As Babydoll tries to formulate her escape we are left watching this as well as being catapulted from steampunk Trenches with Hello Kitty ‘mechs, dragons, sky fortresses and high tech grav trains. It is all amazing, a tad blurry in the action and bewildering. This is where several people get lost along the way. That is the shame of it, because it is supposed to shake you up. You're supposed to feel lost, because that is how Babydoll feels. She lost and trying to find a way out.

It all makes perfect sense.

Think about it.

Who falls along the wayside? Amber and Blondie, because they simply aren’t important. They are red herrings. The only three people that matter are Rocket, Sweet Pea and Babydoll.

Babydoll accidently kills who? Her kid sister. Who are the sisters in the Asylum? Rocket and Sweet Pea.

Sweet Pea is desperate to protect her sister, even to the point of enduring the sexual predations of Blue’s clients. Why? Because if they endure Sweet pea tells Rocket at least they’ll live. What does Rocket say?

“I’m dead already.”

So we should not be surprised when the kid sister dies…at all.

Thus, we can see that when everyone else dies we are left alone with Sweet Pea and Babydoll.

Again much like 2001: a space Odyssey. We are left alone with Hal and David Bowman. We are on a journey to an enigma with madness surrounding us. What does it all mean?

When Babydoll sacrifices herself to free Sweet Pea, we see that Sweet Pea escapes and we are plunged into an ending that no one can quite comprehend.

As Sweet pea boards the bus, we see kindly old Scott Glen is driving; the boy from the trenches is boarding as well.

Huh?

It’s all in her mind, Babydoll is long gone. Her mind is trying to find totems to grab onto hope. She wants to have a loving father as opposed to the nightmare that is her stepfather, thus she creates the Wise Old Man. She hopes that all men aren’t evil so she has the Innocent Young Boy there. She wants to be strong, so she imagines herself as the Strong Protector that is Sweet Pea. She wants her sister back, so she creates Rocket. She wants strong friends so he creates Amber and Blondie who will help her.

Thus, what is reality? Everything up to her seeing Sweet pea on stage and the lobotomy play, and then final scene when she’s lobotomized, everything else is unreal.

Or not. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the Monolith is nothing, maybe it’s everything.

So like Kubrick before him, Snyder has forced you to think, to debate and not handed you your answers.

The greatest Sucker Punch of all is that you may never know.

John White served as the National Art Director of The Honor flight Network 2008-2010,  and Regional Art Director Honor Flight Northwest Ohio 2007-2010.  He is the Author of the ‘Airship Neverland’ Steampunk series- currently seeking publishers.