Given its themes and even some bad language(!), Barbie (2023) is not a children’s film. Given the brand, that seems rather to be cheating and must have been a disappointment to the many young girls who were excited to watch it.
Yet despite its adult content, the film’s other major flaw is a laziness in the script that it attempts to excuse through fourth-wall-breaking references to the fact of being a children’s toy brand. For example, how does Barbieland connect to the “Real World”? For another example, why are the humans not more shocked at meeting the dolls and entering Barbieland? It is all just make-believe and does not matter, apparently.
Barbie has been labeled a feminist film in both praise and criticism. The first part of the film makes it seem very much so, being almost didactic in its dialogue, much of it delivered by an army of unnecessary minor characters. The latter part, however, shows and thereby condemns the performative and male-disrespecting nature of feminism as embodied by the Barbieland matriarchy. The final scenes between Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) convey the importance of individualism for both men and women and give the film some very belated character development. Given the opportunity finally to act, the lead actors do well.
Beyond an expectation-subverting but somewhat-vague criticism of feminism and call to individualism, this film is essentially existentialist, being much more emphatic about the (real or imagined) problems of life than any possible solutions. A problem for this film is that other films have done that better, notably The Truman Show (1998) and Free Guy (2021).
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