Zack Snyder Says He “Didn’t Go Far Enough” With Sucker Punch, Audiences Missed the Satire

While Zack Snyder earned promising reactions from audiences and critics alike for his work on Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen, his original adventure Sucker Punch in 2011 was largely a financial and critical disappointment. Looking back, the filmmaker notes that he thinks he could have been even more overt in his attempts to convey to viewers that the escapist fantasy was meant to be satire as opposed to something taken more literally, and had viewers picked up on those elements, the project would have resonated with audiences more strongly. Despite sitting at only 22% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has earned a passionate cult following among Snyder supporters.

“Sucker Punch is probably the most obvious example of straightforward, pure satire that I’ve made. And I still think I didn’t go far enough, because a lot of people thought that it was just a movie about scantily clad girls dancing around in a brothel. I’m like, ‘Really? Did you see Watchmen?’” Snyder revealed to Total Film, per GamesRadar. “That film is completely a superhero deconstruction from the drop, which is all Alan Moore. That’s the thing I’ve found really interesting and motivating throughout my career. And I think that, seen as a whole, it’s more obvious than on a movie-to-movie basis.”

He added, “The thing that is deceiving about my movies is that I’m always trying to give the audience the movie they think they want to see, but also give them the subverted version of it at the exact same time. That notion has always been really cool and fascinating: that as filmmakers, we’re trying to sneak in the subversive thing without breaking the illusion. That’s the trick.”

The film follows a group of young women who have all been committed to a mental institution who then fantasize about finding the necessary items they would need to escape this prison, all while battling thugs and robots. While a number of Snyder’s projects prior to Sucker Punch incorporated genre elements, that original experience brought together dozens of seemingly disparate elements into one bombastic adventure.

Snyder previously expressed his frustrations about how critics and audiences thought the incorporation of all of these genre elements was too “exploitative.”

“That was the whole thing to me; I always thought it was interesting when people would review the movie and say it’s exploitative. It’s like an anti-war movie that gets the war too good,” Snyder shared with Letterboxd of those criticisms. “I feel like the main criticism of the film was that it was too exploitative. People took the movie as if the girls fighting and all that stuff was the movie. I found that slightly disheartening.”  

Like many other Snyder projects, the filmmaker hopes to get to release a director’s cut of the narrative at some point.

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