Sucker Punch is... an odd movie.
First, it's not exactly what it looks like at a glance; the advertising has, I think, been exceptionally good at masking the presence of anything except tits and explosions.
I don't think I can really talk about it without spoilers.
[spoiler]
Sucker Punch is actually quite a bit like a video game - specifically,
Sanitarium. The story - yes, there is one, more or less - is presented through strongly allegorical nested psychological fantasies - think "Inception", but with motifs instead of faux-realism. There's the "real world", in which the main character has been imprisoned in an insane asylum; her primary coping fantasy allegory, a "Casablanca"-style brothel, and then a series of sub-fantasies in a variety of abstract settings, where she and her friends are fighting to obtain or retrieve something of significance.
All of the crazy combat sequences with the slow-mo and the katanas and the dragons and the steam-powered nazi zombies and etc. are from those sub-fantasies. Everything on the movie poster is imagery from those sub-fantasies.
The movie is
riddled with motifs; with two major settings and something like four minor settings to work with, there's a lot of room for recurring elements. Some of these elements (shattering lightbulbs) have some reasonably apparent significance; others (the kid in the trench in the world war scene who later reappears on the bus at the end of the movie... I think?) are inscrutable.
The movie is absurdly sexual, both in plot and style; this is really weirdly juxtaposed with how
aggressively PG-13 it is. (There was a
thing about how Zach Snyder isn't allowed to make R movies anymore.)
The ending is terrible; there's a "twist" where the main character is lobotomized and ceases to be a character, because - vat a tveest! - the primary supporting character was the secret main character the whole time! There's an allegorical element here, too, but it still feels like a poorly-implemented
infernokrusher-style twist.
I don't think I can sufficiently emphasize just how motif-heavy this movie is, by the way. It feels like it's trying really hard to have a real coherent artistic merit, but at the same time it has that more-guns-more-fishnets-more-dragons thing going on, but they're turned up to, like, thirteen, so it's
like a parody, but...
I just can't decide if the movie is one enormous
poe or not.
[/spoiler]
Great soundtrack, though. I'll have to buy it just for the "Search And Destroy" cover.