'Sucker Punch' Trailer & Tidbits

In Zack Snyder’s SUCKER PUNCH, a otherwise orphaned young woman called Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is committed to a mental institution by her stepfather. Using an dream world (or is it?) to deal with her situation, she enlists her fellow female inmates to plan an escape—before she’s lobotimized.
This involves them all entering her alternate reality. On the first level, Baby Doll and her allies Sweet Pea ( Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) as all call girls in a theatrical brothel, coached  by Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino) and visited by by the High Roller (Jon Hamm).
However, there’s also a timeless battlefield which the Wiseman (Scott Glenn) tells them is the key to their escape, provided they can bring back five items for which they will have to battle everything from WWI soliders, robots and dragons to obtain.
An unusual project, written by Zack Synder and Steve Shibuya (largely known for 2nd Unit and FX work), the film includes popular songs and dance numbers by the cast, along with wild and fantastical combat scenes. 
Speaking to Coming Soon, Synder commented that on this film, where he is not adapting someone else’s graphic novel-based work, there was something of a different feeling.

 Sucker_Punch_poster
“…It was a little bit more freeing, I gotta say it was a little bit of a vacation from these massive iconology films that I’ve been working on, although in a weird way, we still ended up doing this… in my mind when I started talking about the project, it was going to be this kind of straight-forward thing and then as you work on it, it has really evolved into, I gotta say, a pretty complicated and complex structural and a sort of psychological study that we ended up doing.

It was kind of like “300,” and we basically used the same production methodology as “300,” because you had real enemies that were just dressed like WWI guys and then we had the girls fighting them, and we had sets for the trenches and sets for No Man’s Land and that was the approach.
 In that way, it was kind of comforting to start with that early on because it was like we all got in on the groove and we understood how to shoot it.
Zack Synder also revealed that he expects to begin filming SUPERMAN (THE MAN OF STEEL) this August.

SUCKER PUNCH opens this Friday, March 25th in theaters and IMAX from Legendary Pictures and Warner Brothers.

Snyder Gears up for 300 Prequel

Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes in 300
Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes in 300

SuperHeroHype have been talking to Zack Snyder (300, WATCHMEN) and it seems that he’ll be directing the prequel to 300, entitled XERXES, in the near future. Apparently Frank Miller (SIN CITY, THE SPIRIT) is working on writing the film and once Snyder releases his upcoming LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS and finishes next years SUCKER PUNCH he says, “There’s a really good chance that will be the thing we do [next]”.
Additionally, the original 300 may be re-released in 3D following the decision to convert SUCKER PUNCH to said format. Warner Bros. converted a ten minute portion of 300 into 3D to show him its potential for SUCKER PUNCH and it was enough to make him, and the studio, seriously consider a 3D re-release of 300. The original 300 was visually stunning and a lot of fun so a prequel created by the main two minds behind the original should be something to look forward to. Though the decision to convert 300 into 3D smells a little more like a re-hash for cash than anything else.
Snyder’s LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS is out on the 24th of September later this year and SUCKER PUNCH the 25th of March, 2011. What do you think, does the prospect of a 300 prequel sound exciting  and is 300 worth a re-release in 3D?

300 – Borderland Film Review

Zack Snyder’s film version of the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley may look like the greatest music video ever made; whether or not it is a decent feature film is another question altogether. Snyder makes wonderful use of computer-generated imagery, combined with beautiful live-action photography, to create a unique sepia-toned looked that presumably stands in for the images from the source material. But as a director, Snyder is so enamored of the imagery that he lets it drag the film to a deadly standstill, time after time. For all its calls to glory and brutal bloodshed, 300 never works up a head of steam that comes close to matching GLADIATOR or BRAVEHEART. For a film so desperate to prove its manly muscle, it ends up feeling flaccid and weak, unable to sustain itself, erupting in small spurts here and there until it finally just sputters to a halt. Continue reading “300 – Borderland Film Review”