“Do you guys ever think about dying?” – Barbie
Wow – talk about a disturbance in the Force, this film is IT. Everything about it goes completely against anything that’s sane, logical or even vaguely credible. Even this review was never supposed to happen, because I had absolutely zero interest in seeing it. In fact, my strategy was to ignore the fact that it even existed. I had assumed that the world at large would adopt the same stance. I mean, it’s Barbie. That and the fact that its release date was the same as Oppenheimer, a film that’s been teased in cinemas for about a year. Everything was stacked against a vacuous film about a doll whose every possession is the same shade of startling pink and has no backstory. (To be fair, at least the Transformers have an established backstory to draw from.)
Yet, here we are. Barbie is breaking box office records globally and at the time of writing, is the third highest grossing film of 2023 after only its second weekend. (For the record, only Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and Super Mario Brothers have grossed more.)
So, in this weird bizarro world, Barbie has outsold Fast X, Mission: Impossible, Transformers, Oppenheimer, Indiana Jones, Scream VI and The Flash. I don’t understand it. I’d have bet the house that Oppenheimer, Indiana Jones and The Flash would absolutely have dominated the summer box office, but nope! And when I saw it, the multiplex was heaving with people, proving that cinema is NOT dead. People still enjoy seeing a film as a shared experience on a large screen. It’s a phenomenon not only attributable to Barbie, but a perfect storm of three crowd pleasers all released within a week of each other; Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Pt 1, and Oppenheimer being the others.
So how did I, with no interest in seeing this film, come to be sitting in a crowded screening room, waiting for it to start, surrounded by very few other males, but an army of pink clad females of every conceivable age? How could such an anomaly happen to me?
The answer is simple. Listeners of our podcast Piercing the Veil will know I have a daughter, Tiff. And Tiff can be deviously manipulative when it comes to her poor old dad. We fathers tend to be putty at times when it comes to our daughters. Tiff has a black belt in this, obviously, having had 27 years of practice. One of her strategies was “think of the podcast and what a great episode it’ll make if you’ve seen it and we discuss it”. That episode will be recorded in a couple of weeks, incidentally.
Unsurprisingly, I had done no research on this movie. I had sat through the teaser trailer during a cinema outing and every last nerve I had said “nope”. The one plus I had going in was Margot Robbie, who I generally enjoy in every film I’ve seen her. I was assuming a kind of fantasy character leaving their normal fantasy world and ending up in the real-world scenario, like Disney’s Enchanted or the live action He-Man & The Masters of the Universe film from 1987. And in a way, I was right – sort of.
It's fair to say that this in an uneven film, with frequent changes in mood and gear. It starts off as a comedy. Barbie is living in her perfect Barbie world with all the other Barbie variants, in their dream houses – exactly like the toys Tiff used to play with as a child. Kudos must go to the set designers, but holy crap, that’s a lot of pink to assault my eyes. Also living in Barbie world is of course Ken (Ryan Gosling who doesn’t exactly stretch his limited talents here) in all his variants. There’s plenty of visual humour, and it seemed to be heading off in the same absurd, over the top but played straight tongue in cheek was as Batman was in 1966, so all good. I get it. It might get tedious for two whole hours, but it’s a bit better than Detective Pikachu was. (I still shudder at the memory of THAT mess) but the whole tone changes because (and I can’t believe I’m typing this) Barbie suffers an existential crisis and begins to ponder death and why she exists, why things can’t just stay the same for ever. This was a concept that kind of knocked me over. In a Barbie film? Existentialism? From Barbie? Thoughts of life, death, the meaning of life? This sets Barbie off on a quest to the real world, where I assumed most of the film would take place – but no. (At this point, all my assumptions were out of the window, I was ready for a comedy, not angst.)
Barbie returns to her world and everything has changed, gone is the previous order of their society (I honesty can’t believe I’m writing this about a BARBIE MOVIE!!!) and the film becomes a sociological statement about the flaws of living in either a matriarchal or patriarchal society. And this message very quickly becomes laboured and over stated.
For a film that I had assumed would carry the emotional weight of candy floss, the film became a heavy message leaden slog very quickly. Yes, the message is one that we all need reminding of, but I don’t think we need it driven home as forcibly as it is here. My reactions through the screening reflect the changes in tone pretty accurately. I was with it all the way for this first half. The third quarter saw my attention begin to wander, the fourth had me just wishing the film was over already.
My Rob Rating reflects this. It’s not ALL bad, it really isn’t, but clever as parts are, it was like watching three different films, eliciting three different mind sets.
Rob Rating 6/10