Before I dive into this review properly I would like to acknowledge the hard working and genius PR-campaign of the Warner Brothers marketing department. You guys really pulled off a miracle with this one successfully duping all of us including me into believing that Barbie was going to be just another colorful light-hearted easy-going family comedy with some cheeky self-aware humor ironic gags and probably capped off with a blondly inoffensive female empowerment about girls learning the value of their own potential.
What none of us expected was 114 minutes of spiteful bitter mean-spirited borderline unhinged hatred of men and everything even vaguely associated with them. Barbie is like the deformed mutated rage child of Captain Marvel, Ghostbusters 2016 and She-Hulk. The result is pure brain cancer in movie form and I was genuinely shocked by the sheer undisguised contempt this production has towards 50 percent of the human population. Much in Barbie was one of the most miserable demoralizing unpleasant experiences I've ever had as a movie critic and the whole thing made me question where our western society is heading.
The movie begins with a rip-off homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey" where little girls discover Barbie for the first time and gleefully cast of their boring and oppressive Baby Dolls in an orgy of violence and destruction, and if the visual metaphor of little girls happily destroying the embodiment of motherhood to focus their lives instead on a shallow and materialistic piece of consumerist trash is lost on some people, then I don't know what to say man, but they're probably the target audience for this movie.
The movie explains that all the Barbie & Ken Dolls live together in Barbie Land, a kind of magical part to the real world which is portrayed as a peaceful feminist Utopia where all the important jobs are done by the Barbies and the Ken's just kind of exist. They've got no inherent value they contribute nothing they've no power or say in how their society is run and they're basically looked down as a bit silly and irrelevant by the Barbies, which raises following question: Could the writers possibly be trying to tell us about their views on men?🤔
Anyway this is where we meet stereotype typical Barbie who's busy living her best life partying with her friends and treating her boyfriend's like absolute dog s*it! Who's the hero of this thing again? Whatever the answer is, things suddenly change when Barbie starts experiencing emotional changes and physical flaws like flat feet and cellulites. See, because Barbie world is a reflection of the real world the Barbie's appearances change depending on how their life owner plays with them. Wait, what?😲 Do you have any idea how many Barbie Dolls must get broken or thrown in trash compactors or set on fire or eaten by family pets every single day? Then the place would look like the Omaha beach scene from Saving Private Ryan.
At any moment Barbies could suddenly get torn apart or melted or crushed in front of their friends eyes, what's like an existential nightmare, but I guess you're not supposed to think too much about that.
Internal consistency in a movie like Barbie is rarer than a Mainstream Medie Outlet willing to give this movie an honest review, so the only solution is for Barbie to journey into the real world find the girl who plays with her and get her to be happy again and Ken tags along for the ride because he's got nothing to do than simp for Barbie. Unfortunately the real world turns out to be an oppressive patriarchal hellscape, that's utterly dominated by men like one guy literally walks up to Barbie and slaps her in the a** in the middle of a crowded boardwalk in broad daylight in front of her boyfriends.
Now you might think that this would afford the writers a chance to demonstrate a little bit of nuance in their storytelling, maybe portray the real world as both good and bad in sharp contrast to the simplistic idyllic innocence of Barbie worlds kind of like an enchanted where the protagonist gets taken out of her cartoon Homeworld and has to learn to navigate the complexities and difficulties of real life ultimately growing and maturing as a person along the way, but then you've to remember to Jessie de la Cruz Quotation: "Hope Dies Last"! Surely, that movie actually had a likeable main character, a decent story and wasn't written by people who despised half the human population, but nope, the real world and all the men in it are shown to be universally irredeemably horrible, because of course they are!
Anyway Barbie eventually finds the kid who plays who turns out to be an a**hole communist activist feminist that I think the movie wants us to empathize with.☭💁♀️🚩 Ken on the other hand discovers the patriarchy is very much to disliking mainly because for the first time in his entire life people actually showing basic respect and human decency. You know, sometimes I get the impression this film isn't saying what the filmmakers think it's saying , so when Barbie returns to Barby land she discovers to her horror that Ken is brought the patriarcha back with him and turned the whole place into a giant frat party in the space of like a day.
Finally there's a plot I can get behind. It's kind of funny though because it did make me question how the supposedly intelligent empowered and self-confident Barbies were so easily subjugated by Ken and the others. This is the kind of awkward little Paradox that keeps coming up when you try to constantly portray women as strong empowered infallible Kick-Ass girl bosses who can do anything and beat anyone but you also need them to be helpless supressed victims of male domination, you can't have your cake and eat it!
Barbie uses her Newfound powers of feminism to free the other Barbies from the evil Ken's oppression and because they're dumb as f*** she's able to trick them into fighting each other unti eventually they just give up and surrender. Now you might think after all these wild swings between male and female domination The Logical Way Forward would be for Barbie Land to adopt a more equal system where both sides are given power and respect, perhaps teaching the audience that for all our different sees men and women are both pretty awesome and maybe we do well to work together instead of unfairly elevating one group about the other, but nope, the Barbies go right back to being in charge of everything again and the Kens slide back into a meaningless depressing existence of being a relevant second-class citizens and that I think is supposed to be a happy ending?🙄
Honestly I'm struggling to find the right words to properly Express just how monumentally awful this film is. It's like a serial killer dressed in a Pikachu outfit superficially it might look bright and cheerful and cute, but beneath the appealing facade there's something genuinely horrible and Sinister. This is a movie made by people who utterly despise men and masculinity or any kind of traditional gender roles of any kind and make absolutely no attempt to hide it, so you're a woman and wants to be a mother or a homemaker the reaction of these ideologues behind the film is: "Screw you fascists!"
You're a man who wants to be assertive ambitious confident and succesful? Well, that clearly makes you a misogynist, didn't you know that? It's so F***ing divisive and unneccessary like they had a perfect opportunity to unify audiences behind a simple message of reconciliation and equal opportunity but they just couldn't help themselves. They were still filled with rage and hatred and bitterness that it just had to come spewing out onto the screen! As far as this film's concerned women are simply amazing and men and everything they do are utterly irredeemably 💩.
They might be grudingly tolerated provided they play by the rules but they have no inherent value and can never be trusted with any kind of power or responsibility and the only way to guarantee a peaceful and harmonious Society is for women to be put in charge of everything and meant to be docile powerless servants who exist only to please them.🤢 🤮 Irony On Wow, what an inspiring message for impressionable girls. Irony Off You know, the thing is none of this would have been quite so insidious if the marketing hadn't done everything in its power to keep it a secret, I mean for all their faults She-Hulk, Ghostbusters 2016 and Captain Marvel, all wore their feminist hearts on their sleeves you know exactly what were you getting into when you went to see them, but Barbie really is a wolf in sheep's clothing!
This ideological Catastrophe tricking people into watching it by promising one thing and delivering something very different and I guess that's the thing that really struck me about this film. A lot of parents will have been duped into taking their daughters to watch this movie probably expecting the kind of breezy colorful family-friendly movie that was advertised, only to find themselves confronted with this spiteful bit sir mean-spirited pile of misandrous dig s**t insteads where girls are to be turned into man-hating libbers by portraying men as enemies and complete idiots, while whole generations are to forget what a man really is, does and why no society can do without them.
I can't help but wonder how many future man-hating psychopaths are going to be created because this film. It's not very often I say this in reviews but if you're a parent and you thinking about taking your kids along to see Barbie the I recommand you skip this one and do literally anything else with them. Believe me, you will thank me later.