that does not respect your greater talent, so you channel your stupidity into nitpicking the work of people a thousand-fold more knowledgable of a art form you could never ever dream of comprehending even in a thousand year lifespan… but I digress).
I’d hope to find stupider things than you, Mr. Parsons, but frankly I can’t imagine anything more stupidly blubbering than what you are.
But just a few words of advice: when you find yourself in a position where your only argument is that anyone that dislikes what you like is an idiot and an asshole, it’s time to take your head out of your own ass and to retire from ever engaging in anything remotely intelligent. Then you can spend all day swimming in your own spew of self-righteousness and stupidity! Think how happy you’ll be.
On Wednesday evening I sat down dead center, facing the giant IMAX projector. I was about twenty minutes early, and looking around I immediately noticed a jarring demographic that was primarily male, the occasional female friend here and there amongst groups of college to post-college men. The advertising for Sucker Punch had certainly hit its demographic mark.
Minutes passed and before I knew it, the opening montage of Baby Doll’s life going into shambles intercut with telephoto focuses on details and anachronistic, nondiegetic music coinciding was unfolding in classic Zack Snyder style. It was exceptional, as expected.
Then two hours passed, and as I left the theater I felt a twinge of sadness, shame, and disappointment. Amidst the onscreen explosions, grandeur aerials and gratuitous action scenes involving scantily clad women, I felt absolutely nothing – no excitement, no awe, not even a moment of fun. What I had witnessed was a movie that had failed on multiple levels, levels that with perhaps more introspect and tasteful aesthetic finesse could have so easily made Snyder’s original story work. The trouble, I suspect, is that Snyder doesn’t truly understand the goals he aspires towards: here he attempts to bask in the glory of the ridiculous and obscure known and beloved by anime fans alike and simultaneously tries to empower the very women he forces into the most misogynistic of lens possible. The saddest part is that I think this was completely unintentional. I asked myself,
Where did everything go wrong?
It seems the concept of Sucker Punch was doomed to go wrong easily or burdened to succeed difficultly from its inception. For starters, Snyder attempted the inexplicable and, frankly, the impossible – to tout five young women as individualistic, strong, and enduring while filming them in the most traditional of male gazes possible. I’m speaking, of course, of the same paradox that arises with many superheroines and supposed strong women that could just as easily be mistaken for supermodels if we didn’t see them in action.
There is nothing wrong with a strong female that also happens to be sexually attractive. There is, however, a strong discrepancy in how one chooses to frame and focus on said strong female – and in the case of Sucker Punch, the framing only allows our five heroines to be heroic in a fantasy realm; back in reality, they’re just as helpless and just as brutalized by the very men they fantasize to overcome. Fantasy, it seems, is just a means of escapism where they can imagine and project their own ideas of a power that does not exist nor are given the opportunity – by Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya – to ever truly practice in the realm that matters, their immediate reality.
As they scheme and scream and suffer, the actresses go along with Mr. Snyder’s pretense that this fantasia of misogyny is really a feminist fable of empowerment.
It is not just that the women are attired in garish boudoir fashions, cropped schoolgirl uniforms and the latest action lingerie. With a touch of humor — with any at all — “Sucker Punch,” which Mr. Snyder wrote with Steve Shibuya, might have acknowledged the campy, kinky aspects of its premise. But even as it exploits, within the hypocritical constraints of the PG-13 rating, salacious images of exposed flesh and threatened innocence, the film also self-righteously traffics in moral outrage.
Focus and framing are everything, and what I saw on screen was a far cry from the female empowerment Snyder enthusiastically and earnestly proclaimed in interviews. Baby Doll’s reality, for starters, is catapulted into a women’s mental asylum that, in turn, exploits its girls’ budding sexual assets to lure in lecherous, well-to-do customers who simply can’t settle for a regular brothel or strip club – their libido can only be satisfied by taking advantage of women with no power or means to defend themselves. If that isn’t already a difficult scenario to project female empowerment that isn’t a caricature, we’ve even got the girls romping around the corridors in what I can only assume is non-standard mental patient attire and more attuned to burlesque teasers. Now top all of this off with an antagonist so hideous, so grotesquely misogynistic and leering that his twitching pencil moustache was only a sick reminder that this man, Blue, was a pimp. A despicable, disgusting, degenerate pimp – who was taking advantage of mentally instituted girls.
Numerous times throughout the film I found myself shifting uncomfortably as men pimped, slapped, licked, kissed, grabbed, and shot terrified, crying, and (mostly) passive women in the perceived reality. This is not the discomfort that arises from having ideas or thematics challenged – it was the sort that makes you feel ashamed of yourself, where you feel like a voyeur who should be doing something to stop what’s happening on screen rather than passively watching it happen, where you start beginning to question your own sense of morality for even looking at the events unfold. Not once are any of these women given the dignity to retaliate, to compose themselves from terror and contemplate the remaining control of their own lives, or even revel in the reasons why they were locked up in the asylum to begin with; the closest this comes to is Sweet Pea wearing her sibling protectiveness on her sleeve, and her sister Rocket responding accordingly. Otherwise, there is not one ounce of reprieve for these women in reality, not a moment where self-respect is evident or allowed: Snyder wants us to see victims, and we see them all right; where female empowerment comes into all of this is victimizing reality is beyond me.
Then there were the fantasy sequences.
What is astounding that for a film that extols feminism as an appeal, somehow Baby Doll, Sweat Pea, Rocket, Amber and Blondie imagine themselves to be clad in what is nothing short of scant. Baby Doll clashes onscreen in pig tails, high heels, thigh-high stockings, a mini skirt and midriff-baring schoolgirl top that echoes suspiciously of male fantasies regarding Catholic or Japanese school girls; her colleagues’ attires, to some credit, echo nothing of specific fetishes, appearing to be only conjured up for the purpose of showing off their assets through the wonders of corsets, fishnets, leather, and panties.
If Snyder had not so enthusiastically proclaim that his film empowered females, then I’d have simply shrugged off this detail as nothing more than useless eye candy aimed for a particular demographic. However, he did say that, and that’s where the problem lies: between these women enjoying their own sexuality versus them creating sexually-charged avatars for a audience, I’d say under Snyder’s directing choices Sucker Punch leans towards the latter since, frankly, there’s no narrative establishment that suggests otherwise.
Worst of all, Snyder explicitly turns the viewer into sexual voyeurs, hypnotically leering at his cast of young actresses. The women, to be sure, are astonishingly beautiful, but they’re also ornate and never fully individuated to emotionally connect the material to the larger architecture of the story.
Strange enough, even the fantasy sequences – separate from Snyder’s serious misunderstanding of true feminism – failed to entertain me. For such elaborate worlds painted with the magic of CGI, the fantasy environment seemed largely to be used as uncreatively as possible (the use of follow-cam and lack of sufficient establishing shots didn’t help either). For so many explosions, bullets, shrapnel and steel occurring around, our five girls are surprisingly unattached from it all – physically, not philosophically – and besides the occasional one-on-one combat situations, they never really went out of their way to improvise with, say, a branch or helmet that was laying nearby. The visual space was largely unused as the girls went about their mission in a linear manner, never once taking advantage of the fact that they were essentially Gods in a fantasy of their own creation. It was nothing short of feeling trapped as the passive onlooker while someone else was playing within the goal-oriented constricts a video game – an utter disappointment, to say the least. Perhaps it’s the fault of what I can only infer as gratuitous use of green screen, where the actors are told to pretend to inhabit a world the filmmakers had yet to fully flesh out; regardless, it’s no excuse for a lack of innovation, considering Scott Pilgrim vs. The World accomplished the feat on a lower budget. If anything, I hoped to walk away from Sucker Punch with some sense of escapist enjoyment attached to its numerous fantasy segments – which, unfortunately, wasn’t the case.
So again we come back to the core problem Snyder and Shibuya faced: how to glorify aesthetics enjoyed by fans of anime and campy overdrive while incorporating real female empowerment. Such a challenge was met and executed by Quentin Tarantino back in 2003 with the installment of Kill Bill, a glorified revenge narrative that had one simple goal: make it fun.
The famous fight scene in “Kill Bill” where the Bride squares off against Gogo and the Crazy ‘88s – a revenge flick to its greatest glory.
Kill Bill, at the core of the stylized dialogue and attuned fighting choreography by Yuen Woo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), never let up the pretense that it was anything more than a perfect execution of aesthetics and genre conventions. Themes never echoed beyond their basic roots, never truly challenging the audience to actually think beyond what was happening on screen since what really mattered was style. And in the process of stylizing everything, Tarantino also stylized his characters, in particular his women, to be fleshed-out personas with something more interesting to say and do beyond their own sexual appeal and physical prowess. Some aspects of the revenge epic are so outrageously unrealistic and aestheticized that, in effect, you can sense Tarantino winking at us, “It’s only a movie.” And indeed, what we see in Kill Bill is through a stylized lens that morphs an otherwise psychologically traumatizing aspect into exploitative and, frankly, fun entertainment. That’s what made Kill Bill work: it lived up to what it set out do, and exceedingly well at that.
Sucker Punch, as opposed to what was advertised in trailers, tried to do more than just be fun, and failed in the process. By stepping away from camp for the sake of camp, the bizarre for the hell of being incongruous, Snyder and Shibuya tried to incorporate a linking narrative that held together what was otherwise a hodgepodge of video game and anime cliches; and in creating the linking narrative, they nonetheless created one under the guise (or misconception) of female empowerment amongst a suppressive male world, inadvertently mixing in a very jarring and uncomfortable mix of misogyny and disconcerting voyeurism. The overarching narrative is Baby Doll’s reality, where she and other girls are exploited by men who consider female mental patients a desirable fetish, which in turns drives Baby Doll to fantasize about escape and power while suspiciously still sexually appeasing to the male gaze. This linking narrative is, without a doubt, the biggest mistake Snyder and Shibuya made as a writing team.
In “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” director Edgar Wright celebrated the pop culture glory of video games and was especially creative in how he used the environmental space to choreograph and convey Scott fighting. In this scene, where Scott is confronted with Ramona’s fourth evil ex, Roxy, we get a sense of how “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” used its budget better to appeal its particular demographic of video game and anime fans – something “Sucker Punch” did not live up to. Above all else, watching this cohesive fight sequence is especially entertaining – and not to mention that we get to see two girls beat the living crap out of one another, and tastefully too.
In Dead Fantasy II, Monty Oum manages to create an interesting fight sequence by referencing Jackie Chan’s “Drunken Master” amidst volcanic lava. The fighting scenarios are physically impossible and as preposterous as anime and video games get, which is exactly what fans of such enjoy. “Sucker Punch’s” fantasy sequences seemed to aspire towards this level of inanity, but unfortunately I found the sequences surprisingly baseline action, lacking in the sort of creativity and environmental interaction that Monty Oum demonstrates in the above clip.
I suspect Sucker Punch might have worked better as an episodic format, where there are consistent set of characters that go up against new challenges and environments, each episode a self-contained fantasy segment that is detached from any overarching reality or narrative. This approach is what originally drove Monty Oum’s Dead Fantasy project and other likewise over the top action-fantasy-scifi mixups: in Monty Oum’s case, this involved pairing up characters from the Final Fantasy and Dead or Alive game series into nothing short of sexy female characters beating the crap out of one another. Dead Fantasy is preposterous, outrageous, and nonetheless entertaining, and is something Sucker Punch could have easily achieved had it not insisted on a feature length narrative.
Instead, we get a clumpy, clumsy theatrical release that incorrectly proclaims feminism, female empowerment and a girl’s escapism as an excuse to exercise what is nothing short of a male gaze fantasy. Sadly, in trying to appeal to two demographics – fans of wide-eyed, baby-faced school girls wielding samurai swords and guns and those who want to see more empowered female presence on screen – Snyder failed at both. The fantasy sequences weren’t nearly over the top nor creative enough to warrant significant fun, and the reality sequences were so jarringly misogynistic that it boiled down to a portrait of female victimhood, not female empowerment. At the end of it all, I couldn’t have cared less about the numerous anachronism, if there was a reality within a reality, a fantasy within a fantasy, or whatever the hell was really happening within the proscenium stage in the opening – it had not been an enjoyable viewing experience, period.
His scripts aren’t incoherent, they’re simply expressive of a positively infantillic understanding of the powers of symbols, much in the way that comic book artists and video game artists can only ever think in the titillation of an image and not its meaning… Snyder at the very least confines his scope to positively pubescent pursuits, however tired and overdone those may be.
I wish this wasn’t the case, but unfortunately it is with Snyder's Sucker Punch. I fear, most of all, that Warner Bros will look at the box office numbers and conclude that the audience doesn't want to see strong females in the forefront, leading to a looping pattern of no strong leading female stories being green-lit (a proposal that made internet headlines back in 2007).
At the end of it all, I like Zack Snyder. He, an indisputably talented visual director with a knack for seamlessly integrating music with imagery in spite of all of his narrative flaws, is earnest and enthusiastic. He is, however, still especially juvenile in his creative endeavors, which became very clear in how his directing choices were jarringly disjointed from the original content in his third feature Watchmen (awkward sex scene much?). I don’t believe he intended to force his actresses into a misogynistic lens, nor do I believe he is misogynistic like Frank Miller or self-indulgent and unwilling to aspire to what he should do beyond what he could do like George Lucas, Michael Bay, or M. Night Shyamalan. I believe, more than anything, that he still has a lot to learn.
He has a long way to go if he ever wants to be considered more than a director of visual orgies, and a lot to learn regarding how he frames his characters, what he chooses to aestheticize, and what the direct and indirect implications are of his directing choices beyond a pop culture surface. He is more than capable of overcoming his current barriers, smiles and all, and I hope that in one of his future projects, we’ll catch him winking at the audience,
“It’s only a movie."
Note: thank you to Viet Le for again for his insightful commentary that helped me shape my thoughts on "Sucker Punch."
…
Opening of "Sucker Punch” and additional footage
“Sucker Punch” Featurette
Zack Snyder at Comic Con 2010, talking about “Sucker Punch”
Zack Snyder interview about “Sucker Punch” with the LATimes
Zack Snyder “Sucker Punch” interview with Leicester Square TV
If there is anything I’d like to see change in my lifetime, please for the love of Brad Bird, Sylvain Chomet, Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyzaki, Nick Park, Andrew Stanton, Isao Takahata – please change that damn award category “Best Animated Picture” to “Best Animation for a Feature Length Film,” or even “Best Animation” for short.
Why would I implore such a change, you ask? It’s simple really: I’m tired of everyone thinking animation is a genre –
The distinction couldn’t be clearer and more important. To regard animation as a genre implies that any narrative that animators bring to life automatically relinquishes any sense of seriousness or weight for adult sensitivities, instead caters to the attention span of ADD children coked up on glucose with horrendous retrofit 3D and the comic timing and intellect of cow manure. So when the Academy calls an award category “Best Animated Picture,” they are implying that somehow, by virtue of being animated, narratives told via animation rather than live action are diluted and dumbed down, stupid even.
Oh Academy please, if you could look past your long history of Disney fare and see that beyond what an American animator and entrepreneur sold to the mass public there are artists out there frustrated by the restraints of big animation studios turning down quieter, smarter, darker scripts for interest of preserving their business – not creating, mind you, but preserving it. They ask themselves, “why risk it if the public wants cheese for cheese’s sake, packaged as kid-friendly because they’re animated?” There are artists out there outside of Pixar and Dreamworks, creating stories with the magic of animation that live action could never, ever come close to accomplishing. When I hear your presenters saying “Persepolis” is unusual because it’s animated but adult-oriented, a little part of me hits itself against an imaginary wall, hoping that this performance act stunt will shed some light on your own ignorance of what animation can accomplish beyond musical sashays and sassy side characters.
When you say “Best Animated Picture,” you instantly stratify animated narratives into a separate cohort, a subcategory to live action regardless of the narrative’s quality or characteristics. You instantly say films like “Grave of the Fireflies” are the intellectual and narrative equivalent of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”; you assume the “The Illusionist” is as emotionally acute as “Madagascar”; worst yet, you bring films as politically charged as “Persepolis” or psychological subversive as “Paprika” down as the equivalent of stupidly written films like “Alpha and Omega” or “Shrek 4” – a virtue resultant of these narratives being animated rather filmed live, no doubt.
So tell me, Academy, what’s it going to take for you to realize that animation is a medium and not a genre? How many more animated films are you going to see willingly that run contrary to your expectations of princesses singing about faux feministic independence while they wait on their prince from their domestic royal chamber?
When people see the award category “Best Cinematography,” do they think the lighting is a designate genre? No. So why the same for “Best Animated Picture,” where most Academy voters consider animation as a genre despite animation being a highly, incredibly meticulous technical process? Cinematographers create the illusion of perfect lighting on every star in every shot, are masters of making people and sets look good; animators create the illusion of movement, drawing and redrawing and drawing again primary and secondary motions, facial expressions, and numerous other gestures that the everyday observer takes for granted in their perception of the world. Animation is just as technically important as cinematography, and vice versa – both are necessary components of creating a comprehensive narrative. It just so happens that people tend to notice the narrative contribution of animation more than that of cinematography, and too easily are influenced by Disney precursors into believing all animated narratives lie in the same narrative framework. It all falls back to most moviegoers believing that narratives told via animation has the narrative potential of cheese nips, oblivious to the fact that they are observing astute, detail oriented animators from all departments working tirelessly to create the same illusion cinematographers do in live action film.
So please, Academy, wake up and hear my cries that so many cinephiles and animation enthusiast have been screaming out for years – animation is not a genre, so stop treating it like so and change that damn award category to reflect this understanding. I’m tired of having to explain to people why “Grave of the Fireflies” is one of the greatest anti-war films to date, or why “The Triplets of Belleville” is a worthwhile example of superb animation despite rejecting Disney aesthetics of clean lines and bright colors, or why “Wall-E” was one of the greatest dares in modern narrative when it omitted syntactical dialogue for the first forty minutes, and why it deserved that “Best Picture” nomination over “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” period.
I hope you’ll see that animation lends itself to potential live action could never, ever dream of tapping into, that under the hand of apt technicians like any other film production animation can dive into the deepest cores of our psyche, of hopes and dreams, and everything in between.
“The Thief and the Cobbler – Recobbled Edition,” 1993 (Note: I watched the fanmade “Recobbled” cut that was put together in the aftermath of the film being destroyed by its distributing studios, which you can read about here).
