Today is the day folks! It’s here! The *second* most exciting day of the year: the Barbie reviews are out and critics all over the world are revealing just what they thought of the film. However, if you thought it was all going to be glitter and rainbows, you’ve got another thing coming — because it looks like not everyone was impressed with the show.
Barbie is probably the most hyped movie not just of the year, but of the last few years. The marketing has been tremendous; this huge, glittery, pink spectacle that’s impossible to ignore. The excitement has been infectious, but as quite a few people who reviewed the movie have reminded us, the corporation behind all this is Mattel, not the feminist blonde woman with 150 careers it created.
The Good
Barbie slayed on Metacritic, with a glowing score of 81 AKA “universal acclaim”.
Rolling Stone fkn loved Barbie, which it called “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”.
Writer David Fear praised Barbie for adding “levels of intelligence and interrogation into not just the script, but the narrative itself.”
I mean, the review literally opens with this: “It’s a long commercial for a legacy corporate brand and a pretty-in-pink fuck you to the patriarchy. It is Barbie — hear it roar.”
Entertainment Weekly also adored the film —the publication’s staff writer Devan Coggan had pretty much zero criticism and gave the film an A-.
“The verdict? Never doubt [Greta] Gerwig,” Coggan wrote.
“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 LA Times loved what it reckons is the duality of the film:
“Gerwig has conceived Barbie as a bubble-gum emulsion of silliness and sophistication, a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand,” wrote film critic Justin Chang.
“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.
“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.”
The Mixed
LA Times‘ Justin Chang did note that having it both ways isn’t always a good thing: “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?”
Multiple Barbie reviews have said similar things about the film — it pulls way too many of its punches and plays it a little too safe. It seems this may be because it’s too self-conscious and meta in a way that actually weakens it. As Vulture put it, it’s “defensive”.
“There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness,” wrote Allison Willmore, Vulture’s film critic.
Willmore also said that while Barbie somewhat critiqued the patriarchy, it didn’t really feel like “enough” because at the end of the day, this is still a film produced by Mattel.
“If it’s surprising to find Barbie holding forth on the plague of the patriarchy and the contradictory expectations faced by women, it’s more surprising to discover that the movie doesn’t ultimately want to do much more than talk itself in circles about these themes,” she wrote.
“The trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.”
The Guardian‘s review was largely positive on the whole “it’s pink and fun” part, (it called the movie “beamingly affectionate”) but it was still mixed overall (3/5 stars all up).
“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,” film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote.
“It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.”
The Hollywood Reporter review similarly thought the movie was gorgeous and funny, but lacking in politics probably because it’s still a “corporate movie”.
“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,” Lovia Gyarkye, arts and culture critic, wrote.
“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. The gestures feel politically hollow because the reality is that a film with this mandate just can’t do it all.”
Variety‘s review was largely positive, but I think it’s worth noting here that it said the film was great despite being “a feature-length toy commercial”. So this seems to be its pitfall.
The Ugly
TIME‘s review of Barbie, titled “Barbie is very pretty but not very deep”, was pretty cynical (and in my opinion, fairly so). It thought the film fell flat (like Barbie’s feet), and that it was more a cash grab than anything else.
“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,” film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote.
“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.”
Zacharek liked the first half of the film, but felt the constant self-conscious gags were “exhausting” and “delivered in lines of dialogue that are supposed to be profound but come off as lifeless.”
PerthNow published a searing review of Barbie, which writer Ben O’Shea called a “cash-grab that forgets to be funny”.
“They bludgeon us with monologues about ‘cognitive dissonance’ relating to women existing in a patriarchal system, while conveniently ignoring the fact this film only exists to make money for the company behind a toy that has perpetuated unhealthy female body types for the majority of its 64-year history,” he wrote.
“The film tries so hard to claw its way to a position of moral and intellectual superiority that it often forgets to be entertaining, and one should be wary of anyone who claims it is a feminist masterpiece.”
At the end of the day, O’Shea reminded readers that this is still a movie Mattel marketed the shit out of and made heaps of bank from via licensing and merch.
Well, there ya go folks — Barbie looks like it’ll be a certified hit for the average viewer, but almost all of the reviews have the same issue with the film: that at the end of the day, it’s an ad for a toy, and that’s going to come through. There’s only so much our queen Gerwig can do about that.
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