Zack Snyder Says the Criticisms of SUCKER PUNCH Being "Too Exploitative" Were "Disheartening"
Zack Snyder has been talking about his 2011 fantasy action film Sucker Punch with Letterboxed. We recently shared that he’s planning on still doing a director’s cut one day, which would be cool to see. But, he also talked about how the film was received by critics and audiences and how it was disheartening to hear people say that it was “too exploitative.”
He explained that Sucker Punch “was a very polarizing film,” and added, “To be frank, the people I’ve run across who’ve come to me and said Sucker Punch is my favorite movie’ are normally angsty teenage girls. It’s like a Morrissey song or something.”
In the film, a young woman named Babydoll (Emily Browning) is locked away in a mental asylum and while there “she retreats to a fantasy world where she is free to go wherever her mind takes her. Determined to fight for real freedom, she finds four women -- Rocket, Blondie, Amber and Sweet Pea -- to join together to escape the terrible fate that awaits them. With a virtual arsenal at their disposal, the allies battle everything from samurais to serpents, while trying to decide what price they will pay for survival.”
Snyder went on to say: “I feel like the main criticism of the film was that it was too exploitative. People took the movie as if the girls fighting and all that stuff was the movie. I found that slightly disheartening.”
Snyder argued that the film was “so genre self-aware” and revealed that there were scenes were cut that made it more overt that the film’s tone was a “self-aware, self-reflexive audience observing the movie.”
The filmmaker went on to explain: “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 previously talked about the movie being misunderstood, saying: “I’m always shocked that it was so badly misunderstood. I always said that it was a commentary on sexism and geek culture. Someone would ask me, ‘Why did you film the girls this way?’ And I’d say, ‘Well you did!’ Sucker Punch is a f**k you to a lot of people who will watch it.”
The movie also starred Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac. This was such a great cast, and while the movie wasn’t perfect, I did like the movie and I enjoyed it. I think I liked the movie more than a lot of other people.
What did you think about Sucker Punch when it was first released?