Sucker Punch: Wonderpunk?

While the name is stupid, Sucker Punch is indeed a movie I didn’t see coming (hence, Sucker Punch might be an apropos name after all). The best way to describe it is something like this: a young girl in the 1950’s (I think) has a bad life, gets put in the Lennox House asylum, after which she somehow ends up in an imaginary shared fantasy world that director Zack Snyder describes as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”. Huh.

Well, more to the point, here’s the short trailer:

As you can see, there’s a crazy mix of elements here, besides the real-world we have guns, swords, samurai, dragons, exploding airships, bombers, Nazis, robots, other planets, biplanes, and who knows what else. Wild!

Here’s the longer trailer, and the awesomeness begins about half-way through:

To the list we can add post-apocalyptic cities, choppers, siege engines, giant robot mecha (fighting biplanes), possibly Nazi zombies (which are even more fun to blow away), and did I mention dragons, samurai, airships, and robots? I should also add that if you like this, I have similar elements in my own fantasy world of Mythania (shameless plug alert!).

Anyway, this is certainly not steampunk–so let’s get that out of the way. Airships alone do not a steampunk film make. It is more or less a post-WWII adventure fantasy. However, critics are already comparing it to Alice in Wonderland, for some bizarre reason, perhaps because director Zack Snyder suggested the connection. There is a question as to what to call this, genre-wise, and as it certainly has some punk elements, I’m just going to call it “wonderpunk” (see my essay on What’s with the Punk?). That is, it is from the same conceptual cut as Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, but all punked up. In truth, though, I have no idea where it falls.

Regardless, the movie looks pretty awesome.