It's Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.
Steve Shibuya and Zack Snyder took five years to finish this epic story.
Interestingly enough, the number five appears several times within their story: 1950s, 5 girls, find 5 items etc...
The story is set in the 1950s where a young girl called Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is trying to cope with the pain caused by her "evil" stepfather.
While fighting against being lobotomized in a mental institution, she creates her own epic fantasy world.
Her inmates in the asylum double as her partners in the hyper-reality of her imagination.
The lines begin to blur when she begins using lessons from her fantasy world to plan an escape from the mental facility.
This film touches on an insightful truism: fantasy games and epic imaginative stories have a very real influence on the concrete worlds we live in.
By the age of 21, the average young, gaming person will have spent as much time playing fantasy games likeHalo and World of Warcraft as they will have spent in schooling from 5th grade to their senior year in highschool.
Kids will have grown up spending an equal amount of time in the real world and an epic fantasy world of their own imagination.
In a sense the film works as a film within a film or a parable within a larger parable.
Walter Fisher would say story is how all human beings function.
Not only is Snyder showing us the value of working together and being resilient in the face of adversity; he is also showing us that, as Hamlet put it "the play is the thing.
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