[TrentCrimmIndependent]

Originally Posted by timun

Barbie is a ####ed-up fever dream of a movie, and by god the opening scene hooked me. I felt like the only person in the theatre who even knew it was a spoof of 2001 though...

The first half hour or so had me grinning ear to ear, but the more it went on the more I felt things were falling flat. Everyone who sees it will have their own opinion and interpretation of the film's central tenets and the moral of the story, but for me it just... didn't land well. Or at least not as well as it should have, or could have. I think in that first hour or so I had already built it up to be something far cleverer than it ended up being, and my dashed expectations left me feeling conflicted.

I really liked it, but I wanted to love it.

Spoiler!

The entire idea that Ryan Gosling's "Stereotypical Ken" would end up brainwashing all the Barbies into domestic servitude after seeing how "great" the "patriarchy" in the "real world" was was handled in a very facile way that just didn't "hit" for me at all. The solution to the problem being America Ferrara's character just explaining to all the Barbies how ####ty it is to be a woman in the real world and tricking the Kens back into their subservient roles was just like, "Huh? Doesn't this run counter to the point you're trying to make?"

It fell back so hard on negative tropes and stereotypes of men that it was like... a satire of a satire, if that makes any sense? The Kens' entirely selfless existences in Barbieland with absolutely no agency for themselves was a horrendous dystopia. Maybe even more dystopian than Barbie's experience as a woman in the real world. It felt like a point they were trying to make but couldn't bring themselves to say.

But hey, it's a goofy movie about plastic dolls. Like I said, I think I was building it up to be something more profound than the makers intended.

Y'know what the worst part of this movie is? It's going to be a raucous success and the same sort of hapless "suits" the film satirizes—the very same idiotic Mattel execs—are going to think that making movies about all of Mattel's toy lines is a great idea. These dumb mother####ers are, without a hint of irony, going to try to make a "Mattel Cinematic Universe" out of this and it's going to fail miserably because they're too stupid, arrogant and greedy to "get it".

Sensibility is what's lacking, I would say.

Just because something may (or may not) roll in some dough doesn't mean it should get made. There has to be a line somewhere just out of reason. Otherwise it indicates that money rules everything creative, and theres no line nor limit to that. And that's just sad.