SUCKER PUNCH

SUCKER PUNCH. Zack Snyder, director, co-script with Steve Shibuya, story; producer, with Deborah Snyder. Rick Carter, production design. Emily Browning and Abbie Cornish, featured players.[1] USA/Canada: Warner Brothers, 2011; see IMDb for details of production and distribution.[2]

Reviewed by T. S. Miller in SFRA Review #296 (Spring 2011): pp. 29-30, who recommends the film to students of SF/F and notes the intriguing setting of "a seedy brothel that maps very closely onto the asylum," where the heroine is imprisoned, that "is not only the first fantasy world, but a first-order fantasy world: only in this world does Babydoll," that protagonist, "experience those second-order action fantasies in which she battles golems and dragons and, yes, steampunky WWI German Hun zombie robots." Further, "In both the first- and second-order fantasies, the film quite deliberately adheres to the barest bones of RPG-storytelling" — that's "Role-Playing Games" (not, say "rocket-propelled grenades"), "and the action sequences take the form of a series of video game challenges, contextless missions that offer only as much background and narrative content as will be necessary to complete their objectives" (Miller, p. 29).[3]

So, see for Steampunk and the intersection of fantasy and SF in film and video games (and their electronic progeny).

RDE, finishing, 4Ap21