Battle: Los Angeles vs. Sucker Punch

In the past month, I spent my last two movie passes watching two movies.  The first movie I went to see was Battle: Los Angeles.  It's one of those movies whose trailer makes it look like much more of a movie than it actually is.  I found it to be a clichéd, derivative, and predictable alien invasion movie.  While that may sound bad, I enjoyed all 116 minutes of it.  It was Independence Day meets Black Hawk Down, and that's pretty good praise even though it is not as good as either.  Not everything can be Inception, but not everything has to be.  Occasionally, some pulp to mix in with the classics is a good thing, and I don't think it was trying to be anything more than an action packed let's shoot some aliens and save the earth thrill ride.  There was nothing particularly memorable about it, but it worked.

A couple weeks later I went to Sucker Punch.  What can I say, but I have wanted to see a Zack Snyder movie, and since 300 and Watchmen were rated R, and I couldn't bring myself to spend money or a movie pass on that owl movie Legends of the Guardians, Sucker Punch seemed like the obvious choice.  I have heard people describe it as a music video at the beginning, a video game in the middle, and something of a descent movie by the end if you make it that far.  The cheap music video and video game thrills were the parts that I enjoyed however, and when Zack Snyder tried to add the substance at the end, it lost me.  Visually, it had a nice sepia toned color palette that gave it a graphic novel feel, and the soundtrack featured Bjork's Army of Me and an awesome cover of The Pixies' Where is my Mind.  I liked all of the dream sequences fighting giant Samurai warriors and mechanical steam powered undead German soldiers, but unlike Battle: Los Angeles, the film gave me something to think about by the end.  My main debate with myself was did I actually like it or not?  I hate to always go back to Inception, but that's what this movie wants to be, and it doesn't even come close.  One of the key themes of the movie I didn't really care for, and now I ask myself if I really want Zack Snyder making the next Superman film.  If I could go back, I kind of wish I would have used my last movie pass on Rango, which is dubbed by BBC movie critic Mark Kermode as Gore Verbinski's best film ever, and I really wish I had that movie pass so that I could go see Duncan Jones' (David Bowie's son) second feature film Source Code, which I just paid to see and will write about soon, but I can't go back.  Somewhere in Sucker Punch there was a high production special effects movie about redemption with a potentially good story, but the end product missed the mark.