New Film Featurette Gets Fans Excited for Sucker Punch

If they weren’t already, fan boys will be hooked when they see the new featurette released this week for Zack Snyder’s epic fantasy-action fest Suckerpunch. Warner Bros. is clearly keen to keep momentum after the buzz that the film trailer generated when it was first play at the San Diego Comic Con in July and released to the cinema-going public in November to go live with the films Due Date and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One.

The featurette also adds some much needed coherence to the film trailer which, though heavy on action, was light on explanation. Perhaps only those looking out for the director’s next effort would know the film’s story, where sweet-cheeked Babydoll is thrown into an asylum by her evil stepfather. With the threat of lobotomy in five days’ time, Babydoll retreats into her own reality, first transforming the asylum into a bordello and then descending into deeper and deeper levels in her imagination. Battling samurais, mutant World War One Germans, dragons and more, Babydoll must complete epic quests with the help of her fellow inmates, transformed into an elite fighting force.

Snyder hit the big time directing the film adaptation of artist-writer Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s graphic novel 300. With an inventive visual vocabulary and well-framed bold tableaux, Snyder was well-matched for the grandeur of Miller’s images and the firelit colours of Varley’s painting, recreating a bloody hyper-reality charged with audacious action. The same distinctive style and strong sense for the graphic framing of comic books also made an impact on his subsequent film Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore’s acclaimed comic.

On Suckerpunch, Snyder is directing his own material rather than adapting others as he has done before. To judge from the film’s trailer, the result is a distinctive homage to his favourite influences, borrowing from comics, fantasy art and anime for a bizarre and lush imaginative world running at break-neck speed and shot through with fetish. The ‘elite force’ of girls played by Emily Browning (A Series of Unfortunate Events), Jamie Chung, Jenna Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Abbie Cornish jump from hospital to war scenes, falling past dirigibles and dragon to land upright in leather and weapons to battle giant samurai. It’s audaciously loud and fast-paced cinema, somewhat incoherent, rather overwhelming but incredibly bold. Snyder’s visual vocabulary is definitely playing with us but any plot is also trapped behind an impenetrable wall of visual effects.