Err, well I think the problem here Bob is that you don't seem to get it. Unless it's covered in the second part of this entire thing, which I doubt as it would undermine everything you said here, every point you make is undermined by the actual plot of the movie. There is no real hidden meaning here because the good guys and bad guys are clearly spelled out during the film, which means that saying there is an intended audience analogy here doesn't quite work out because the movie sets out to create the clear good vs. evil seperation.
What Suckerpunch is, at it's core, is simply a surrealistic vision quest movie, which stands out by having two layers of parallel reality instead of just one. It's no differant than a movie where say a character in a coma undergoes all these wierd ans surrealistic experiences that ultimatly represent them striving to recover from their injury.
The actual "Suckerpunch" in the movie, which is actually kind of spelled out from the beginning is that the apparent Protaganist, Babydoll, is not actually the focus of the story. All of the stuff about the plot to steal her inheritance and such is just a giant smokescreen for everything that is going on, by trying to get you to care about her, where the actual point of the story is the salvation of another girl in the asylum. The narrator tells you that, as does the "cut back" scene at the beginning of the movie right before you see her Lobotomized at the beginning.
Overall the point here is that in the deepest layer of reality there is ONE character who does not have an analogy to any of the other layers of reality, the guru/mentor figure who gives Babydoll her marching orders in the dreamscapes, who is incidently a man. You do not see this character make an apperance until the very end of the movie where the actual girl who was supposed to survive, the one Babydoll was there to rescue so to speak, finally completes her escape. He actually plays a role, if an offhanded one, as a bus driver (still in a colorscape which can make you go "huh" but that's anothr whole discussion) in manipulating events directly for the first time.
The big mind trip here is of course whether he, the guiding force, is actually god, some great spirit, or whatever else.
Now granted, Suckerpunch is a movie that can be heavily debated, and I suppose the fact that it's not straightforward is exacvtly why it's gotten such mediocre reviews. We could actually argue everything that I've said, but it seems to be something of a consensus at least among those people I've talked to about the movie seriously, and I believe Zak himself is supposed to have confirmed a lot of this in a magazine interview early on, but I've never actually seen that (just heard other people talk about it). The point here is that your basic theory pretty much ignores a lot of things that happened within the movie, ranging from initial narration, to the prescence of the guru figure, etc...
It's doubtful you (Moviebob) read this, but I'm going to say two final things:
#1: Your right in a general sense of the disguised exploitation of women, though it has little to do with this movie, though your wrong about some of the specifics.
In general, women left to their own devices tend to create this same stuff for a female audience when they produce it. If you read things like "Anita Blake", "The Hollows", and other series written largely for a female audience, or just look at the artwork (statues, paintings, etc...) by female artists the differance between what they create and what men create is pretty much zero. The imagery in of itself if absolutly nothing bigoted or exploitive, women are as fond of their outlandish costumes and physical perfection as men are, and at the end of the day wind up with the same exact endgame of spectacular amounts of butt being kicked. If anything the differance is in the way stories are told and a relational as opposed to rational viewpoint and way of reaching the same exact place, but relational vs. rational and those tendencies are again another entirely discussion and dissection of writing.
BUT you are CORRECT that this trope tends to be subverted, especially by non-western creators. A lot of action-girl anime is intended to be humorous and part of the joke is how inherantly ridiculous the idea of women doing this stuff is, especially when your dealing with young girls who act extremely, stereotypically, young, and wind up inflicting huge amo unts of devestation on the bad guys more or less accidently, perhaps with an emotional trigger.
The idea of trying to subvert that back in on itself is an interesting one, but truthfully it's self defeating, as it's not common enough overall to warrent it, and such a message would ultimatly wind up knocking the entire idea which would of course also be telling women "you can't have this, there is something fundementally wrong with it" perhaps tied to the idea that something men can also enjoy or be attracted to is wrong, which is kind of counter productive, and insulting to the women (and men) who create this stuff seriously.
In some respects I think it's become too easy to project irony into campy or deliberatly corny-cool productions, where people seek a deeper meaning than is present. Certain critics pretty much demanding creators come up with arguements about irony to defend their work certainly doesn't help matters much either. Sometimes a hot girl, in a hot costume, kicking butt with a ray gun, is just what it appears to be, and there is absolutly nothing wrong with that.
In short, I think there was less subversion going on here than you. The dreamscape/vision quest idea ultimatly being a unique spin on what is otherwise a fairly grim asylym escape story, and a way of sort of playing up what would otherwise be a very subtle supernatural element. Told without the dreamscapes you'd pretty much have the escape guided by a girl hearing voices in her head, which are shockingly accurate in knowing a few things the girls couldn't otherwise know, following by the final girl unknowingly running into the source of the voice of that one girl's head. While presumably all of the corrupt forces at the asylum undergo a house cleaning due to the attention that has been garnered by the events of the story. It could be good played "straight" but this was a unique way of telling that story.
#2: Bob, look man, I respect you for knowing more about geek culture than I do, which is actually saying something, but really, I think you need to stop projecting politics onto everything. While it has less to do with Suckerpunch than a general tone of reviews, you
are seeing crap that just isn't there.
I get that you had a rough childhood as a persecuted geek, I can feel for you, heck I spent a good portion of my childhood messed up in residential facilities as I've mentioned before. Anything that is mainstream, pro-American, pro-majority, or critical of minorities is not inherantly bad. You seem to be so focused on seeing a status quo burn that you haven't really thought things through, especially in terms of an actual "big picture" so to speak. If you had, you'd notice there is actually far more of an agressively pro-liberal message in a lot of these movies, and a lot of them are pretty insane when you get down to it. It's not like your point of view (and those even more extreme) isn't represented. If anything I'd think someone like you would actually find some of what the other side has to say, when it appears, thought provoking at the very least.
Basically, I'm saying that you should probably lay off the politics a bit, I get that you like "Suckerpunch" but really, I think your projecting more depth than is actually there, because you want it to mean more than it actually does.