Is Barbie Really Everything Or Trying To Do Too Much?

Hot take: I didn’t like the Barbie movie. Here’s why…

With huge stars like Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and under the artistic eye of director Greta Gerwig, this has arguably been one of the most anticipated films of the year as fans have planned Barbenheimer double features. We follow Barbie and Ken who are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbieland. But when Barbie starts going through an existential crisis, she has to head to the real world to figure out how to fix it.

Now there’s no denying this is a star studded cast. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling deliver solid performances. They’re surrounded by a diverse cast featuring America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Nicola Coughlan, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Alexandra Shipp, Dua Lipa, even John Cena. Michael Cera was a particular stand out as Ken’s bestie Allan, The visuals are stunning, from the costumes to the sets to the way they bring iconic Barbie accessories to life. They also explore really important themes, including self-doubt, double standards, the patriarchy, and corporate greed, plus what Barbie is supposed to represent for women and how that can be seen from different sides.

Unfortunately, there is so much to tackle that a lot of the ideas feel half-baked and not fully explored. You have this diverse group of actors portraying Barbie and her friends, but most of them are just glorified cameos with big names. I feel like Barbie’s journey in particular was stunted by a lack of development of the story overall. She is going through this existential crisis because of the person playing with her. They introduce America Ferrera as Gloria, who is dealing with her own identity crisis while struggling to get closer to her teen daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) again. But the problem is this is all told to us. We don’t get to actually see what they’re dealing with and aren’t given a real meaningful moment seeing them reconnecting as mother and daughter.

Then you’ve got Will Ferrell plays the CEO of Mattel, which really amounts to just a few lines asking about why men are in charge of this female-focused company. They’re not the villains of the story and they didn’t get much to do besides running around to find Barbie. Their main purpose is to be there to give us this piece of commentary that they don’t really explore further than just saying it. This was unfortunate because this film had so many important topics to tackle but a lot of them just end up being the actors monologuing and not truly exploring these themes on a deeper level or making them accessible. Because of that, I don’t think Barbie is a movie for kids either.

This feels like the ideal property to tie together fans young and old who have grown up with Barbie, but I think a lot of the verbiage used just isn’t accessible for young kids to teach them about these ideals. By the end, even Barbie says she doesn’t know what she wants. While this could be a relatable message that even an icon like Barbie doesn’t have it all together, it felt like they introduced all these ideas only for them to go nowhere. I didn’t leave the theater with the empowered feeling I was hoping for after a movie like this. The only person who gets real exploration is Ken, who is going on this journey to figure out who he is outside of Barbie and gets sucked into the patriarchy while doing it.

I also found the connection between Barbieland and the real world to be contradictory. They’re telling us that these worlds influence each other. We see Barbieland is ruled by women and they think they’ve impacted the real world to be led by women, but when Barbie goes into the real world she learns this isn’t true. Then when Ken brings the patriarchy to Barbieland, we don’t even get to see how that effected the real world, if at all. They also tell us that Barbie is going through all of this because of the person who was playing with her, but they don’t explain how that works very well. So would that mean the kids playing with Barbies in the real world are influencing Barbieland which is then influencing the real world again? I feel like we needed a little more explanation there, in the vein of how Life Size makes it clear how Eve comes alive to help Casey. On top of that, in the real world we are introduced to the ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the creator of Barbie… so now we’re adding ghosts into the mix? It just didn’t work.

All in all, they had so much to work with, but instead of giving us these really rich, robust characters with depth, they just lined up all the themes that were important and threw them at us in a very heavy-handed way. The storylines felt underdeveloped and it was really more about the message than the story. I would’ve liked to see more of a balance there. Tonally, the film was all over the place. The funniest moments were seen in the trailer which left the rest of the movie lacking in humor and campiness. Barbie suffers from an over-bloated script that’s trying to tackle too much with too many stars instead of focusing on character development. The marketing was more successful than the movie itself.

Barbie is now playing in theaters.