Barbie — Satisfactory To Social Media But Plastic to Your Intellect
Its still a very good-looking and entertaining movie to watch. (No Spoilers)
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The Magnum Opus in Pink is now alive, and I went to the preview yesterday. Barbie, whatever it was, wasn’t dissatisfactory to the eye.
I walked into the theater with complimentary champagne and no expectations. After all, I wasn’t the Barbie type while growing up. But the movie immediately had my attention.
Beautiful art, but they made just two pieces of it.
A world of pink, where everything is cute. Witty and accurate to the Barbie stereotype. A Malibu Mansion, cute plastic cars, the plastic beach, and the near-plastic Ryan and Margot, what a treat!
As the movie progressed, I was hoping to see more of that world, trying to stretch my imagination beyond the same 3 plastic sets. But all there was was the mansion, the plastic beach, and the long plastic road to the real world. Sigh. So much wasted potential.
A Deep Premise with a shallow foundation
The premise — The doll has an existential crisis and breaks through to the outside world to resolve her pain ( already knew this from the trailer). The idea is promising and I was curious to see how it develops.
Alas, the dialogue writers could not grow beyond over-simplified platitudes. “Why isn’t everything perfect” and “Men are dumb, but they have it easy and think horses are awesome”. At the end of the movie, I was left wanting.
I have no issue with “Naive feminism” being the point of the movie. However, It was uncomfortable to watch the shallow dialogue and silly corporate men carrying pink batons who couldn’t even jump over a turnstile.
Only after I watched the movie to the end did I realize that it was actually aimed at 12-year-olds. That is the only explanation.
