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"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig ’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example. The costume design (led by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran ) and production design (led by six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood ) are constantly clever and colorful, befitting the ever-evolving icon, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (a three-time Oscar nominee) gives everything a glossy gleam. It’s not just that Gerwig & Co. have recreated a bunch of Barbies from throughout her decades-long history, outfitted them with a variety of clothing and hairstyles, and placed them in pristine dream houses. It’s that they’ve brought these figures to life with infectious energy and a knowing wink.

“Barbie” can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout. They come from the insularity of an idyllic, pink-hued realm and the physical comedy of fish-out-of-water moments and choice pop culture references as the outside world increasingly encroaches. But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad. Such is the anticipation industrial complex.

And so you probably already know the basic plot: Barbie ( Margot Robbie ), the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, begins experiencing an existential crisis. She must travel to the human world in order to understand herself and discover her true purpose. Her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), comes along for the ride because his own existence depends on Barbie acknowledging him. Both discover harsh truths—and make new friends –along the road to enlightenment. This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “ The Truman Show ” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.

This is a movie that acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the kinds of very real body issues they can cause in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. After all, there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) before there was an actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), an achievement “Barbie” commemorates by showing two suited-up women high-fiving each other among the stars, with Robbie’s Earth-bound Barbie saluting them with a sunny, “Yay, space!” This is also a movie in which Mattel (the doll’s manufacturer) and Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) at least create the appearance that they’re in on the surprisingly pointed jokes at their expense. Mattel headquarters features a spacious, top-floor conference room populated solely by men with a heart-shaped, “ Dr. Strangelove ”-inspired lamp hovering over the table, yet Will Ferrell ’s CEO insists his company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” are evidence of diversity. It's a neat trick.

As the film's star, Margot Robbie finds just the right balance between satire and sincerity. She’s  the  perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner completely looks the part, of course, but she also radiates the kind of unflagging, exaggerated optimism required for this heightened, candy-coated world. Later, as Barbie’s understanding expands, Robbie masterfully handles the more complicated dialogue by Gerwig and her co-writer and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Noah Baumbach . From a blinding smile to a single tear and every emotion in between, Robbie finds the ideal energy and tone throughout. Her performance is a joy to behold.

And yet, Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer as he revels in Ken’s himbo frailty. He goes from Barbie’s needy beau to a swaggering, macho doofus as he throws himself headlong into how he thinks a real man should behave. (Viewers familiar with Los Angeles geography will particularly get a kick out of the places that provide his inspiration.) Gosling sells his square-jawed character’s earnestness and gets to tap into his “All New Mickey Mouse Club” musical theater roots simultaneously. He’s a total hoot.

Within the film’s enormous ensemble—where the women are all Barbies and the men are all Kens, with a couple of exceptions—there are several standouts. They include a gonzo Kate McKinnon as the so-called “Weird Barbie” who places Robbie’s character on her path; Issa Rae as the no-nonsense President Barbie; Alexandra Shipp as a kind and capable Doctor Barbie; Simu Liu as the trash-talking Ken who torments Gosling’s Ken; and America Ferrera in a crucial role as a Mattel employee. And we can’t forget Michael Cera as the one Allan, bumbling awkwardly in a sea of hunky Kens—although everyone else forgets Allan.

But while “Barbie” is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again. The breezy, satirical edge she established off the top was actually a more effective method of conveying her ideas about the perils of toxic masculinity and entitlement and the power of female confidence and collaboration.

One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us. The middle-aged mom in me was nodding throughout in agreement, feeling seen and understood, as if this person knew me and was speaking directly to me. But the longtime film critic in me found this moment a preachy momentum killer—too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights.  

Still, if such a crowd-pleasing extravaganza can also offer some fodder for thoughtful conversations afterward, it’s accomplished several goals simultaneously. It’s like sneaking spinach into your kid’s brownies—or, in this case, blondies.

Available in theaters on July 21st. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Barbie (2023)

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.

114 minutes

Margot Robbie as Barbie

Ryan Gosling as Ken

America Ferrera as Gloria

Will Ferrell as Mattel CEO

Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie

Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha

Issa Rae as President Barbie

Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler

Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie

Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie

Alexandra Shipp as Writer Barbie

Michael Cera as Allan

Helen Mirren as Narrator

Simu Liu as Ken

Dua Lipa as Mermaid Barbie

John Cena as Kenmaid

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Ken

Scott Evans as Ken

Jamie Demetriou as Mattel Executive

• Greta Gerwig
• Noah Baumbach

Cinematographer

• Rodrigo Prieto
• Alexandre Desplat
• Mark Ronson

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Barbie First Reviews: Hysterically Funny, Perfectly Cast, and Affectionately Crafted

Critics say greta gerwig's send-up of the iconic doll is a thoughtfully self-aware, laugh-out-loud comedy that benefits from a flawless margot robbie and a scene-stealing ryan gosling..

TAGGED AS: Comedy , First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Barbie :

Is the movie funny?

“ Barbie can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

“Often funny, occasionally very funny, but sometimes also somehow demure and inhibited, as if the urge to be funny can only be mean and satirical.” – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“The entire screenplay is packed with winking one-liners, the kind that reward a rewatch.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“One of the funniest comedies of the year.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Will fans of Greta Gerwig’s other movies enjoy Barbie?

“In some ways, Barbie builds on themes Gerwig explored in Lady Bird and Little Women .” – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

“ Barbie balances the incredibly pointed specificity of the jokes and relatability of Lady Bird , with the celebration of women and the ability to show a new angle of something we thought we knew like we saw with Gerwig’s take on Little Women .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Never doubt Gerwig.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

(Photo by ©Warner Bros. Pictures)

How is the script?

“It’s almost shocking how much this duo gets away with in this script, and in certain moments, like a major speech by America Ferrera’s Gloria, who works at Mattel, it’s beautiful that some of these scenes can exist in a big-budget summer film like this.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us… [and it’s] a preachy momentum killer — too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights. ” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

“The moments that aren’t just laughing at and with the crowd, however, are shoved into long, important monologues that, with each recitation, dull the impact of their message.” – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Does it stick the landing?

“The second half of Barbie bogs down a bit.” – Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

”It’s frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

How does it look?

“It’s a visual feast.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

“Highest honors to production designer Sarah Greenwood, costume designer Jacqueline Durran and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.” – Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

How is Margot Robbie as Barbie?

“She’s the perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role… Her performance is a joy to behold.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

“She gives an impressively transformative performance, moving her arms and joints like they’re actually made of plastic.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“Anything Gerwig and Baumbach’s verbally dexterous script requires, from Barbie’s first teardrop to the final punchline, Robbie handles with unerring precision.” – Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

“Robbie is simply incredible in the title role… She has often excelled in these types of roles where we see the power a woman truly has in her environment, but there might not be a better example of that than in Barbie .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

What about Ryan Gosling’s Ken?

“For an actor who’s spent much of his career brooding moodily, here, he finally gets to tap into his inner Mousketeer.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer… He’s a total hoot.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

“Ken allows Gosling to go broad in a way that we’ve never seen him go before, and the result is charming, bizarre, and one of the most hysterical performances of the year.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Does it feel like a toy commercial?

“It’s Gerwig’s care and attention to detail that gives Barbie an actual point of view, elevating it beyond every other cynical, IP-driven cash grab.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“ Barbie could’ve just been a commercial, but Gerwig makes this life of plastic into something truly fantastic.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“This movie is perhaps a giant two-hour commercial for a product, although no more so than The Lego Movie , yet Barbie doesn’t go for the comedy jugular anywhere near as gleefully as that.” – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“The muddied politics and flat emotional landing of Barbie are signs that the picture ultimately serves a brand.” – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Are there any big problems?

“If the film has a flaw, it’s that Barbie and Ken are so delightful that their real-world counterparts feel dull by comparison.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“The only segment of Barbie that doesn’t work as well as it maybe should is the addition of Mattel into this narrative.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments.” – Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com

Who is the movie ultimately for?

“ Barbie works hard to entertain both 11-year-old girls and the parents who’ll bring them to the theater.” – Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly

“ Barbie doesn’t have that tiring air of trying to be everything to everybody. With luck, and a big opening, it might actually find the audience it deserves just by being its curious, creative, buoyant self.” – Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

Barbie opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

Thumbnail image by ©Warner Bros. Pictures

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Barbie reviews: What do critics make of the Margot Robbie film?

Life in plastic is mostly fantastic according to many critics, who have broadly praised the Barbie movie.

The much-publicised film is released this Friday - opposite Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer - and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

Empire said Barbie was "painfully funny", while the Independent described it as "joyous from minute to minute".

But the Daily Mail called it "uneven and disjointed", while Time said it was "very pretty but not very deep".

Robbie stars as the doll in director Greta Gerwig's film, which has been made with co-operation from toy manufacturer Mattel.

In a five-star review, the Independent's Clarisse Loughrey said: "Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory - a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism.

"While it's impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, especially when consumer culture has caught on to the idea that self-awareness is good for business, Barbie gets away with far more than you'd think was possible."

The Telegraph's Robbie Collin was also positive, awarding the film four stars and describing it as "deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious".

"It's an unexpected pleasure to report that Greta Gerwig's film - while still fundamentally being a summer comedy adventure about the Barbie toy line - is far from the blunt-force cash grab many of us feared," he wrote.

"The satirical angle - likelier to strike a chord with older viewers than pre-teens - is enthusiastically and mischievously milked. (There are gags here that gleefully poke a number of masculine online beehives.)"

However, the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine was less keen on the representation of men. She wrote: "It's a deeply anti-man movie, an extension of all that TikTok feminism that paints any form of masculinity - other than the most anodyne - as toxic and predatory...

"Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser. If the roles were reversed, and a male director made a film about how all women were hysterical, neurotic, gold-digging witches, it would be denounced - quite rightly - as deeply offensive and sexist."

She concluded: "It's uneven, disjointed, the plot makes no real sense - and the dead hand of corporate America weighs heavily upon it."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw also gave a lukewarm review, awarding the film three stars.

He suggested Barbie is "a good-natured but self-conscious movie" that is "occasionally very funny, but sometimes also somehow demure and inhibited, as if the urge to be funny can only be mean and satirical".

He added: "This movie is perhaps a giant two-hour commercial for a product, although no more so than The Lego Movie, yet Barbie doesn't go for the comedy jugular anywhere near as gleefully as that."

Other critics were far more positive. Rolling Stone's David Fear said Barbie "may be the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st Century", while NME's Alex Flood noted the script "contains unexpected subtlety".

Barbie received its UK premiere last Wednesday - one of the last major showbiz events to be held before the Hollywood actors' strike was announced by industry union SAG.

Empire's Beth Webb praised Robbie and Gosling's performances as Barbie and Ken in her four-star review.

"Robbie - who has been dialling it up to 11 since Harley Quinn - is hilarious, but the most consistent scene-stealer is Mr. Blond Fragility," she said.

"Gosling submerges wholeheartedly into Ken's insecure psyche as he moves from Barbie's sidepiece to patriarchal poster boy. Every muscle flex, every hair flick, every guitar strum lands perfectly. There are moments where he will rob you of breath."

There was also praise for the film's director from Devan Coggan of Entertainment Weekly, who said: "Never doubt Gerwig.

"The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry, even if you're made of plastic."

Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter struck a more dissenting note, writing: "However smartly done Gerwig's Barbie is, an ominousness haunts the entire exercise.

"The director has successfully etched her signature into and drawn deeper themes out of a rigid framework, but the sacrifices to the story are clear. The muddied politics and flat emotional landing of Barbie are signs that the picture ultimately serves a brand."

Other reviews had different criticisms, with Deadline's Valerie Complex describing Barbie as "an imperfect film".

"It stumbles somewhat in its handling of its characters of colour. They mostly are used as devices to push the Stereotypical Barbie and Ken narratives forward," she said.

"There is a tight 95-minute movie here, but it's crammed with pointless dance scenes and musical numbers that are just filler and nothing else."

Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post went further, describing Barbie as an "overwrought disappointment".

"The packaging of Barbie is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box," he said. "To almost quote the Aqua song: Life in plastic - not fantastic."

The tone of the film was criticised by Time's Stephanie Zacharek, who said: "It's a movie that's enormously pleased with itself. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it's being, every exhausting minute."

Variety's Peter DeBruge concluded: "It's kind of perfect that Barbie is opening opposite Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, since Gerwig's girl-power blockbuster offers a neon-pink form of inception all its own, planting positive examples of female potential for future generations.

"Meanwhile, by showing a sense of humour about the brand's past stumbles, it gives us permission to challenge what Barbie represents - not at all what you'd expect from a feature-length toy commercial."

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Barbie Reviews

Gerwig and Baumbach offer thoughtful commentary not only on Barbie herself and everything she represents, but also on womanhood, feminism, and growing up.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Add it all up and we get an enchanting explosion of pink cotton candy fun, all of which conceals a deceptively nutritious sociopolitical core.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Can we all just “Beach”?

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 6, 2024

Barbie is equal parts a feminist rallying cry, an educational film, a reaffirmation of healthy matriarchal values, a musical, a comedy, and the kind of movie that everyone, especially young men, should see.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024

Beneath all the laughs at the expense of men and women is the sad truth that this brand of essentialism itself, of separating Barbies from Kens, of emphasizing their differences, is the thing that damages us the most.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2024

Before she hits the road, being in Barbie Land is just as pleasurable for the viewer as it is for these toys. The depiction of this world is a triumph of imaginative design and skilful craftsmanship.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2024

That Gerwig was able to essentially hijack a two-hour toy commercial (and a magnificently visualized one at that), one that cost $150 million, and deliver something approximating a progressive message, is just short of miraculous.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 25, 2024

Why was this made?

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 18, 2024

Throw in Billie Eilish’s melancholic tear-jerker and an intentionally butchered pronunciation of The Godfather and the movie was bound to be an instant classic. And you, too, have the power to take your Birkenstocks out of the closet in 2024.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2024

One of the main keys to Barbie’s success is commitment to the Barbieland authenticity and Gerwig’s willingness to undercut both Barbie and Ken leads, only to build them back up again.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 1, 2024

Barbie’s highs more than make up for its shaky third act. The game cast’s commitment to the tone, dazzling visuals and spirited direction prove it’s not a bad thing visiting Barbie’s World even if it’s just a break from the real one.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 31, 2023

One of the most thought-provoking social commentaries and empowering mainstream comedies in recent years. The “I’m Just Ken” scene should be playing on a loop in the Louvre.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 30, 2023

Gerwig had given no indication she (or anybody, really) could produce such a hot-pink masterpiece of goofball humor, winsome Jacques Tati alienation, and low-key patriarchy seminar.

Full Review | Dec 28, 2023

Barbie is very entertaining and despite the apparent artificiality, it questions social mandates. Throughout the film, a successful sense of humor is maintained regarding the struggle of the sexes and its cultural implications, without being offensive.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 28, 2023

In Greta we trust.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 27, 2023

With a stellar cast of actors, Barbie focuses all the energy of its first half hour on running through this insular version of things. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 26, 2023

Barbie is a brand extension exercise, but it's an audacious, hilarious, and artistically crafted one, raising the bar considerably for big-budget intellectual property ventures to come.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

"Barbie" is to feminism as a wrench is to a cat. Extermination of rational thought is this commercial's goal. Toxic. "Barbie" is a chunky diarrhea stain on humanity. Greta Gerwig is a hack screenwriter, and a remedial filmmaker at best.

Full Review | Original Score: LESS THAN ZERO STARS | Dec 22, 2023

"Barbie" does exactly what the doll itself was intended to do. It acts as a beacon to young women telling them that they can achieve greatness and be anything they want even in a patriarchal landscape where men control the levers of power.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 21, 2023

For all the great things Robbie and Gosling are doing on a comedic level, their brilliance lies in the ability to also bring pathos to a narrative that never shies away from the complicated nature accepting another's lived experience and desires.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 8, 2023

‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century

• By David Fear

It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing this movie about everyone’s favorite tiny, leggy bearer of impossible beauty standards suddenly transformed it from “dual corporate cash-in” to “dual corporate cash-in with a very high probability of wit, irony, and someone quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

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Except, in the middle of one of their regular super-cool and totally awesome sing-alongs, Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” No one, least of all the shiny, happy person who said it, has any idea where that random bummer came from. The next morning, Barbie’s imaginary shower is cold. Her imaginary milk has curdled. The collective perkiness of her friends and neighbors only seems to highlight her inexplicably bad mood. Her stiletto-ready arches suddenly fall flat. And then, she comes face to face with what can only be described as the Thanos of the Barbie Cinematic Universe: cellulite.

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Once in our world, Barbie will encounter sexual harassment, gender inequity, the benefits of crying, the CEO of Mattel ( Will Ferrell ) and the mother (America Ferrara) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who’ve introduced such morbid thoughts into her brain. Ken will discover horses, Hummer SUVs, and toxic masculinity . She returns with her new human friends to Barbieland in a state of dazed enlightenment. He comes back as a full-blown Kencel, spreading a gospel of full-frontal dude-ity.

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Critical thinking isn’t mind corruption, of course. Nor is pointing out that you can love something and recognize that it’s flawed or has become inflammatory over time, then striving to fix it. It’s definitely not a bad thing to turn a potential franchise, whether built on a line of dolls or not, into something that refuses to dumb itself down or pander to the lowest common denominator. And the victory that is Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling — along with a supporting cast and crew that revel in the idea of joining a benefic Barbie party — slipping in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, under the guise of a lucrative, brand-extending trip down memory lane? That’s enough to make you giddy. We weren’t kidding about the “subversive” part above; ditto the “blockbuster.” A big movie can still have big ideas in 2023. Even a Barbie movie. Especially a Barbie movie.

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‘Barbie’ Reviews Are In: Slickly Subversive or Inescapably Corporate?

Some critics viewed the highly-anticipated movie as satirically capitalistic, while others saw it as capitalistically satirical.

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By Julia Jacobs

As reviews for “Barbie” rolled out ahead of its weekend opening, a critical divide emerged.

Some thought that Greta Gerwig, the acclaimed director of “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” had met the expectations for a more subversive take on the 11.5-inch Mattel phenomenon. They thought Gerwig’s script, which she collaborated on with her partner, Noah Baumbach, succeeded in acknowledging the criticisms that the Barbie brand has received over the years — including unrealistic representations of women’s bodies and, up until recent years, a lack of diversity in its collection — while presenting a comedy that leans into the delightful weirdness of the Barbie universe. Others felt that the director did not go far enough in dinging her corporate sponsors, keeping the critiques of consumerism and female beauty standards at surface level.

Critics tended to be unified in their praise of the movie’s stars, however, celebrating Margot Robbie’s surprising emotional depth as the so-called stereotypical Barbie who embarks on an eye-opening journey outside of the meticulously manufactured dolls’ world, as well as Ryan Gosling’s deadpan comedy as a Ken who delights in his discovery of the patriarchy.

Read on for some highlights.

‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century [ Rolling Stone ]

The movie does more than avoid delivering a two-hour commercial for Mattel, David Fear writes, suggesting that the movie could be “the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century to date.”

“This is a saga of self-realization, filtered through both the spirit of free play and the sense that it’s not all fun and games in the real world — a doll’s story that continually drifts into the territory of ‘A Doll’s House,’” Fear writes. “This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too.”

We Shouldn’t Have to Grade Barbie on a Curve [ Vulture ]

In one of the most critical reviews of the movie’s approach to gender politics, Alison Willmore writes that “it’s not a rebuke of corporatized feminism so much as an update,” noting “a streak of defensiveness to ‘Barbie,’ as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made.”

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Review: With Robbie in pink and Gosling in mink, ‘Barbie’ (wink-wink) will make you think

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Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” an exuberant, sometimes exhaustingly clever piece of Mattelian neorealism, opens with an extended, heavily trailer-spoiled homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We’re at a drab early moment in the history of the toy industry; for too long, little girls everywhere have had only their sad, uninspiring baby dolls to play with — until now, at this fateful dawn-of-mannequin moment. Hello, dolly! But really, hello, Barbie, played by Margot Robbie with a megawatt grin and impeccable coiffure, modeling a black-and-white swimsuit and towering over the primordial landscape on skyscraper legs. She’s a marvel of (anatomically incorrect) engineering, a citadel of plasticine perfection and, to judge by her immense popularity, a major evolutionary leap forward.

Whether or not Barbie has ever represented an advance, of course, has been fiercely debated since Ruth Handler created her in 1959. Did Barbie, with her can-do spirit and variegated career possibilities, offer young girls a positive model of be-whatever-you-want-to-be womanhood? Or did her bombshell proportions and impossible chest-to-waist ratio entrench the kinds of cruelly unforgiving beauty standards that second-wave feminism was just beginning to interrogate?

Decades later, conversations around female self-image, representation, agency and empowerment have shifted, to say the least, as have personal and public attitudes toward Barbie herself. She has been attacked and defended, dismissed as a punchline and reclaimed as a pioneer. She has diversified with the times (new races, new body types and, as always, new clothes). In recent years, she’s also experienced plummeting sales and a diminished cultural profile, which of course explains why — after countless small-screen animated Barbie movies, series and specials — she now has a live-action theatrical feature to call her own.

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Really, though, that explains this movie only in part. Whatever you think of “Barbie,” the mere existence of this smart, funny, conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy speaks to the irreverent wit and meta-critical sensibility of its director. (It also owes something, I suppose, to Mattel’s willingness to endure some modestly scathing satire in the pursuit of ever-greater profits.) Working again with her co-writer, Noah Baumbach (“Mistress America,” “Frances Ha”), Gerwig has conceived “Barbie” as a bubble-gum emulsion of silliness and sophistication, a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand. It doesn’t just mean to renew the endless “Barbie: good or bad?” debate. It wants to enact that debate, to vigorously argue both positions for the better part of two fast-moving, furiously multitasking hours.

The case for the Barbie defense is presented by the Barbies themselves. There are a lot of them walking, talking, dancing, doing the splits and consuming nonexistent meals in the groovy pinktacular paradise that is Barbie Land, where life is a beach party by day and a dance party by night. The Barbies dwell in sisterly harmony and blissful self-fulfillment, each with her own meticulously furnished Barbie Dreamhouse and endlessly colorful wardrobe. Each one also has her role to play, whether she’s President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney) or even Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa), popping up from behind some delightfully fake-looking ocean waves. (If you’ll permit a “Barbenheimer” joke, I must point out the existence of Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie, who presumably discovered the secrets of nuclear fuchsian.)

Tiptoeing into the spotlight on perfectly arched feet is Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie, whose self-mocking name and lead-heroine status are a handy example of Gerwig’s have-it-both-ways attitude. Although surrounded by Barbies (and Kens, but more on them later) of various shapes, sizes and colors, Stereotypical Barbie is Barbie: white, blond and svelte, in line with our earliest, most lasting impressions of the doll formally named Barbara Millicent Roberts. To say that Robbie is perfectly cast is an understatement (her surname alone could be a Barbie/Roberts portmanteau), though that very perfection underscores the movie’s problem: Can you really call out and perpetuate a stereotype at the same time? Would it have been better — more daring, and also more interesting — to tell the story from a less classically molded Barbie’s perspective?

Perhaps that possibility will be taken up in future visits to what is already being mapped out as a full-blown Mattel cinematic universe. For now, this early adventure generates more than enough goodwill to sustain your curiosity and suspend, or at least temporarily overwhelm, your reservations. Drawing on the breathless narrative velocity and sly comic mischief she showed in her sparkling recent adaptation of “Little Women,” Gerwig maintains a delirious but remarkably coherent onslaught of gags, twists, ideas, non sequiturs (Michael Cera! Matchbox 20!) and scholarly bits of Barbie arcana — all of it swirling like a merry comic tornado around the serene center of gravity that is Robbie’s captivatingly sincere performance.

Like Amy Adams as a fish-out-of-water Disney princess in “Enchanted,” Robbie takes an archetype long dismissed as an airheaded caricature and, moment by deeply felt moment, teases and fleshes her out. With her radiant smiles and goofy-graceful physicality, she inhabits Barbie’s glamour and entitlement as effortlessly as she inhabits her hot-pink bell bottoms. But she also gradually punctures those upbeat vibes with tremulous notes of vulnerability and premonitions of disaster, right around the time her Barbie notices a patch of cellulite and begins having incongruous thoughts of death.

These intimations of mortality, which I wouldn’t have minded hearing about in even gnarlier detail, suggest cracks in Barbie’s psyche, but also in Barbie Land’s very foundations. To explain further would risk giving away the strange metaphysical rules that govern Barbie Land, its fantastic-plastic inhabitants and their tricky relationship to the real world. And that real world is ultimately Barbie’s destination, a place she sets out for in search of answers, not realizing that her own attention-starved Ken has stowed away in her little pink Corvette.

Ah yes, Ken. There are several Kens in this movie, all of them amiable second-class citizen hunks of Barbie Land, played by actors including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa. But Gosling, as the neediest, most pathetically insecure Ken of the lot, rises to delicious new levels of actorly self-mockery. Sporting a platinum dye job that never fails to match his denim cutoffs, ’90s neon workout gear, pastel-striped beachwear and luxurious mink coat (sold separately), Gosling scores the expected laughs about Ken’s fashionista vanity , ambiguous sexuality and all-around preening petulance. But what makes him more than just another smooth-chested punchline is one of Gerwig’s deftest satirical touches: As it turns out, it doesn’t take long for a dude with serious self-esteem issues to open a Pandora’s box of patriarchal oppression.

Ryan Gosling and Greta Gerwig on how Ken became the subversive center of ‘Barbie’

Star Ryan Gosling and director Greta Gerwig open up about Ken’s journey to toxic masculinity and back in their comedy based on the iconic Mattel toys.

July 11, 2023

For toxic masculinity, though unheard of in Barbie Land, is of course alive and well in the real world, as Barbie and Ken are initially shocked to learn when they arrive on the sunny streets of Los Angeles. Here, women aren’t respected, let alone placed on polymer pedestals; they’re ogled, objectified, sidelined and worse. And to hear it from an angry teenager named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), Barbie herself deserves her share of the blame, being a tool of “sexualized capitalism” that “set the feminist movement back years.”

That’s the case for the Barbie prosecution, in a nutshell, and as you might expect, it isn’t allowed to go unchallenged. Sasha’s attack is the first of the script’s two big throw-down scenes; the second is a rousing feminist cri de coeur delivered by Sasha’s mom, Gloria (a winning America Ferrera), who’s on hand to temper her daughter’s scorn, emphasize Barbie’s enduring multigenerational appeal and remind us that, yes, you can love women and love Barbie too. It’s a hugely effective monologue, calculated for maximum applause and likely to get it. But “Barbie’s” feminism, something it wears proudly on its sequined sleeve, seldom needs such emphatic dramatic underlining to register.

The movie is at its best when it’s simply leaning into its own fast, funny, free-floating goofiness, whether it’s letting Kate McKinnon do her thing as a self-explanatory Weird Barbie, pitting multiple dancing Kens against each other in a hypnotic dream ballet, or throwing in a coconutty reference to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I could’ve done without the filler-ish comic subplot featuring Will Ferrell as Mattel’s CEO, a mostly toothless bit of corporate ribbing that nonetheless does lead to a visually striking chase sequence through a maze of office cubicles, cleverly staged as a riff on Jacques Tati’s classic “Playtime.”

Gerwig’s wide-ranging movie love serves her well here; there’s something fitting and finally moving about the way Barbie’s journey of self-discovery takes her through a glittery funhouse of cinematic allusions. If Barbie Land can’t help but evoke the creepily self-contained utopia of “The Truman Show,” Barbie’s entire quest unfolds like a kind of reverse “Wizard of Oz,” in which she ends up leaving a trippy Technicolor dreamscape and traveling to a humdrum, grayed-out reality rather than the other way around. You might sense echoes of those films during this movie’s strange, beguiling final moments, and perhaps a callback to “2001” too. The evolution of Barbie continues.

'Barbie'

Rating: PG-13, for suggestive references and brief language Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes Playing: Starts July 21 in general release

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‘Barbie’ Review: Greta Gerwig Goes Way Outside the Box with Her Funny, Feminist Fantasia

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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But just as Kubrick’s apes eventually met by an alien monolith that utterly changed their world and worldview, Greta Gerwig ‘s little girls are about to be descended upon by a world-altering and brain-breaking new entity: a giant, one might even say monolithic, Barbie doll, in the form of a smiling Margot Robbie , kitted out like the very first Barbie doll ever made . And thus spake Barbie . That’s where Gerwig’s funny, feminist, and wildly original “Barbie” begins. It will only get bigger, weirder, smarter, and better from there. Related Stories Tim Burton Feels He ‘Could Have Retired’ After ‘Dumbo,’ But ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Helped ‘Reenergize’ Him Naomi Ackie Deleted Her Instagram After Being Cast in ‘Star Wars’ to Avoid Potential ‘Racist’ Backlash

Imagine, if you can, a world split in two upon the release of the first Barbie doll in 1959. There’s the real world (known in the film as, of course, “The Real World”), and then there’s the seemingly idyllic (and very plastic) Barbie Land, which exists on the premise that the invention of Barbie (the doll) so drastically, so completely, and so positively impacted the real world that she (the doll) basically solved feminism. As far as the Barbies (and attendant Kens) who populate Barbie Land know, the Real World is a wonderful place for women (because Barbie Land very much is), and the female-forward world they happily clatter through is just a reflection of what happens in the flesh-and-blood universe.

This Barbie (like, it seems, all Barbies) has a great day every day. Her Stereotypical Ken ( a delightfully unhinged Ryan Gosling )? He only has a good day when Barbie pays attention to him, and Barbie is pretty busy. Gerwig guides us through a typical Barbie day with meticulous attention to detail (both impressive and incredibly amusing). Her Barbie Dream House? It doesn’t have windows, or working stairs, or running water. She can get wherever she wants to go by simply jumping (just like a child might move their doll, foisting them from spot to spot with little care for logic). Her hands are stiff. Her food is nonexistent. Her life is perfect. Robbie’s dedication to the gag, along with co-stars Rae, Shipp, Mackey, Hari Nef, and Nicola Coughlan is profound, and boy, does it pay off.

That truth: She must go to the Real World and mend the rip in the temporal fabric that keeps Barbie Land and the Real World distinctly different. And while Barbie, initially resistant to the fate before her, eventually takes on the challenge with verve and vigor, the questions start piling up: How different are Barbie Land and the Real World? If what happens in the Real World can impact Barbie Land, is the reverse true? And why the hell is Ken in the backseat of Barbie’s hot pink car as it cruises straight into La-La Land?

Once in the Real World, Barbie and Ken’s twinned realizations of what it’s actually like unfold at a lopsided pace. Barbie is confused by everyone’s behavior, not just the men who leer and the women who scoff, but especially that of Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), a sassy teen whom she believes is her longtime owner, the very person suffering from angst so deep it ripped a hole between the Real World and Barbie Land. Gerwig and co-writer and longtime partner Noah Baumbach steadily lift the veil (or, as the case may be, rip their own temporal fabric) as Barbie is beset by the truth of the Real World (not feminist), Barbie Land (also not feminist), and her place in both.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s venture into the Real World is absolutely necessary — it unlocks the film’s thesis after besieging us with diverting fun, gives us the darling Greenblatt and her Barbie-obsessed mom Gloria (America Ferrera, who runs off with the film’s last act), and allows Will Ferrell to go nuts as the wacky (male!) CEO of Mattel. However, it’s not nearly as fun, fantastic, and entertaining as the rich world of Barbie Land — that’s the point. Thankfully, we’re back there soon enough, though it’s been hugely altered by the full force of a returning (and, dare we say it, red-pilled) Ken, who uses all his newfound male rage and patriarchal power to upend what was once a lady-powered idyll. Barbie? She’s having a bad day.

Gerwig, as ever, has assembled a stellar supporting cast. All Barbies delight, but the Kens, appropriately enough, launch a real sneak attack, especially Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Michael Cera nearly makes off with the whole thing as the singular sidekick Allan. There’s also a murderer’s row of below-the-line talent: Opuses can and will be written about Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.

It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic.

Warner Bros. releases “Barbie” in theaters on Friday, July 21.

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By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Barbies might “just” be toys, but Barbie™ is an impossibly perfect paragon of glamorous femininity who’s had as many specialized professions over the course of her 64-year-long existence as she has bespoke outfits. There are few pieces of corporate-owned IP that are truly as Iconic (in the pre-social media sense of the word) as the doll that put Mattel on the map and taught children of all genders — but especially little girls — to long for hot pink dreamhouses. That’s why it isn’t all that surprising to see Mattel Studio’s brand protection-minded influence splashed all over Warner Bros.’ new live-action Barbie movie from writer / director Greta Gerwig.

Valuable as the Barbie brand is, it makes all the sense in the world that Mattel would want Gerwig’s feature — a playful, surreal adventure that does double duty as a deconstruction of its namesake and her technicolor, dreamlike world — to play by a set of rules meant to protect their investments. But as well meant as Mattel’s input presumably was, Gerwig clearly came with a bold vision built around the idea of deconstructing some of the more complex realities of what Barbie represents in order to tell a truly modern, feminist story.

Watching the movie, you can often feel how Mattel and Gerwig’s plans for Barbie weren’t necessarily in sync and how those differences led to compromises being made. Thankfully, that doesn’t keep the movie from being fun. But it does make it rather hard to get lost in the fantasy of it all — especially once Barbie starts going meta to poke fun at the studios behind it in a way that seems to be becoming more common .

Along with celebrating innumerable pieces of Mattel’s history, Barbie tells the story of how the most Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in all of Barbie Land gains the tiniest bit of self-awareness one day and starts to find her growing sense of complex personhood so alarming that she sets off for the Real World to find out what the hell is going on. Like the vast majority of Barbies who call Barbie Land home, all Stereotypical Barbie knows about her own world is based on the picture-perfect, idealized experiences she and her friends are able to breeze their ways through solely using the power of their imaginations. 

Things don’t just happen to Barbies. They’re very much the arbiters of their own wills who’ve worked hard to become people like President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), and Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp). But life for Barbies also isn’t especially difficult or complicated, partially because they’re all dolls living in a plastic paradise. Mainly, though, it’s because Barbie Land’s an expressly woman-controlled utopia reminiscent of Steven Universe ’s Gem Homeworld , where neither misogyny nor the concept of a patriarchy exists because that’s not what Barbie™ is about.

As an unseen Helen Mirren — who seems to be playing a version of herself as Barbie ’s narrator — points out who’s who in the film’s opening act, you can see how Mattel’s willingness to let Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script poke fun at Barbie™ led to some extremely good world-building.

Barbie Land isn’t just a predominantly pink pocket dimension where Life-Size -like dolls live in life-sized, yet still toy-like dream homes. It’s the embodiment of the easy-to-digest, corporate-approved feminism and female empowerment that Mattel and many other toy companies deal in. Only in Barbie Land, the idea of a predominantly female supreme court or construction sites full of nothing but hardworking women aren’t just dreams — they’re a regular part of everyday life. And all the Barbies are better for it because of how it reinforces their belief that they can do anything.

But outside of the Stereotypical Barbie-obsessed Ken whose job is to stand on the beach (Ryan Gosling), none of the other Kens (Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, and John Cena) are ever really given personalities to speak of. It’s clearly a purposeful decision meant to reinforce the idea that Ken dolls, which were invented after Barbie dolls, are the Eves to their Adams — accessory-like beings created to be companions rather than their own people. But as solid as the idea is, in practice, it has a way of making the Kens of color feel like thinly-written afterthoughts hovering around Gosling and like Barbie isn’t sure how to utilize its entire cast — a feeling that intensifies more and more as the movie progresses.

Long before Barbie even starts to have her existential crisis and seek guidance from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), it becomes painfully clear that there was a strong desire on either Mattel or Warner Bros. parts for audiences to be spoon-fed as much of the film as possible before actually sitting down in theaters. If you’ve watched even a couple of Barbie ’s lengthier ads or the music video for Dua Lipa’s (who plays Mermaid Barbie) “Dance the Night,” you’ve seen a significant chunk of this film and its more memorable moments.

What you’ve seen less of is how often Barbie slows down to have characters repeat jokes and belabor points as if it doesn’t trust the audience to catch beats on their initial deliveries. Some of that can be attributed to the PG-13 movie trying to make sure that viewers of all ages are able to engage because as existentially heavy and slightly flirty as Barbie gets at times, it’s a movie about Barbies, which is obviously going to appeal to a bunch of literal children. But once Barbie’s in the real world being harassed by lascivious men, ruthless teen girls, and a bumbling, evil corporation that the movie goes to great lengths to make fun of, you also get the sense that more than a bit of the movie’s unevenness on the backend stems from Mattel putting its foot down about how it, too, needed to be a part of Barbie’s live-action, theatrical debut.

There’s a time and a place for corporations to try getting in on the fun of events like this by way of meta humor that acknowledges their own existence and the role they play in bringing projects like movies about Barbie dolls into being. But rather than creating the necessary conditions for those kinds of jokes to land, not need explanation, and add substance to Barbie, both Mattel and Warner Bros.’ self-insert jokes work more to remind you how the movie is ultimately a corporate-branded endeavor designed to move products.

That doesn’t keep Gerwig’s latest from being an enjoyable time spotlighting a decidedly inspired performance from Robbie. But it is going to make the rabid Barbie discourse even more exhausting than it already is when the feature hits theaters on July 21st.

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Barbie review: A near-miraculous achievement from Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie

While it’s impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, this mattel-approved comedy gets away with far more than you’d think was possible, article bookmarked.

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Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism. It’s timely, too, arriving a week after the creative forces behind these stories began striking for their right to a living wage and the ability to work without the threat of being replaced by an AI. It’s a pink-splattered manifesto to the power of irreplaceable creative labour and imagination.

While it’s impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, especially when consumer culture has caught on to the idea that self-awareness is good for business (there’s nothing that companies love more these days than to feel like they’re in on the joke), Barbie gets away with far more than you’d think was possible. It’s a project that writer-director Greta Gerwig , co-writer (plus real-life partner and frequent collaborator) Noah Baumbach, and producer-star Margot Robbie were free to work on in relative privacy, holed up during the pandemic away from the meddlesome impulses of Warner Bros and Mattel executives.

The results are appropriately free-wheeling: There are nods to Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Jacques Tati’s Playtime , deployment of soundstage sets and dance choreography à la Hollywood’s musical Golden Age, and a mischievous streak of corporate satire that calls to mind 2001’s cult classic Josie and the Pussycats . But while the absurdity of its humour sits somewhere between It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure , its earnest and vulnerable take on womanhood is pure Gerwig, serving as a direct continuation of her Lady Bird and Little Women .

The fact that all of this is tied to one of the most recognisable products in existence – and that any success it enjoys will undoubtedly boost Mattel’s stock prices – underlines the fact that it’s largely impossible to embrace art without embracing hypocrisy. Capitalism doesn’t always swallow art whole; occasionally it thrives in spite of it. And that’s a complexity that feels particularly on brand for a director who had her Jo March, in Little Women , declare: “I am so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it! But – I am so lonely.”

Barbie contains another Gerwig-ian speech, delivered beautifully by an ordinary (human) mum played by America Ferrera, about the hellish trap women have been forced into. Caught between girl-boss feminism and outright misogyny, women now have to be rich, thin, liberated, and eternally grateful without ever breaking a sweat – because when Barbie promised little girls that “women can be anything”, those words got twisted to mean “women should be everything”. Gerwig’s movie begins by playing a brilliant trick on its audience: Helen Mirren’s opening narration is self-congratulatory, a bit of canned PR about Barbie’s “girl power” legacy that grows increasingly tongue-in-cheek. “Thanks to Barbie,” she concludes, “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved”.

We’re then introduced to our Barbie – ie “the Stereotypical Barbie” – who is chipper, confident, blonde, and, most importantly, looks like Margot Robbie. She is eternally adored by Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), whose job is “beach”. Not “lifeguard”, but “beach”. Barbie’s friends all have high-powered jobs: president (Issa Rae), author (Alexandra Shipp), physicist (Emma Mackey), doctor (Hari Nef), and lawyer (Sharon Rooney). Every morning, she steps into her shower (there’s no water), sets out her breakfast of a heart-shaped waffle with a dollop of whipped cream (she doesn’t eat), and then sets off in her pink convertible (she doesn’t walk downstairs, but merely floats). All is perfect. Then Barbie starts having irrepressible thoughts of death.

Barbie’s bid to fix that sudden, scary attack of humanity sees her visit “the Real World”, where she meets the all-male executive board of Mattel (among them Will Ferrell and a wonderfully dorky Jamie Demetriou), who think themselves qualified to determine what little girls like and need because they once had a woman CEO (or two, maybe). Meanwhile, Gerwig uses, through a hysterical farce centred around Gosling and his fellow Kens, the implicit matriarchy of Barbieland to explore how power and visibility shape a person’s self-perception. Gosling gives an all-timer of a comedic performance, one that’s part-baby, part-Zoolander, part-maniac, and 100 per cent a validation for anyone who ever liked him in 2016’s noir comedy The Nice Guys . There are (naturally) some exquisite outfits designed by Jacqueline Durran, some very funny references to discontinued Barbies (have fun reading up on the backstory behind Earring Magic Ken), and a few unexpected pops at fans of Duolingo, Top Gun , and Zack Snyder’s Justice League .

Barbie is joyous from minute to minute to minute. But it’s where the film ends up that really cements the near-miraculousness of Gerwig’s achievement. Very late in the movie, a conversation is had that neatly sums up one of the great illusions of capitalism – that creations exist independently from those that created them. It’s why films and television shows get turned into “content”, and why writers and actors end up exploited and demeaned. Barbie , in its own sly, silly way, gets to the very heart of why these current strikes are so necessary.

Dir: Greta Gerwig. Starring: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, Will Ferrell. 12A, 114 minutes.

‘Barbie’ is in cinemas from 21 July

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Movie Review: She’s Perfect Barbie. He’s Scene-Stealing Ken. Their life in plastic looks fantastic

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Ryan Gosling, left, and Margot Robbie in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Margot Robbie in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Kingsley Ben-Adir, from left, Ryan Gosling and Ncuti Gatwa in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP).

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Kate McKinnon in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows, from left, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Kingsley Ben-Adir in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Issa Rae, from left, Scott Evans, Simu Liu, Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Margot Robbie, from left, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt and America Ferrera in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Simu Liu in a scene from “Barbie.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

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For someone who’s 11.5 inches tall and weighs under 8 ounces, poor Barbie’s had to carry an awfully heavy load over the years on that slender, plastic back of hers.

Welcomed as a trailblazer in 1959 — An adult doll! With actual breasts! — she was nonetheless branded an anti-feminist a decade later when women’s rights marchers chanted “I Am Not a Barbie Doll,” referring to her unrealistic body type (and perhaps ignoring the fact that she was single, a homeowner and a career woman).

As years went by, Barbie had her hits (adopting a more inclusive body type, running for president) and misses (exclaiming “Math class is TOUGH!” — ouch). Through it all, this lightning rod in tiny pink heels remained uniquely talented at reinventing herself.

Which is why it makes sense that now, writer-director Greta Gerwig takes Barbie in more than one direction – in every direction, really – in her brash, clever, idea-packed (if ultimately TOO packed) and most of all, eye-poppingly lovely “Barbie,” the brand’s first live action movie.

Is it a celebratory homage to Barbie and her history? Yes. Also a cutting critique, and biting satire? Yes, too. The film is co-produced by Mattel, and they must have felt skittish about some elements — perhaps not Will Ferrell’s reliably buffoonish Mattel CEO, but a far more serious scene where a young girl accuses Barbie of making girls feel bad about themselves. The movie’s also about gender dynamics, mothers and daughters, insidious sexism ... and more.

But the neatest trick is how “Barbie,” starring a pitch-perfect Margot Robbie — and after a minute you’ll never be able to imagine anyone else doing it — can simultaneously and smoothly both mock and admire its source material. Gerwig deftly threads that needle, even if the film sags in its second half under the weight of its many ideas and some less-than-developed character arcs.

In any case, boy — or should we say, girl — life in plastic looks fantastic.

A head-spinning opening credits sequence begins with a Barbie history lesson, narrated by Helen Mirren. Then it’s off to Barbie Land, where Barbie lives in her flamingo-pink Dreamhouse, surrounded by other Barbies in theirs.

Other Barbies? Well, we know how many Barbie versions exist on store shelves, and Gerwig and her writing (and life) partner Noah Baumbach take this one step further: If they’re all Barbies, that means “Barbie” is all of THEM. There’s no one Barbie — although Robbie, who plays Stereotypical Barbie (and also produced the film), is the focal point.

And every day’s perfect for Stereotypical Barbie, who wakes in her heart-shaped bed, waves to neighbor Barbies, and heads to the shower, which is dry (there’s no actual water, wind, sun or gravity in Barbie Land.) Her day’s outfit awaits, perhaps a Chanel number, protected by shiny plastic as in a Barbie box. Then she swoops down her hot pink slide to the pool-with-no-water. The sky above is painted blue, the mountains purple. Gerwig was inspired by old soundstage musicals. Architectural Digest even did a piece on the house.

Equally stunning is “Beach” — a place, and also the name of Ken’s career. (Sorry Ken, we should have mentioned you before the 11th paragraph, but we had so much to say about Barbie). The beach is also apparently where Ken lives, because, have you ever heard of Ken’s house? In any case, a very blond Ryan Gosling gleefully chews the scenery — or, inhales it — and is never better than when conveying Ken’s forced enthusiasm with an edge of desperation plus a sprinkle of menace. Also, when dancing.

Speaking of dancing, one night at Barbie’s “giant blowout party,” she suddenly starts thinking about … death. The next morning she has bad breath, and OMG, her famously arched feet go flat! Also gravity happens, so she falls off her house.

After consulting with Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon — who else?) Barbie heads to LA to solve a tear in the boundary between Real World and Barbie Land, singing the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” her signature road song. (The film’s high-powered soundtrack features Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj, HAIM, Lizzo, Billie Eilish, and many others.) There, she and Ken encounter a world with a wrinkle: Men have the upper hand. No all-female Supreme Court here! Hmm, thinks Ken.

On the run from Mattel, Barbie encounters Gloria (America Ferrera), mother of tween Sasha, who has mixed feelings about Barbie, not to mention Mom. In her spare time, Gloria sketches ideas for new Barbies — as in Thoughts of Impending Death Barbie (not to be confused with Depression Barbie.) Gloria helps rescue Barbie and also proves of crucial help when they later discover that Ken and the other Kens — Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir and others — are up to no good.

There’s so much more, and we’re over our word limit — which may just be the feeling Gerwig had when trying to fit her ideas under two hours. And all her actors: It would’ve been great to see more Issa Rae as President Barbie, Emerald Fennell as pregnant, discontinued Midge, and Michael Cera as Allan-who-can-wear-Ken’s-clothes. In any case, the snappy pace starts to lag.

Not to discount Ferrera’s eloquent monologue, in which Gloria educates newly conscious Barbie about the landmines women face trying to navigate social rules that don’t seem to apply to men, like how to be a mom and also a professional, the need to be “thin” but call it “healthy,” and other things.

And if, Gloria concludes, all this is true for a doll just trying to represent a woman ... what does that mean for the rest of us? Which is, perhaps, the essential Barbie dilemma — she’s always been judged by rather impossible standards.

Nevertheless, she persists. All 11.5 inches of her. And now she’s Movie Star Barbie.

“Barbie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release, has been rated PG-13 “for suggestive references and brief language.” Running time: 114 minutes. Three stars out of four.

MPAA definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land. However, when they get a chance to go to the real world, they soon discover the ... Read all Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land. However, when they get a chance to go to the real world, they soon discover the joys and perils of living among humans. Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land. However, when they get a chance to go to the real world, they soon discover the joys and perils of living among humans.

• Greta Gerwig
• Noah Baumbach
• Margot Robbie
• Ryan Gosling
• 1.8K User reviews
• 456 Critic reviews
• 80 Metascore
• 203 wins & 423 nominations total

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• Trivia Barbie is 23% larger than everything in Barbieland to mimic the awkward, disproportionate scale that real Barbies and Barbie activity sets are produced in. This is why Barbie sometimes appears too large for things like her car or why ceilings seem to be too low in the Dreamhouses.
• Goofs Gloria drives a Chevrolet Blazer SS EV, yet during the car chase scene her electric vehicle makes conventional gas engine acceleration noises.

Ken : To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I lost interest.

• Crazy credits All the actors playing Barbies and Kens are not indicative of which Barbie and Ken they portray, and are simply listed as playing "Barbie" and "Ken", with the exception. (Just for clarification's sake, Margot Robbie plays "Stereotypical Barbie", Kate McKinnon plays "Weird Barbie", Issa Rae plays "President Barbie", Hari Nef plays "Dr. Barbie", Alexandra Shipp plays "Writer Barbie", Emma Mackey plays "Physicist Barbie", Sharon Rooney plays "Lawyer Barbie", Ana Cruz Kayne plays "Judge Barbie", Dua Lipa plays all the "Mermaid Barbies", Nicola Coughlan plays "Diplomat Barbie", and Ritu Arya plays "Journalist Barbie".)
• Alternate versions The IMAX version, released on September 22, 2023, has an extended runtime of two hours.
• Connections Edited from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Soundtracks Requiem (1963/65): 2. Kyrie Written by György Ligeti Performed by Bavarian Radio Orchestra (as Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks) and Francis Travis Courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH Under licence from Universal Music Operations Ltd

User reviews 1.8K

• Jul 18, 2023

Incredible Looks From the 'Barbie' Press Tour

• How long is Barbie? Powered by Alexa
• July 21, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Instagram
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• Venice Beach, Venice, Los Angeles, California, USA
• Warner Bros.
• Heyday Films
• LuckyChap Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $636,238,421
• $162,022,044
• Jul 23, 2023
• $1,445,638,421

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 54 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• 12-Track Digital Sound
• D-Cinema 96kHz 7.1
• Dolby Atmos

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‘Barbie’ Review: Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling Compete for Control of High-Concept Living Doll Comedy

Greta Gerwig loads plenty of food for thought in a hot pink pop fantasia, poking fun at patriarchy and corporate parent Mattel in her treatment of the iconic “girls can do anything” doll.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Check out the brain on Barbie ! Sure, she’s just a doll, but that doesn’t mean she has to be an airhead. Therein lies “Lady Bird” director Greta Gerwig ’s inspired, 21st-century solution to bringing one of America’s most iconic playthings to life on the big screen. Combine that with the casting of Margot Robbie in the title role, and “Barbie” is already starting out on the right, perfectly arched foot. So what if this high-concept comedy falls a bit flat in the final stretch?

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Barbie Land, as it’s called, is an inherently hilarious alternate reality modeled on the dream that Mattel has been selling American girls since the doll was introduced in 1959. It looks a lot like the one they’ve seen in countless commercials, where flamingo-bright Barbie Dreamhouses inspire envy as a diverse collection of perky, positive-minded dolls smile and wave at one another (represented here by such avatars as Alexandra Shipp and Dua Lipa, Issa Rae and Ritu Aryu, Hari Nef and Sharon Rooney). It’s a wild pop-art space, all but exploding with supersaturated color, where the doll heads appear lower contrast and backlit, obliging us to squint to make out the actors’ faces.

You half-expect to see a giant hand reach in from the sky to interact with these lifelike toys, but that’s not how it works. Instead, Gerwig enlists Helen Mirren as narrator to lay out the rules, pausing now and then to spotlight specific costumes, interject vintage TV spots or cast shade on discontinued products — such as Growing Up Skipper, with her inflatable bust; pregnant Midge; or questionable-taste offerings like Sugar Daddy and Tanner, a flocked dog that poops plastic pellets.

Although Robbie’s blond-haired, fair-skinned Stereotypical Barbie seems to possess some abstract notion of herself as a toy, there’s a major disconnect between inventor Ruth Handler’s best intentions and the state of things in the Real World (where the movie spends roughly half its time): “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved,” Mirren sarcastically summarizes. One evening, in the middle of a dance party, Stereotypical Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” The next morning, she’s horrified to find her feet have flattened and a patch of cellulite has appeared. What could be threatening her near-perfect physique?

The answer lies in the Real World, where Barbie and Ken (Gosling’s Ken, not the ones played by Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, John Cena and others) steer her pink Corvette, emerging at Venice Beach wearing matching fluorescent Hot Skatin’ ensembles. Yes, “Barbie” is one of those movies, like “The Smurfs” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” where imaginary characters cross over to modern-day America — just infinitely more clever. Instead of using the premise as a setup for slapstick, Gerwig shows Barbie defending herself when some random guy slaps her butt, getting a knuckle sandwich in return.

At the same time Barbie is experiencing her rude awakening, Ken’s busy filling his empty head with all the possibilities that “patriarchy” entails. In Barbie Land, Ken’s job is a deliberately ill-defined afterthought (basically, just “beach”), whereas in the Real World, dudes rule — an idea he takes back to Barbie Land with pointedly absurd results, brainwashing all the women into behaving like obedient housewives. The film’s draggier second half gets both silly and unabashedly strident, as Stereotypical Barbie seeks help from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a damaged-goods doll with singed hair and messed-up makeup who serves as this girly-girl world’s Morpheus-like sage.

It’s upsetting (in a useful way) to see Barbie confronted with the overnight impact of rampant patriarchy, a concept that has rarely looked more off-putting than the frat-boy fantasy caricatured here. Think of it as the misogynist alternative marketed by old-school beer commercials, the polar opposite of Mattel’s mid-’80s “We girls can do anything. Right, Barbie?” campaign. While the Barbies plot to take back the government, Gerwig gives all the Ken dolls an over-the-top musical number, “I’m Just Ken,” which is so amusingly self-involved it risks subverting the very point the movie’s trying to make. If “Barbie” is all about centering and celebrating women, why let Ken steal the show?

Gosling is a good sport to play the slightly predatory, sartorially helpless pretty boy, as the spray-tanned ex-Mouseketeer parodies his popular “hey girl” persona, flexing both his muscles and a range of facial expressions all but lacking from his recent work. If Robbie’s Barbie sets an impossibly high bar for young women, then Gosling’s Ken reps an equally formidable male model, with his chiseled abs and cheekbones.

That factor hasn’t escaped Gerwig, who sets out to disrupt such unattainable aesthetic standards, calling out ways the doll’s idealized design can harm self-esteem and encourage eating disorders. She crams most of that critique into a single motormouthed monologue, which drew cheers at the premiere and which, on closer inspection, contains not a single controversial idea. In the end, the trouble with “Barbie” isn’t that it goes too far, but that it stops short, building to a conceptual scene between Barbie and her Creator (Rhea Perlman) that inadvertently underscores one of the movie’s few failings: It’s an intellectual experience, not an emotional one, grounded largely in audience nostalgia.

It’s kind of perfect that “Barbie” is opening opposite Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” since Gerwig’s girl-power blockbuster offers a neon-pink form of inception all its own, planting positive examples of female potential for future generations. Meanwhile, by showing a sense of humor about the brand’s past stumbles, it gives us permission to challenge what Barbie represents — not at all what you’d expect from a feature-length toy commercial.

Reviewed at Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, July 9, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 114 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release and presentation of a Heyday Films, LuckyChap Entertainment, NB/GG Pictures, Mattel production. Producers: David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Robbie Brenner. Executive producers: Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, Ynon Kreiz, Richard Dickson, Michael Sharp, Josey McNamara, Courtenay Valenti, Toby Emmerich, Cate Adams.
• Crew: Director: Great Gerwig. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, based on Barbie by Mattel. Camera: Greig Fraser. Editor: Rodrigo Prieto. Music: Nick Houy.
• With: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt, Ana Cruz Kayne, Emma Mackey, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, Jamie Demetriou, Connor Swindells, Sharon Rooney, Nicola Coughlan, Ritu Arya, Dua Lipa, Helen Mirren

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‘barbie’ review: margot robbie and ryan gosling in doll comedy from greta gerwig that delivers the fun but fudges the politics.

Barbie and Ken venture into the real world to try to save Barbieland in this fantasy adventure from the director of 'Lady Bird' and 'Little Women.'

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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There isn’t exactly a God in Greta Gerwig ’s Barbie (unless you count Helen Mirren’s omniscient narrator), but the director does experiment with creation myths. Barbieland, a parallel universe populated by iterations of the Mattel doll, is her sandbox. The toy conglomerate’s vast archive, a trove of successful products, middling ideas and discontinued merch, are the tools. 

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With Gerwig, the pleasure is always in the details. Her Barbieland — thanks to Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costuming — is a pink fever dream. A phantasmagoria of magenta and blush soundtracked by funky compositions by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, and bubblegum anthems from Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. Plastic trees and identical two-story Barbie dream homes line each avenue of this manufactured oceanside locale. Engineless vehicles roam the road but flying is the preferred mode of transportation. Think about it: Have you ever seen a Barbie take the stairs?  

An army of Kens patrol the land’s pristine beaches. The chiseled dolls can’t rescue a drowning person or save anyone for that matter, but they do stand around and look pretty. Barbies do the real work: She is the president and all the members of the Supreme Court. She is a doctor and a physicist. She has won every Nobel prize and probably cured cancer. Barbieland is feminist utopia as inversion of our patriarchal reality. Voiceover commentary by Mirren adds to its storybook quality.

Gerwig populates her pink vista with a range of Barbies played by a formidable and starry cast: Issa Rae , Emma Mackey, Alexandra Shipp and Hari Nef are a few of the faces in the film. But the protagonist of this wily and fun comedy is Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), the blonde-haired, blue-eyed manifestation of Ruth Handler’s imagination. Her Ken counterpart is played with impressive heart and humor by Ryan Gosling (with Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir and John Cena among the film’s other assorted Kens). The pair are a version of Eve and Adam, if Eve were God’s favorite and Adam acknowledged as the liability he was. 

Their fall is not as righteous but just as dramatic. When Barbie finds her perfect life suddenly hobbled by existential thoughts, she seeks answers from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a doll whose traumatic history (she was played with “too hard”) has turned her into the kingdom’s sage. On the outcast Barbie’s advice, Stereotypical Barbie, with an all-too-eager Ken in tow, heads to real-world Los Angeles to find her little girl. The relationship between Barbies and their human owners is tenuously outlined, so it’s best not to think too deeply about how it all works. 

Greta slips in au courant commentary through Barbie’s encounters with real people: the all-male executive suite of Mattel (which includes Will Ferrell playing CEO); Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), a teenager whose disdain for Mattel’s dolls is only outmatched by her hatred of fascism; and Sasha’s mother Gloria (a brilliant America Ferrera ), a Mattel secretary with an indiscriminate love of the toy.

Those worried that the film would uncritically pedestal Handler’s invention have little to fear. Barbie lives up to its early tagline: “If you love Barbie…if you hate Barbie, this movie’s for you.”

Fulfilling this mission comes at a cost, though. There’s a tension between Gerwig’s effort to keep Barbie fun and to texture her source material with the emotional dexterity of her previous projects. After an unplanned detour separates her from Ken, Barbie makes her way back home ready to restore perfection to her routine. But her homecoming is a dour one; Barbie returns to see that Ken, armed with his newfound knowledge of the patriarchy, has transformed Barbieland.

In some ways, Barbie builds on themes Gerwig explored in Lady Bird and Little Women . The film wrestles with the twisting journey of self-definition and the mercurial relationships between mothers and daughters. It’s fraught with the questions that plague artists and women trapped in a category-obsessed society.

The tension between Barbie as object and subject can be felt especially through Robbie’s performance. Barbie’s increased consciousness plays across the actress’ expressive eyes, which become steadily weighted by the forces of the human world. Her physical presence tells us something, too: Robbie moves mechanically in Barbieland because she’s a toy, but who’s to say she’s any less rigid in the real world?

However smartly done Gerwig’s Barbie is, an ominousness haunts the entire exercise. The director has successfully etched her signature into and drawn deeper themes out of a rigid framework, but the sacrifices to the story are clear. The muddied politics and flat emotional landing of Barbie are signs that the picture ultimately serves a brand.

This wouldn’t be as concerning if the future of films weren’t blighted by Mattel’s franchise ambitions . After all, we can’t get all our humanist lessons from corporate toymakers.

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Barbie review: Welcome to Greta Gerwig's fiercely funny, feminist Dreamhouse

The Barbie movie could’ve been another forgettable, IP-driven cash grab. Instead, the director of Little Women and Lady Bird has crafted a neon pink delight.

Devan Coggan (rhymes with seven slogan) is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. Most of her personality is just John Mulaney quotes and Lord of the Rings references.

When Warner Bros. announced plans to launch a Barbie movie, the entire premise sounded a bit like a game of Hollywood Mad Libs gone wrong: Quick, name a beloved indie director ( Greta Gerwig !), an unadapted piece of intellectual property (Barbie dolls!), and an adjective (neon pink!). Every new piece of information that trickled out on the (lengthy) press tour seemed stranger than the last. Gerwig ( Lady Bird , Little Women ) cited 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gene Kelly musicals as her biggest inspirations. Elaborate dance numbers were teased. Ryan Gosling gave a lot of quotes about something called " Kenergy ." What actually was this movie, and could it possibly live up to all that hot pink buzz?

The verdict? Never doubt Gerwig. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry, even if you're made of plastic. It's certainly the only summer blockbuster to pair insightful criticisms of the wage gap with goofy gags about Kens threatening to "beach" each other off.

The film (in theaters this Friday) whisks viewers away to Barbie Land, a candy-colored toy box wonderland of endless sunshine. It's there that our titular heroine ( Margot Robbie ) spends her days, each just as magical and neon as the one before. There are always other Barbies to party with — including Doctor Barbie ( Hari Nef ), President Barbie ( Issa Rae ), and Mermaid Barbie ( Dua Lipa ) — as well as an endless supply of devoted Kens, led by Gosling's frequently shirtless boy-toy. It's a plastic paradise for Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie, the type of doll that immediately comes to mind when you think of Barbie.

But something's gone wrong. Her Malibu Dreamhouse malfunctions; her mind is clouded by un-Barbie-like thoughts of death; and her perfectly arched feet now fall flat on the floor. So, our heroine sets out to seek some answers from Barbie Land's pseudo mystic, Weird Barbie ( Kate McKinnon ), who says a rift has opened up between their world and the real world, and she must brave the long trek to Los Angeles to find the human playing with her doll to remedy the situation. You bet her ever-loyal Ken (Gosling) is coming along for the ride.

Once Barbie and Ken begin roller-blading around L.A., however, they both realize that they've essentially entered a mirror dimension. Where are the female presidents, the CEOs, the astronauts? Barbie was supposed to empower young girls to dream big, but she hasn't had the feminist effect she anticipated — and in fact, she might have made things worse. Gerwig tackles the doll's complicated legacy head on, exploring how Barbie's reputation here isn't one of leadership or creativity but of corporatized objectification. Barbie herself is horrified, facing crude comments and misogyny for the first time in her (plastic) life. But to Ken, this newfound idea of patriarchy is intoxicating, and he quickly enters a spiral of masculinity, luxuriating in trucks, cowboy hats, and the addictive thrill of power.

Gosling has already scored praise for his earnest himbo performance, and in truth, he steals the show. For an actor who's spent much of his career brooding moodily (see: Blade Runner 2049 , Drive , First Man ), here, he finally gets to tap into his inner Mouseketeer , dramatically draping himself at Barbie's feet or breaking into a shirtless power ballad called "I'm Just Ken." His Ken has very little going on inside his brain, but his heart is brimming with emotion: love and admiration for Barbie, a longing for masculine validation, and a wide-eyed curiosity about the world around him.

Robbie still remains the real star of Barbie . Physically, the blonde Australian actress already looks like she stepped out of a Mattel box (something the film itself plays on during one particular gag), but she gives an impressively transformative performance, moving her arms and joints like they're actually made of plastic. Robbie has brought a manic physicality to previous films including Babylon and Birds of Prey , but she now embraces physical comedy to the max. (At one point, she face-plants on the floor, limbs askew like a toy dropped by a toddler.) As Barbie begins to discover more about the real world, Robbie's performance gradually shifts to become more human. One of the most moving moments comes about halfway through the film, as Barbie perches quietly on a park bench, silently observing the humans around her.

If the film has a flaw, it's that Barbie and Ken are so delightful that their real-world counterparts feel dull by comparison. America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt play a frazzled mother and her sardonic teen daughter, who've drifted apart over time. Ferrera fills her days at her boring Mattel office job by doodling alternative Barbies, ones that are plagued by cellulite or haunted by thoughts of death. Her feminist daughter is dismissive of everything Barbie represents, dressing down Robbie with a pointed sneer. Ferrera admirably delivers one of the film's biggest emotional speeches, but surprisingly, the human characters never feel quite as lived-in as their plastic doll companions.

Still, Barbie works hard to entertain both 11-year-old girls and the parents who'll bring them to the theater. Gerwig co-wrote the script with her partner and longtime collaborator Noah Baumbach , and the entire screenplay is packed with winking one-liners, the kind that reward a rewatch. The fear is that Hollywood will learn the wrong message from Barbie, rushing to green-light films about every toy gathering dust on a kid's playroom floor. (What's next, The Funko Pop Movie? Furby: Fully Loaded? We already have a Bobbleheads movie , so maybe we're already there.) But it's Gerwig's care and attention to detail that gives Barbie an actual point of view , elevating it beyond every other cynical, IP-driven cash grab. Turns out that life in plastic really can be fantastic. Grade: A-

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“Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell

It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially, fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life, the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived reality, as Wes Anderson recently did in “ Asteroid City ,” and as Greta Gerwig has done spectacularly in her new film, “Barbie.” Unlike Anderson, who has spent his entire career on the far side of the imagination, Gerwig’s previous features as solo director, “ Lady Bird ” and “ Little Women ”—both ardently crafted, both modestly literal—did little to foreshadow the overwhelming outburst of inventive energy that makes “Barbie” such a thrilling experience. Though “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s breakthrough feature, is a fictionalized story of her own adolescence, her family life, and her home town, “Barbie”—yes, a movie about a doll made under the aegis of its manufacturer, Mattel —is the far more personal film. It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

The underlying subject of “Barbie” is how to play with Barbie dolls and why. Playing with Barbies, after all, is the D.I.Y. version of adaptation, the enactment in private of the kind of free and wild play that Gerwig (who wrote the script with her romantic and creative partner, Noah Baumbach ) enacts in the movie. “Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making preëxisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property. Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of them. “Barbie,” in other words, is a film of the politics of culture and, by extension, of the need for a creative rebellion to reëstrange the familiar for the sake of social change.

The movie begins with one of the most ingenious parodies I’ve seen in a while, an origin story of the Barbie doll based on the opening sequence of “ 2001: A Space Odyssey .” A group of girls is stranded in a barren primordial landscape. A voice-over narration (by Helen Mirren) explains that, since the beginning of time, they had only baby dolls to play with, leaving them nothing to imagine themselves as except mothers. Then came Barbie (Margot Robbie), who, with her many varieties and guises, offered the girls (who now smash their baby dolls to pieces) the chance to imagine themselves as astronauts, doctors, judges, even President, and thus heralded a future of equality and opportunity. It’s in the abyss between this promised utopia and the world as we know it, between the merchandising of professional feminism and the endurance of patriarchal realities, that the movie is set.

“Barbie” contains a potent paradox that is fundamental to its effervescent delights. A single frame of the film packs such profuse and exquisite detail—of costume and settings, gestures and diction—that it’s impossible to enumerate the plethora of inventions and decisions that bring it to life. With its frenetic pace and its grand-scale, wide-ranging inspirations, it plays like a live-action cartoon, and captures the anything-is-possible spirit of classic Looney Tunes better than any other film I’ve seen. Yet its whimsical plot is constructed with a dramatic logic that manages to transform phantasmagorical leaps into persuasive consequences, with the result that the details of the story seem utterly inseparable from, and continuous with, the riotously ornamental visual realms that it sets into motion.

The driving conceit is that Barbie comes to life and enters the real world, but Gerwig grounds that transformation ingeniously by giving Barbie a prior life of her own as a doll. The Barbie played by Robbie, who’s called Stereotypical Barbie, lives in Barbieland along with all the other Barbies who have been put on the market, whether Astronaut Barbie or Doctor Barbie or President Barbie, as well as Barbies of a wide range of ethnicities and body types, all named Barbie, all residing in doll houses, all calling to one another every bright and sunny morning, “Hi, Barbie!,” and offering identical side-to-side hand-wave greetings. Stereotypical Barbie drinks imaginary milk poured from a carton to a cup, eats a plastic waffle that pops from a toaster as a perfectly shaped dollop of butter lands atop it, and—because, as the narrator explains, Barbies can be carried and placed anywhere—glides from her balcony through the air to behind the wheel of her pink fifties-style Corvette convertible.

Stereotypical Barbie has a stereotypical suitor, the hunky blond Ken (Ryan Gosling)—one of many in Barbieland—who courts her with a droll sexual ignorance to match hers. There’s a strong gay subtext to the movie’s well-coiffured and accessorized Kens; in one scene, Ken and another Ken (Simu Liu) get into a dispute and threaten each other to “beach you off.” (A nerdy friend of the Kens, called Allan, played by Michael Cera, is the only non-himbo around.) The narrator makes the distinction—one that proves to be of great narrative significance—that for Barbie every day is a good day, whereas for Ken a day is good only when Barbie looks at him. Ken takes awkward pains to get Barbie to look, but she’s content in her Barbie-centric world. In lieu of a date, she invites him to a girls’-night bash at her house—the best party ever, but then, they all are—complete with a whirlwind-spectacular dance sequence. In the middle of the festivities, though, Barbie embarrassingly blurts out her own sudden premonition of death.

Something troubling is disturbing the pristine perfection of Barbie’s permalife in Barbieland, and she consults the closest thing to a troubled outcast in her midst, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), to find out what’s going on. Weird Barbie has a punk haircut, a malformed body, and something like face tattoos—the result, it is said, of a human who played with her “too hard.” To get to the source of her disturbance, Barbie will have to make passage to the human world and find her own owner, whose play has perhaps left an emotional mark just as Weird Barbie’s has left a physical one. Travelling between Barbieland and the human world involves transit via, among other Mattel-certified vehicles, Barbie’s convertible, a space rocket, a tandem bicycle, and a Volkswagen camper van. Ken stows away on Barbie’s journey, and the duo eventually lands on the beach in—where else?—Los Angeles, another land of artifices, where Barbie quickly has her illusions burst.

In L.A., Barbie encounters such human-world phenomena as catcalling, old age, anxiety, and the social dynamics of real-life girls, most notably a young high-school intellectual named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who calls Barbie a “bimbo,” a menace to feminism, even a “Fascist.” Barbie finds her way into Mattel headquarters, where the C.E.O. (Will Ferrell) wants to trap and twist-tie her in a display box. Instead, Barbie escapes, but, while she’s on the run, Ken—who’s read up in the school library about patriarchy—heads to Barbieland and exports the notion there. When Barbie returns home, she finds it transformed into a manosphere, full of Kens slaking grudges against Barbies and Barbies content with subservience to Kens, and she has to plot to restore it to its ostensible original form as a feminist paradise. Spoiler alert: the Ken-centric patriarchy that Barbie finds at home is both appalling and hilarious, with lots of horses (“man extenders,” Ken calls them) and ardent guitar playing “at” Barbie, especially of the Matchbox Twenty song “Push,” which the Kens have adopted as a male anthem.

The trait that enables Barbie to fight to take back Barbieland is the very weirdness that she’d sought to cure. It’s the “hard” play of a human owner—the use of Barbie as an avatar of a real person’s emotional crises—that gives Stereotypical Barbie the perspective to see what’s wrong with Barbieland, the wiles to take action to reclaim it for herself and the other Barbies, and the open-mindedness to see that she herself is in need of personal change. The uninhibited expression of Barbie’s human has taught Barbie, above all, the concept of freedom; and it’s no spoiler to note that the concept, here, meshes with an existentialist tradition that links such freedom to the inevitability of death. (In a magnificent meta-touch, Barbie has an encounter with the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, who, in real life, died in 2002; here, she’s played by Rhea Perlman.)

Far from being a feature-length commercial for Barbie, Gerwig’s movie puts in bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Instead of projecting their own imperfections or thoughts onto the doll, girls have been socialized to strive for an impossible doll-like perfection in their own lives. Barbie can be anything in Barbieland—a doctor, a President, an astronaut—but only because Barbieland is a frictionless Brigadoon. There’s no Fox News in Barbieland, no political demagogy, no religion, no culture. Any girl who plays with Barbie and imagines that she can do anything will discover, eventually, that she’s been the victim of a noxious fantasy. Playing weird with Barbie means ascribing the tangled terms of one’s own environment to Barbieland, one’s own conflicts to Barbie. It means turning Barbie human—into a character whom a child can use to give voice to an inner life, in the second person, when her first person feels stifled or repressed.

“Ordinary”: pay attention to the arrival, in “Barbie,” of that word, which reverberates like a tuning fork through the entire story, conveying longing for the day when a woman’s life doesn’t demand heroic struggle against societal limitations and contradictory demands. (The movie features a fervent monologue on the subject, built of familiar talking points that are energized by the fast and furious indignation of the speaker, Sasha’s mother, a Mattel employee played by America Ferrera.) The idea inflects Gerwig’s aesthetic, too, in a way that’s made clear, again, in the contrast between her filmmaking and that of Wes Anderson, the current cinema’s preëminent stylist. Anderson’s films borrow copiously from pop culture without making films of pop culture; his rigorous visual compositions set the action at a contemplative distance that keeps one eye on history and the other on the future. Gerwig, by contrast, is out to conquer the moment, and her visual compositions reflect this immediacy. Her images (with cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) offer, in effect, a mighty sense of style without a corresponding sense of form: they teem and overflow, because they’re meant not to be limited to the screen but to burst out and fill the theatre and take their place in the world at large. She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and thereby to transform viewers’ relationship to it and to render that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic. Her art of reinterpreting society’s looming, shiny cultural objects, in the interest of progress, dramatizes the connection between playing in a child’s doll house and on the big screens of the world. ♦

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Barbie, review: Ryan Gosling steals the show in the most improbable triumph of the year

Greta Gerwig takes on feminism and the patriarchy in this hilarious, deeply bizarre film

Anthropologists believe there may be tribes living in the farthest reaches of the Amazon basin who have yet to catch sight of the marketing campaign for the new Barbie film, but for the rest of us the damn thing has been melting our eyeballs for weeks. So it’s an unexpected pleasure to report that Greta Gerwig’s film – while still fundamentally being a summer comedy adventure about the Barbie toy line – is far from the blunt-force cash grab many of us feared. In fact it’s deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious.

Barbie’s core young fanbase will enjoy the silliness, the dance numbers, and above all the bright colours – after two hours I left the cinema barely able to see. But the film has been written with older viewers in mind, and its pleasures are often planted between inverted commas. Much of the time you’re just enjoying the meta-spectacle of Gerwig, whose last film was the masterful 2019 adaptation of Little Women, springing herself and her stars from what initially looks like an inescapable corporate trap.

It opens with an arch narration from Helen Mirren, in which the official Mattel line (you can imagine it being dictated to Gerwig and her co-writer and partner Noah Baumbach in a board room) is hammered home to a self-evidently absurd degree. The mere existence of this stylish, aspirational toy, we’re told, has solved every problem women face: thanks to Barbie, little girls in the real world now know they can do and be anything, while Barbie Land itself is a fragrant, female-centred Eden, where each day unfolds in a rictus of bliss.

Daily activities here feel like they’re being dictated from behind the camera by a six-year-old: which is to say in a Barbie context, they’re strikingly realistic. Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach”, bounces off a wave while surfing and is whisked to a fold-out hospital. But that evening, halfway through a Dua Lipa dance number, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) asks her fellow Barbies “Do you guys ever think about dying?” – and it becomes clear that in the outside, human world, from where the Barbies and Kens are (somehow) controlled, things are going dangerously amiss.

Rather than thrashing out the metaphysics, the script simply packs Robbie and Gosling off to Los Angeles, where Robbie’s Barbie finds her downcast owners, Ariana Greenblatt’s Sasha and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera). Meanwhile, Gosling’s Ken, drunk on the delights of a society built to service the needs and desires of men, decides to import some patriarchy back to Barbie Land, causing the whole place promptly to go to seed. 

This satirical angle – likelier to strike a chord with older viewers than pre-teens – is enthusiastically and mischievously milked. (There are gags here that gleefully poke a number of masculine online beehives.) Ken’s vision of a perfect, male-centric society is rapturously inane – think Casio keyboards, Mortal Kombat arcade machines, and large plastic drums of dietary supplements with names like “Girth Juice” – and Gosling comes close to stealing the entire film with his hilariously hungry embrace of his newfound alpha status.

The film makes a sneaky virtue of its artistic fudges: when the near-inhumanly gorgeous Robbie monologues about being afraid to sometimes not look her best, in chimes Mirren with an aside to the filmmakers, reminding them the Wolf of Wall Street star was probably not the best person to cast if they wanted to make this point convincingly. The compromise acknowledged, you find yourself laughing along again: it’s a film that manages to have its strawberry blancmange and scoff it, spoon after wibbling spoon.

12A cert, 114 min. In cinemas from Friday July 21

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• <i>Barbie</i> Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

Barbie Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

T he fallacy of Barbie the doll is that she’s supposed to be both the woman you want to be and your friend, a molded chunk of plastic—in a brocade evening dress, or a doctor’s outfit, or even Jane Goodall’s hyper-practical safari suit—which is also supposed to inspire affection. But when you’re a child, your future self is not a friend—she’s too amorphous for that, and a little too scary. And you may have affection, or any number of conflicted feelings, for your Barbie, but the truth is that she’s always living in the moment, her moment, while you’re trying to dream your own future into being. Her zig-zagging signals aren’t a problem—they’re the whole point. She’s always a little ahead of you, which is why some love her, others hate her, and many, many fall somewhere in the vast and complex in-between.

With Barbie the movie —starring Margot Robbie, also a producer on the film—director Greta Gerwig strives to mine the complexity of Barbie the doll, while also keeping everything clever and fun, with a hot-pink exclamation point added where necessary. There are inside jokes, riffs on Gene Kelly-style choreography, and many, many one-line zingers or extended soliloquies about modern womanhood—observations about all that’s expected of us, how exhausting it all is, how impossible it is to ever measure up. Gerwig has done a great deal of advance press about the movie, assuring us that even though it’s about a plastic toy, it’s still stuffed with lots of ideas and thought and real feelings. (She and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script.) For months now there has been loads of online chatter about how “subversive” the movie is—how it loves Barbie but also mocks her slightly, and how it makes fun of Mattel executives even though their real-life counterparts are both bankrolling the whole enterprise and hoping to make a huge profit off it. The narrative is that Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art , or at least just very smart entertainment.

Read More: Our Cover Story on Barbie

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too. The things that are good about Barbie — Robbie’s buoyant, charming performance and Ryan Gosling’s go-for-broke turn as perennial boyfriend Ken, as well as the gorgeous, inventive production design—end up being steamrollered by all the things this movie is trying so hard to be. Its playfulness is the arch kind. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute.

That’s a shame, because the first half-hour or so is dazzling and often genuinely funny, a vision that’s something close to (though not nearly as weird as) the committed act of imagination Robert Altman pulled off with his marvelous Popeye. First, there’s a prologue, narrated by Helen Mirren and riffing on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, explaining the impact of early Barbie on little girls in 1959; she was an exotic and aspirational replacement for their boring old baby dolls, whose job was to train them for motherhood—Gerwig shows these little girls on a rocky beach, dashing their baby dolls to bits after they’ve seen the curvy miracle that is Barbie. Then Gerwig, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran launch us right into Barbieland, with Robbie’s approachably glam Barbie walking us through . This is an idyllic community where all the Dream Houses are open, not only because its denizens have no shame and nothing to hide, but because homes without walls mean they can greet one another each day with the sunrise. “Hello, Barbie!” they call out cheerfully. Everyone in Barbieland—except the ill-fated pregnant Midge , based on one of Mattel’s many discontinued experiments in toy marketing—is named Barbie, and everyone has a meaningful job. There are astronaut Barbies and airline pilot Barbies, as well as an all-Barbie Supreme Court. Garbage-collector Barbies, in matching pink jumpsuits, bustle cheerfully along this hamlet’s perpetually pristine curbs. This array of Barbies is played by a selection of actors including Hari Nef, Dua Lipa, Alexandra Shipp, and Emma Mackey. The president is also Barbie—she’s played by Issa Rae. (In one of the early section’s great sight gags, she brushes her long, silky tresses with an overscale oval brush.)

Barbieland is a world where all the Barbies love and support one another , like a playtime version of the old-fashioned women’s college, where the students thrive because there are no men to derail their self-esteem. Robbie’s Barbie—she is known, as a way of differentiating herself from the others, as Stereotypical Barbie, because she is white and has the perfectly sculpted proportions and sunny smile of the Barbie many of us grew up with—is the center of it all. She awakens each morning and throws off her sparkly pink coverlet, her hair a swirl of perfectly curled Saran. She chooses an outfit (with meticulously coordinated accessories) from her enviable wardrobe. Her breakfast is a molded waffle that pops from the toaster unbidden; when she “drinks” from a cup of milk, it’s only pretend-drinking, because where is that liquid going to go? This becomes a recurring gag in the movie, wearing itself out slowly, but it’s delightful at first, particularly because Robbie is so game for all of it. Her eyes sparkle in that vaguely crazed Barbie-like way; her smile has a painted-on quality, but there’s warmth there, too. She steps into this role as lightly as if it were a chevron-striped one piece tailored precisely to her talents.

Barbie also has a boyfriend, one Ken of many Kens. The Kens are played by actors including Kingsley Ben-Adir and Simu Liu. But Gosling’s Ken is the best of them, stalwart, in a somewhat neutered way, with his shaggy blond hair, spray-tan bare chest, and vaguely pink lips. The Kens have no real job, other than one known as “Beach,” which involves, as you might guess, going to the beach. The Kens are generally not wanted at the Barbies’ ubiquitous dance parties—the Barbies generally prefer the company of themselves. And that’s why the Kens’ existence revolves around the Barbies . As Mirren the narrator tells us, Barbie always has a great day. “But Ken has a great day only if Barbie looks at him.” And the moment Robbie does, Gosling’s face becomes the visual equivalent of a dream Christmas morning, alight with joy and wonder.

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You couldn’t, of course, have a whole movie set in this highly artificial world. You need to have a plot, and some tension. And it’s when Gerwig airlifts us out of Barbieland and plunks us down in the real world that the movie’s problems begin. Barbie awakens one morning realizing that suddenly, nothing is right. Her hair is messy on the pillow; her waffle is shriveled and burnt. She has begun to have unbidden thoughts about death. Worst of all, her perfectly arched feet have gone flat. (The other Barbies retch in horror at the sight.) For advice, she visits the local wise woman, also known as Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the Barbie who’s been “played with too hard,” as evidenced by the telltale scribbles on her face. Weird Barbie tells Robbie’s confused and forlorn Barbie that her Barbieland troubles are connected to something that’s going on out there in the Real World, a point of stress that turns out to involve a Barbie-loving mom, Gloria (America Ferrera), and her preteen daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who are growing apart. Barbie makes the journey to the Real World, reluctantly allowing Ken to accompany her. There, he’s wowed to learn that men make all the money and basically rule the land. While Barbie becomes more and more involved in the complexity of human problems , Ken educates himself on the wonders of the patriarchy and brings his newfound ideas back to empower the Kens, who threaten to take over the former utopia known as Barbieland.

By this point, Barbie has begun to do a lot more telling and a lot less showing; its themes are presented like flat-lays of Barbie outfits , delivered in lines of dialogue that are supposed to be profound but come off as lifeless. There are still some funny gags—a line about the Kens trying to win over the Barbies by playing their guitars “at” them made me snort. But the good jokes are drowned out by the many self-aware ones, like the way the Mattel executives, all men (the head boob is Will Ferrell), sit around a conference table and strategize ways to make more money off selling their idea of “female agency.”

The question we’re supposed to ask, as our jaws hang open, is “How did the Mattel pooh-bahs let these jokes through?” But those real-life execs, counting their doubloons in advance, know that showing what good sports they are will help rather than hinder them. They’re on team Barbie, after all! And they already have a long list of toy-and-movie tie-ins on the drawing board.

Meanwhile, we’re left with Barbie the movie, a mosaic of many shiny bits of cleverness with not that much to say. In the pre-release interviews they’ve given, Gerwig and Robbie have insisted their movie is smart about Barbie and what she means to women, even as Mattel executives have said they don’t see the film as being particularly feminist. And all parties have insisted that Barbie is for everyone.

Barbie probably is a feminist movie, but only in the most scattershot way. The plot hinges on Barbie leaving her fake world behind and, like Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit before her, becoming “real.” Somehow this is an improvement on her old existence, but how can we be sure? The movie’s capstone is a montage of vintagey-looking home movies (Gerwig culled this footage from Barbie ’s cast and crew), a blur of joyful childhood moments and parents showing warmth and love. Is this the soon-to-be-real Barbie’s future, or are these the doll-Barbie’s memories? It’s impossible to tell. By this point, we’re supposed to be suitably immersed in the bath of warm, girls-can-do-anything fuzzies the movie is offering us. Those bold, bored little girls we saw at the very beginning of the film, dashing their baby dolls against the rocks, are nowhere in sight. In this Barbieland, their unruly desires are now just an inconvenience.

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Barbie Review

21 Jul 2023

The soundscape that sweeps through the opening moments of Barbie –wind and something slightly magical, yet slightly sinister – transports you to a collective memory before you’ve seen even a hint of pink plastic. It’s instantly reminiscent of  The Wizard Of Oz , ahead of meeting another hero with magic shoes and her scarecrow with a six-pack. It promises nostalgia, grandeur, and a little darkness. The film delivers so much else.

Helen Mirren’s wry narration sets the scene with a satirical flourish. As an exquisitely detailed world of startling pink, purple and aquamarine unfurls, she explains that the residents of Barbieland have solved sexism. Barbie can be anything, and so of course women can also be anything. Then why, under a disco ball on another perfect night, is Barbie contemplating death? She must travel to the real world and find her human to find out, with Ryan Gosling’s clingy Ken along for the ride.

It’s a thrill to see Robbie and Gosling effortlessly riding the film’s comedy highs and existential lows

Here ends the fundamental plot of  Barbie . There are other elements that fall into the conventions of a studio summer film: a corporate bigwig (Will Ferrell) is trying to get Barbie back in her box; a tired mother (America Ferrera) is trying to reconnect with her surly teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). Yet at every available opportunity Greta Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach grab their pastel crayons and scrawl them – all at once – over the lines.

Above all else, it’s painfully funny. Barbie’s journey of self-discovery is often derailed by surreal skits and arch asides. Robbie – who has been dialling it up to 11 since Harley Quinn – is hilarious, but the most consistent scene-stealer is Mr. Blond Fragility. Gosling submerges wholeheartedly into Ken’s insecure psyche as he moves from Barbie’s sidepiece to patriarchal poster boy. Every muscle flex, every hair flick, every guitar strum lands perfectly. There are moments where he will rob you of breath.

There are minor casualties as a result of  Barbie ’s many spinning plates. Blink and you’ll miss some of the vast and vibrant ensemble cast, and while the screenplay masterfully subverts recent Hollywood attempts at feminism – especially for a film that is at surface-level 99.9 per cent pink – at times it falls short, reminding us that yes, this is still a toy movie.

Yet where Gerwig can draw us away from the Mattel towards the meta, she does. Now firmly in her big studio-directing era, she has dreamt up a (literal) playground for her stars to run amok in, and it’s a thrill to see Robbie and Gosling effortlessly riding the film’s comedy highs and existential lows, which land with unfaltering, surprising sincerity. Like its glossy protagonist,  Barbie  is a film that refuses to be boxed, permanently moving the bar on what a popcorn movie can achieve. It may not be Oz, but we’re certainly not in Kansas anymore either.

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10 Scenes That Prove Barbie Had the Greatest Movie Soundtrack of Last Year

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As the first live-action installment in her titular franchise, Barbie took 2023 by bright and shiny storm. Every single facet of Greta Gerwig's film – the existence of so much pink in one place – truly adds up to its reputation as her biggest and most lucrative movie to date . Aesthetically and internally, the identity of Barbie stands as a beautiful piece of creative excellence, inside and out. It ties together a fictionally feminine perspective with the complexities of the world we know, resulting in an all too-real-feeling film for so many viewers.

The corresponding soundtrack and scores for the film set the tone for Barbie's whimsically colorful life , even as she enters reality. These include instrumental compositions that set the scene in Barbieland, painfully emotional original songs, and empowering bubble gum pop music. Here are 10 scenes that prove Barbie has the greatest movie soundtrack of the year.

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10 “Stairway to Weird Barbie” - Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt

At the beginning of Barbie's odyssey, the sudden onset of human-like traits and experiences calls for a visit to Weird Barbie, who lives slightly far away from their pink Pangaea, like the Grinch of Barbieland. Stereotypical Barbie, not used to having flat feet, awkwardly walks up the stairs past the multicolored gates and winding stairs through the forested area where Weird Barbie resides.

A Weird Piece for Weird Barbie

As Stereotypical Barbie travels towards Weird Barbie's “Weirdhouse,” magical sounds culminate in a curious-sounding track from the movie’s score composers, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt. Weird Barbie descends from the rafters in a tumbling roll with her legs in the splits as the track ends in a bubbly crescendo, fully solidifying her strangeness from the other perfect dolls.

9 “Speed Drive” - Charli XCX

After Barbie is taken away from Sasha’s school from Mattel, she’s taken into the executives’ meeting room, where they all rise as she enters. Following their discussion of her predicament, Barbie is encouraged to get into a pink, branded cardboard box that will take her back to where she belongs – Barbieland. Realizing the constraints of what she’s about to do, Barbie thinks better of it.

A Fun Chase Scene

As the box’s twist ties close in around her wrists, Barbie slips out and asks to go to the restroom, so she can fix her hair before being boxed up. She thanks them, saunters away, then starts running as Charli XCX’s high-energy song “Speed Drive” starts playing. The CEO shouts, “Get that Barbie!” and they all run after her. Barbie eventually finds refuge in Gloria’s car as she speeds away.

8 “Journey to the Real World” - Tame Impala

Barbie’s mission to leave Barbieland behind and fix her issues in the real world starts off as a one-woman show. Ken just can’t help but sing along to her music (Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”), revealing his hiding place in the backseat of her pink convertible. He tells her he brought his neon yellow rollerblades, solidifying her decision to let him tag along with her. From there, the two press on together, and the convertible begins to transform as they make their way from imagination into reality.

A Magical Journey

“Journey to the Real World” begins to play, incorporating Tame Impala’s classically psychedelic sounds with frontman Kevin Parker’s ascending vocals. The song continues with each iteration of the convertible – a snowmobile, a rocket ship, a camper van, and more – sounding more magical and mystical with each flick of the proverbial page, despite their deepening closeness to reality. With a more repetitive sound to this song’s progression, the song’s measures correspond with the transitions of the bright and bold scenes through which Barbie and Ken travel.

Related: Barbie Review: Greta Gerwig Delivers a Dazzling Pink Blockbuster

7 “Meeting Ruth” - Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt

As Barbie runs through Mattel from the men chasing her when she escapes being boxed up, she stumbles upon a distant kitchen that materializes out of the darkness. She walks closer to the light, coming across a warm and comforting scene. An old woman sits at her kitchen table with gentle music playing – “Meeting Ruth,” which borrows from Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” through a soft, instrumental homage.

Why Its Impact Matters

The woman, kind and motherly towards her, invites Barbie to sit down. Barbie struggles to drink real liquid out of a cup, and when she gets defensive, the woman reassures her, “I think you’re just right.” She shows Barbie a certain way to leave the room where the Mattel employees won’t find her, and she finally introduces herself as Ruth. Later, viewers learn that Barbie came across the ghost of Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie herself, who happily haunts the Mattel building in the movie.

6 “Pink” - Lizzo

Lizzo’s “Pink" starts off the movie by being Barbie's wake-up song on her perfectly pink morning in Barbieland, which doesn't last for long. Positive and smile-inducing, the song narrates Barbie’s typical day “in [her] own pink world,” starting each morning with a wave “to [her] homegirls.” This picture-perfect slice of life continues, showing us how immaculate each Barbie’s life is, until it isn’t.

Positive and Smile-Inducing

The song is repeated as a motif throughout the film and reinterpreted as “Pink: Bad Day,” a more negatively realistic version of Barbie's inner monologue as she notices increasingly human traits. In its purest form, the song employs up-tempo horns and an unmistakable background beat, sounding full-bodied as well as light and airy – perfect for the Barbieland theme song.

5 “Mattel” - Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt

Ultimately representing the imposing and authoritative presence that Barbie’s company, “Mattel” is a rousing track from the Barbie movie’s original score. Audiences hear its aural motif with exterior shots of the massive company building space in Los Angeles, and its militaristic tune can be heard in the background of the Mattel CEO’s speeches.

Why It Deserves More Love

The song appears throughout Barbie , but mostly in reference to Mattel's corporate headquarters that looms over Barbieland from the real world. It also corresponds to the self-importance exhibited by many male characters throughout the film, often cropping up in moments of masculine power to differentiate it from a female-driven narrative.

4 “I’m Just Ken” - Ryan Gosling

“I’m Just Ken” might be Barbie ’s most recognizable song, transforming a tragic ballad into an empowering anthem for the Kens of the world. Beach Ken’s emotional odyssey continues despite having almost everything he wanted, but he yearns to get Stereotypical Barbie back after the Kens all become jealous of one another for the Barbies’ affections. The song was even recently transformed with a festive holiday interpretation in December 2023.

An Iconic, Award-Nominated Song

Its introductory scene in the movie begins with the sun going down on Kendomland (Barbieland’s new name after the Kens’ takeover) and ends with the Kens at PG-13 plastic war with one another on the beach. Throughout the song’s progression, the Kens proceed through a dream ballet homage (“can you feel the Kenergy?”) and go from bickering with each other to embracing self-love. Never forget: You are Kenough.

Related: Ryan Gosling Announces I'm Just Ken EP Just in Time for Christmas

3 “Dance the Night” - Dua Lipa

The dance party after Ken’s beach injury, where everyone comes together, is one of the most magical scenes to come out of this movie. With the Barbies and Kens (and Allan) all dressed to the nines in dazzling outfits, what’s not to love? Dua Lipa’s disco-like track encourages partygoers to “dance the night away,” including triumphant strings and an upbeat tempo.

The Ultimate Party Song

The scene in which this song is first heard ends up in Barbie asking the happy-go-lucky crowd around her, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” The song stops with stunned looks on everyone’s faces staring towards Barbie, who regards them with an awkward, open-mouthed smile: “I don’t know why I just said that… I’m just dying to dance!” This outburst is the first humanlike crack in Barbie’s perfect, plastic armor that the audience can’t help but notice.

2 “Creation of Barbie” - Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt

Almost immediately after Barbie begins, “Creation of Barbie” starts to play. But just before its first few notes, narrator Helen Mirren begins to narrate: “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls.” The sun rises above a primeval arid landscape, which viewers might recognize. Little girls play with baby dolls, looking visibly bored out of their minds. In essence, this scene pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey , putting a girl-power twist on Stanley Kubrick’s iconic initial opening.

A Perfect Introduction

When Mirren is with her brief explanation of how girls used to play, the opening notes of “Creation of Barbie” begin – which start off with the opening section of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” called “Sunrise.” The same heroic crescendo kicks off 2001 , but in the instance of Barbie , it’s a giant 1959 version of the doll looming over the girls instead of the Monolith as their new source of infinite knowledge. Barbie smiles, though, promising knowledge beyond the universe that little girls knew back then.

1 “What Was I Made For?” - Billie Eilish

Sung by Billie Eilish, “What Was I Made For?” is a beautifully tender entry within Barbie’s official soundtrack that just epitomizes the human condition. With piano and soft vocals, the listening experience feels otherworldly. The lyrics ponder the purpose of a person; from a woman’s perspective, this response to existentialism takes on such a deeper meaning when you relate the words to the actual plot progression of the movie and apply their implications to real-world women.

An Award-Winning Tune

“What Was I Made For?” is another one of Barbie’s songs that appears in part as a motif throughout the film, bringing scenes together through such a specific soft sound. When viewers finally hear it in almost its full length, it’s after (spoilers!) Ruth appears in Barbieland and helps Barbie become human. When they’re alone, Ruth tells Barbie, “Take my hands, close your eyes… Now, feel.” Viewers are engulfed in a beautiful video collage and tribute to the women of the real world. Greta Gerwig encouraged her Barbie coworkers to submit videos of family members and friends to put them into this montage.

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