Sucker Punch Review

I have now seen this film on two occasions in the cinema and although movie reviewers have slated it for its lactation of emotional core and a killer plot which inevitably does not cohere as a fully satisfying film, i believe it to be fashioning, impressive and carries distinctive visual constructs from rich source materials. Its one of my latest guilty pleasures. Directed by Zack Snyder and casted by a stunning line up of beautiful actresses are honestly the reason why i went to the cinema in the first place. However once 20 minutes into the film i started to realise its potential and started enjoying it for its unique style and ambitious like quality. With Sucker Punch, though, i finally got to see what Snyder can make with self-mined ore. In some ways, this is his own Inception.

In the 1950s, a 20-year-old girl nicknamed "Babydoll" (Emily Browning) is institutionalized by her stepfather at the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane after she is blamed for the death of her younger sister. Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), one of the asylum's orderlies, is bribed by Babydoll's stepfather into forging the signature of the asylum's psychiatrist, Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), to have Babydoll lobotomized, so she can neither inform the authorities of the true circumstances leading to her sister's death, nor reclaim her recently deceased mother's fortune. Faced with unimaginable odds, she retreats to a fantastical world in her imagination where she and four other female inmates at the asylum, plot to escape the facility. The lines between reality and fantasy blur as Baby Doll and her four companions, as well as a mysterious guide, fight to retrieve the five items they need that will allow them to break free from their captors before it's too late... 

Once Babydoll’s perception has mentally tweaked her grim surroundings from asylum to bordello, we have a faintly titillating milieu of mascara and fishnets giving way not to inventive song-and-dance numbers, but to the fast, furious action sequences which throw just about every fantasy/sci-fi/war cliche at the screen. This happens almost literally: each set-piece is framed within a dance, which begins with Emily Browning’s Babydoll stiffly swaying her hips as we dive into her eyeball and the action, then pulls out again to find her sweaty and exhilarated while her astonished male audience pant almost post-coital. Although i enjoyed this experience when you sit back and thoroughly think about the content of Sucker Punches coerced action it feels less like stream of dream sequences and more like a series of preposterously overblown music videos.

I do believe that If as much attention had been lavished on the characters themselves as on their combat training and costume design it would be a much more successfull film. The story really,as it  turns out, is so dizzied by the artifice of its construction (be that Snyder’s film-making technique or Babydoll’s fevered Rabbit Hole-digging) that we’re encouraged to treat nothing as real, and thus feel no sense of jeopardy — only urgency. Unlike, say, The Matrix (you die in The Matrix, you die in The Real) or Inception (you get killed, you get trapped in Limbo), there’s no reason to fear death in Babydoll’s battlegrounds.

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Source Code Review

Duncan Jones the 39 year old British film maker has just followed up his remarkable 2009 debut Moon with yet another piece of Sci-Fi brilliance. The film takes us into the troubled mind of a man who believes himself to be a US army Captain Colter Stevens, played by (Jake Gyllenhaal)

Believed to be a US army soldier he awakes with a jolt, finding himself on a train heading for Chicago shortly before 8am on one idyllic spring morning. Before he has time to question hes wherebeing a beautifull young woman named Christina played by (Michelle Monaghan) sitting opposite him says, "I took your advice." A series of questions arise from this short piece of speech, who is she? what advice has she taken? The coversation then develops leading towards Colter questioning hes own identity. A succession of odd incidents occurs before he goes to the lavatory. There he discovers he's carrying ID identifying him as Sean Fentman, a schoolteacher, and that the face in the mirror isn't his own.This is a classic film noir amnesia plot, brilliantly handled. He is then aware that he is in someone else's life going through someone else's morning commute. Shortly after with the skyline of Chicago looming in the near distance an express train zooms by on the opposite track making the train jolt furiously, bomb explodes, seemingly killing Colter and all the other passengers. Its truly a brilliantly edited opening to a film which is high in suspense and carries extroadinary thriller like elements.

Colter than wakes up in an isolation chamber, strapped to a seat, and wearing his military flight suit. He still has no idea what's happening, except that he's being spoken to by mission controller Carol Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who calmly recites a series of memory questions to which Colter is shocked to realize he knows the answers. He learns that he's part of an operation called Beleaguered Castle, but before he can progress any further, Goodwin starts up the machinery and suddenlyColter is back on the train, at exactly the same time he first appeared there, once again speeding through Chicago with the same group of commuters.

Source code however, is not a film noir but a sort of sci-fi conspiracy movie, and while there are many twists and much additional information still to come right until the final minutes, the dramatic donnée is revealed immediately. Captain Stevens is the subject of a top-secret military experiment called "Source Code", conducted by a Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), a somewhat sinister government psychologist who communicates to Colter through US air-force officer Captain Colleen Goodwin played by (Vera Farmiga) Souce code is a highly technological breakthrough inwhich properly wired deceased people can relive the last stored 8 minutes of the victim aslong as they have the same physical match. In this case Colter and Sean.

 Howevor the viewer becomes aware that the device on the train is merely a forerunner of what is to come in downtown Chicago. Stevens's patriotic task, therefore, is to locate and neutralise the madman preparing to detonate it. This he'll do by reliving Sean's last moments in a succession of eight-minute bursts until he's identified his quarry.