ϑ’Barbie h̗o̖t̖ take

currently have mixed feelings about a thing so its wall of text time - Barbie was a little like listening to someone talk about a dream they had… cool but incoherent.

on paper this movie had the potential to be a masterpiece - post-modern camp, feminism, self aware casting with ryan gosling addressing his propensity to play as and appeal to the incel character, surrealist matrix/truman show meta humor, greta gerwig’s mother daughter coming of age blueprint, existentialism vs female perfection, mental health, identity beyond heteronormativity, etc - but instead of exploring any one of these topics with nuance, they feel completely glossed over, ticking them off a bucket list like buzzwords. by wanting to address everything they end up really saying nothing interesting about anything, as if to nudge the audience like “you know what i mean right haha so relatable” instead of actually giving any new perspectives. an example i can think of is with the surrealist themes of the movie itself, instead of establishing any solid rules of the universe the film takes place in, it seems to just go with whatever vaguely sounds right, as if the film doesn’t have an interest in understanding itself beyond the abstract idea of “you know, like… imagination!” so instead of getting a sense that the barbie world is an unfathomable, godlike, or orwellian, it comes across as completely trivial and meaningless. its a shame because the premise is so interesting. regardless its still a marvel that this film got to exist at all and I’m really happy it does! in my new charli xcx scoring system its a Crash out of Pop2