To paraphrase a meme; inside of Zack Snyder there are two wolves. One is the filmmaker who believes he’s artfully deconstructing genre archetypes and reinventing familiar stories as operatic epics, and the other is the director who makes all style and no substance movies that critics very rarely give passing marks.
You’d think his DC trilogy would be the perfect encapsulation of that dichotomy, but instead the honor belongs to Sucker Punch. Not just Snyder’s worst-reviewed feature ever with Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 22 and 47 percent from critics and audiences, but it’s also the biggest box office disaster of his career that barely exceeded its $82 million in ticket sales.
One of the major criticisms of the fantasy epic was that it was overly-sexualized and borderline exploitative, with the majority of the story beats and set pieces revolving around beautiful women wearing very small outfits lugging around gigantically oversized weapons in what was essentially Male Gaze: The Movie.
And yet, the mastermind behind it has never been able to comprehend why people got that impression, echoing his well-worn sentiments once again in an interview published on Letterboxd.
“I took out the thing about the dance number at the end, because we had taken the dance number out, but there was that whole exchange between her and Gorsky – this self-aware, self-reflexive ‘audience observing the movie,’ and yet it’s talking directly to them about what they wanna see.
They wanna see the girls, they don’t wanna see the girls empowered. They wanna see them in sexy outfits. That was the whole thing to me; I always thought it was interesting when people would review the movie and say it’s exploitative. It’s like an anti-war movie that gets the war too good.”
Snyder’s defense of Sucker Punch is like hearing him try and justify the infamous “Martha” scene all over again, but it’s not exactly difficult to see how people got the impression it was nothing but eye candy when there’s not as much going on beneath the surface as he thinks there is.
