Black undies? Or white? It was a choice that confronted writer-director Zack Snyder while making Sucker Punch, a mostly female action-fantasy starring Emily Browning as a gun-toting, sword-swinging killer deceptively named Babydoll.
She dispatches zombies and robots with the kind of brutality that made Snyder's mostly male 300 a hit in 2007, but she also wears a thigh-high skirt that, as viewers will discover, can be rather revealing.
The underwear question involved more than just aesthetics. As it turns out, Snyder wanted the colour to play down any titillation, not increase it.
"I did make a concession to say, 'Let's make her underwear black,"' Snyder says. "Otherwise, I'm noticing it too much. If it was white, you see it. But those are the kinds of things we did because I didn't want the movie to be about that."
It's a small but important point that underscores the tricky nature of a movie whose sexual politics are as multi-layered as its plot.
One minute its female characters are invincible warriors, the next they're chattel. And, almost always, they are thoroughly rouged and suggestively dressed.
"It was difficult, at first, to convince the studio, not because it's about all-female action characters but because it was so different," says Snyder's wife, Deborah, who helped produce the film for Warner Bros.
"You usually pitch them a set of comps" - that is, clips of comparable movies - "but there were no comps for a movie like this. That was both exciting and scary."
What has been done before is the revved-up mix of female-driven action and overt sexuality.
The 1970s television show Charlie's Angels was famous for strategically jiggling its heroines; Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! featured women with aggressive personalities and outsize bosoms. More recently, Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft character often wore combat boots and little else.
"You have to recognise that we are making a genre movie, a movie that has elements of, say, Japanese anime," says Carla Gugino, who plays the brothel's mother hen, Madam Gorski.
"In 300, the men wore less clothing than we're wearing! It is absolutely embracing that women can be sexy, strong, smart, all of those things."
Sucker Punch features five young actresses cast somewhat against type.
Browning (Babydoll) starred in kids' film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Abbie Cornish (Sweet Pea) played John Keats' love interest in costume drama Bright Star.
Jamie Chung (Amber) recently had an eye-candy role in Adam Sandler's Grown Ups.
Jena Malone (Rocket) is known for indie films such as Bastard Out of Carolina.
And Vanessa Hudgens (Blondie) is a dimpled tween idol from Disney's High School Musical franchise.
For Sucker Punch, however, they practised martial arts, trained with assault rifles and worked out with Logan Hood, a former navy SEAL who also wrangled Snyder's actors on 300.
Malone, for one, piled 4.5kg of muscle on to her 1.68m frame and eventually pushed her rack dead-lift weight to 136kg.
"I get incredible work as an actor," Malone says.
"But no-one ever says, 'When I look at you, I see someone who can kill 40 men with heavy artillery.' Never had I had anyone instil that belief in me. It was incredible."
The film goes so far as to exclude men entirely from the main cast.
There are no "boyfriend" roles at all, and most of the male characters are villains, from Babydoll's abusive stepfather to brothel owner Blue (Oscar Isaac, Robin Hood).
Scott Glenn plays the Wise Man, a benevolent father figure who sends the women into battle; he is the film's only "redemptive" male, according to Snyder.
At the same time, Snyder wanted his female characters to embrace certain traditional sexual archetypes - "the nurse, the French maid, the schoolgirl" he says - and simultaneously take control of them.
Such archetypes are common in movies with explicit sexual content, he notes, yet Sucker Punch seems destined to cause some hand-wringing even though it contains no sex scenes at all.
"The most dangerous place to go, I think, with female sexuality, is when people are conscious of their own sexuality and it becomes a tool," Snyder says.
"The power of it, when they're aware of it - that's dangerous. Society is not into that, for whatever reason.
"I thought we had a sexual revolution and everyone is cool with that. But apparently it's still a hot-button issue."
