On Sucker Punch
Sucker Punch: A Movie Review
by John David Ebert
In my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, I compared the development of Hollywood cinema in the 1970s and 80s with the achievement of the High Renaissance at the moment when, with artists like Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael et. al., Western oil painting hit the apogee of its arc. The stylistic idiosyncrasies of these Renaissance artists had the effect of breaking these artists out from the anonymous guilds which had hitherto characterized Western art as a series of schools or nationalistic developments: there is, for example, a “Northern Renaissance” style that is clearly and discernibly different from the “Southern Renaissance” style; there is a Florentine style that differs markedly from the Venetian school. But the level of mastery and competence attained by Titian or Giorgione had the effect of creating the cult of the artist as a genius, as a sort of school unto himself. In my film book, I suggested that something very similar took place in cinema with the rise of such great creative artists as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Woody Allen, etc. They were preceded, of course, by the French auteurs, but only just barely. There had never been anything like these directors before, and there hasn’t, I’m sad to say, been anything like them ever since.
This epoch in film lasted from about 1968 to roughly 1993 when, with the advent of CGI special effects and studio-managed formulae, the Hollywood auteur disappeared as a species and a new kind of video-game graphic International Style began to come in and take over the aesthetic sensibilities of Hollywood’s culture industry. Movies throughout the late 1990s and on into the first decade of the twenty-first century began to have a nauseating Sameness about them: all special effects were computer effects and these two-dimensional images that look phoney to the eye began to create a whole new video game aesthetic that is the equivalent in cinematic history to the development of Mannerism at the tail end of High Renaissance art.
Everybody knows who Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo are; everybody, likewise, knows who Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and George Lucas are. But now when you ask the average educated person what came after the great artists of the High Renaissance, you will be lucky to extract a single name from your subject. No one ever says: “Tintoretto is my favorite painter.” Or Guercino. Or Caracci. Or even Pontormo or Bronzino. But these artists come right on the heels of, and even overlap with, the later artists of the Renaissance. Indeed, both Michelangelo and Titian kept right on producing their masterworks long after Renaissance art had moved into its Mannerist phase and was characterized by these obscure painters with busy, cluttered canvases; clashing colors; bizarre and awkward poses. Mannerist art contains very little in the way of originality, and most of it is doomed by a desperate attempt on the part of its painters to escape the stylistic and archetypal image patterns laid down by Raphael and Co.
Do a Google Image search on Guercino or Annibale Carraci and see what comes up: these images represent the end of a development. By the time of their arrival, the miracle of the High Rennaisance was, as they say, history. I would not have wanted to have been a painter in Mannerist Italy and to have suffered the misfortune of articulating the odds and ends of canvas corners left uncovered by the Great Masters.
And so now, with Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, I think we have to say that it is apparent what has been happening in film for the last two decades: namely, that it has entered into the period of its Mannerist decline, from which there seems to be no way out. For the problem with artistic developments — and it is a universal problem whether we are talking about Renaissance art, the sculpture and architecture of Old Kingdom Egypt, or the great sculpture of the end of the Classic Maya period — is that they are always characterized by Entropy: they are One Way Streets whose developments are irreversible. You cannot go from the Post Classic Mayan art development to experience a “Classic” period all over again. It doesn’t happen that way. (Although, a new development from another, unsuspected quarter can, indeed, come along: hence the Spirit shifts from Renaissance Italy to the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, thus beginning a whole new cycle of development with its own intrinsic laws of style formation).
Hollywood cinema has entered into its Mannerist phase, while its fading giants, Cameron, Spielberg, Cronenberg, finish off their oeuvres with their inevitably disappointing Late Works. These directors will never make films as great as their early masterpieces ever again. Hollywood cinema has produced all of its masterpieces. It is now a done deal. The greatest films that will ever be made have already been made. What is to come, I predict, will be a series of flickering embers from a dying fire.
So start drawing up your All Time Greatest Lists, because nothing is going to happen up the road that will change those lists very much. Entropy is consuming Hollywood cinema at an alarming rate of vanishing, and Zack Synder’s Sucker Punch is evidence of that fact.
Sucker Punch is a competently directed, thoroughly entertaining action film with loads of George Lucas-quality action sequences. However, when you step back from the picture, you realize what you’re looking at: a midden heap of visual cliches, recycled images, broken bits of plot scenarios from other movies, and all the genres colliding into one another at light speed. A mess, in other words; and a thin, plotless mess at that. It is as though Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Kill Bill and Saving Private Ryan had all been sent crashing into one another, and the resulting chaos is what we find onscreen in front of us. Just like in Mannerism, which was full of recycled images, cliched Renaissance themes and busy action sequences too cluttered for the eye to derive much joy from.
But not only is this Hollywood Image Mausoleum of a film a disaster: it is, actually, the very best that Hollywood is now capable of achieving. This is its State of the Art, for Zack Snyder is, indeed, a talented director. But he has had the misfortune of being born a decade or two after all the great fireworks of the 1980s took place and as a result, we have a film exhibiting the best of what Hollywood can possibly offer in the way of Visionary Cinema nowadays: a mash up.
Sucker Punch is the Tintoretto’s Last Supper of 2011.
