Not What You've Heard
10/10
Author: imaniac from United States
5 April 2011

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

In a world filled with mindlessly violent movies and flimsy plots with practically nothing to substantiate the actions of the characters, I went into this movie looking for mindless violence and girls-with-guns escaping reality and an asylum and not much more.

What I found instead was apparently missed by a lot of other people out there. I read reviews that said this movie was soulless and pointless sexual fantasy. I don't know what movie they saw…because that wasn't this movie.This movie wasn't about a girl escaping reality by setting up a fantasy within a fantasy and using those fantasies to escape an institution in reality. This movie was about a young woman who had accepted a hopeless fate, but is saved by someone she eventually calls an angel…told from the angel's point of view. This is not Babydoll's story. Yet she still brought down the beast.

This movie was not about a boy's fantasy about girls in short skirts and fishnets holding big guns and a really cool sword. For one thing, boys tend to like bloodshed. Girls tend to like looking awesome. (Please note, I am using the phrase "tend to like" on purpose. I do like bloodshed on occasion and I am a girl. I know those of the male set of the species who also like to look awesome. I'm making a separate point here.) There is very little bloodshed in this movie. The steam-work soldiers did not bleed.

They're already dead. The other creatures, the robots, the dragons… There's practically no blood shed within the fantasy. There is a highly sexual look to the movie. Babydoll is sexually objectified by her stepfather and the orderlies and the guards. Is it any wonder that her first reality-escaping-fantasy is a brothel? And then, within that fantasy, she uses her ability to dance provocatively to render the men motionless, thoughtless, and incapable of noticing anything else around them. It's called a power trip.

Every woman wants to be sexy. Every woman wants to be that capable of holding every man's attention that completely. It was Babydoll's way of using that sexual objectivity as a weapon. And that weapon carries into the next level of her fantasy, becoming a handgun with cartoonish animal charms dangling - taking a weapon and adding a distinctively feminine touch to it - and a really sweet katana engraved with intricate and delicate designs.

This movie was about heroes and self-sacrifice. It was not about women in lingerie holding weapons. It was about using everything you have to fight for freedom - and that your freedom is not the only freedom worth fighting for. This is not Babydoll's story. It may not be yours. But it's still worth telling.Oh yeah, and one more thing: If someone fights for your right to breathe free, fight for the next person's right. You won't know whose story this is until the end.