<PERSON>
appreciate how thorny this is but can’t seem to shake that <PERSON>’s biggest flaw as filmmaker esp. before BvS is his difficulty in incorporating action and movement with the emotional beats of his picture. obviously the structure warrants this to some extent but I think that using the idea of protagonist’s imagination as completely separated from any sort of dramatic weight is simply an error rather than a calculated decision, as evinced by <PERSON>’s death scene(s), where I felt both were intended to make an impact but only one worked. 698
doesn’t help that the fantasy sequences are... kinda ugly? very digitally processed and artificial in a way that I find fascinating, but the color grading rly isn’t that far removed from a <PERSON> film (the differences and pop are there from Man of Steel onward).
one of Sucker Punch’s assets is how keenly it understands the difficulty of re-appropriating imagery and marginalization, your own or that of others, and how the process requires more than personal agency, something which doesn’t exist in <PERSON>’s film. indeed, even the downfall(s) of its peripheral characters (this is the type of film where everyone loses some sort of integrity) happens through forgery of signature + arrest at hands of the same police force who allowed Baby Doll’s story to go unheard for so long in the first place! my appreciation for the film definitely boosted by its ending, esp. the <PERSON>/<PERSON> scene which rly drives home the crux of the film: there is no escape through institution, through empathy w/o action, only through self-acceptance, freedom of thought, and the ability to act upon that freedom!
will probably rewatch and expand thoughts soon. 80