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If only they'd included some cowboys and come aliens in there, maybe then the film would have worked

As I look around, the landscape has changed completely. I'm no longer standing in the brothanage, but on a barren plain under an indifferent sky. My eyes pass over the distant fields and hills, and I can make out the shapes of ninjas, robots and a dragon cavorting merrily together. "Great," I say to myself, "I got a free trip to Comic-Con."

A gruff voice floats through the ether, "You're not in Comic-Con, kid." I turn, and standing before me is a samurai who, for reasons passing understanding, looks like Scott Glenn. "Your shoes," he says. When I don't understand, he repeats it again. "I'm not wearing any shoes," I reply. "I know, why don't you put some on you goddamn fucking hippie? It's disgusting," Scott Glenn screams with barely concealed disdain. "For a samurai, you're not very composed or dignified," I shoot back. "I'm also a grizzled army captain and a saintly bus driver. There are many facets to my role in this story, and I'd thank you for not pigeonholing me as just a sage samurai." After hurriedly donning a pair of Converse, a process made difficult because my actions are depicted in hyper-dramatic slow-motion, I try to get Scott Glenn to give me a straight answer, only for him to reply with a series of self-important nonsense, filled with constant reference to "keys" and "tasks", like I'm the lead character in a second-rate platformer.

After a few swift smacks to his head, Scott Glenn becomes a bit more malleable, and I am able to coax an answer from him. "This is another layer of reality. The one you started in was your own, and you have travelled through subsequent ones, each of which has less and less to do with the one before." Huh, I think to myself, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a film very similar to that, but one that wasn't absolutely terrible. "This is the result of someone trying to take everything that geeks obsess over and trying to cram them all into one place. It's a veritable clusterfuck of niche interests, each piling on top of the next, struggling to breathe." As he says this, a 20 foot tall Ninja decides to have an arm-wrestling contest with a similarly large robot which has a bright pink bunny face painted onto its front. Considering how awesome that sounds, it's actually surprisingly dull, and takes a very long time. "But why is ait all so boring?" I whine pathetically. "All of this stuff, it's so cool!"

At this point, the dragon decides to perch atop a cathedral and start singing Tainted Love in a fine piercing tenor. "It's cool individually, but when you put it all together it becomes meaningless," Scott Glenn replies. "It's like trying to eat pizza on a rollercoaster. Separately, those two things are great, but when combined they make you want to vomit." The dragon joins with a group of undead World War I-era German soldiers in an a capella rendition of Love Is The Drug. "But everything about this seems so crazy, why wouldn't it at least make for an entertaining mess?" The cathedral explodes for no reason. "Because if you try to make everything look cool and epic, it all just winds up looking samey. If you try to make everything impressive, then nothing is."

As the Ninjas and the Zombie Germans form a conga line, I decide the only way to deal with this is to bang my head slowly and repeatedly against a brick wall until my skull splits open. As soon as my forehead connects, a flurry of images run through my head, and I am jolted through layers of reality...

Terry Gilliam called; he wants his ending back

"Wait, where am I now?" I think to myself. I look around the room, and where once was an overly green gothic orphanage, now I see an overly green operating theater and an array of medical implements, whilst a doctor who looks like Don Draper leans over me. "Thank goodness!" I cry. "I thought I was watching Sucker Punch, but it turns out I was just being lobotomised." With a sigh, I relax, and surrender to the numbing void.

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