Barbie Review

August 3, 2023 at 8:20pm
By Jason Stettner

It’s certainly an odd time when the Barbie movie is a fascinating dive into an existential crisis and a look at life, but alas here we are. Each day is sunshine and rainbows in Barbieland where every Barbie enjoys the bliss of easy going life. That is however interrupted at one point when regular Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to have an existential crisis.

The always seeking her gaze Ken (Ryan Gosling) is always watching and also going through things himself. The two eventually begin an adventure into the real world that shakes them to their cores and completely adjusts their values. Barbie begins to see that not everything is perfect whereas Ken starts to understand that men do have some importance. It’s quite an interesting parallel, especially with how things eventually start to flow. An all out of war of sorts, in a literal sense which is a tad wild and unpredictable.

It’s a rather fascinating film to watch as while it starts out easy going the latter portion is rather dreary to say the least. It’s not really something for the younger audience as it becomes straight up depressing. There’s beauty in its messaging to some degree, but it’s also just rather sad. I had a few laughs, and the audience was rather quiet which was interesting.

I was expecting it to be more comedic in style, but I do appreciate the tone they went for. I also do wish they would have been more subtle in messaging as it’s almost too apparent and I think that aspect could have cut deeper had it been layered just a tad more.

The world of Barbie really was quite magical to take in. The sets; the places, they all felt so real and popping with a true to character styling. The real world was however rather drab, lacking in style and feeling just sad. It was almost boring whenever they weren’t in the Barbieland area and I also found the Mattel executives to be entirely pointless in the movie.

Straight up pointless, that you could remove them and it wouldn’t really change anything at all. When it comes to performances I was truly impressed by Gosling’s Ken, I really felt that character stole the show at times. An incredible performance. Not to say I didn’t appreciate Robbie’s deflated moments and great tears, but I was so surprised by what Gosling brought to the table here.

The Conclusion

Barbie is a truly fascinating look at this character with some heavy messaging and hardcore drama elements, I do wish it was more humor driven. I’m sure some will find this to provide more laughs I suppose, but I kind of expected to really be laughing the whole time through and it felt more dramatic and sad.

There were some excellent references and hidden aspects, but I don’t necessarily feel this really hits the youthful target audience being more for adults. That’s fine, but I just wanted to get that aspect across for those expecting an all ages type of thing as the references here are very mature at times.

It’s still sort of easy going and fun. I think critically this is a great film albeit not one I necessarily expected. I do ponder if we’ll see similar efforts in the future on products since this one looks to be quite the hit I would imagine.

Barbie Review at Theather with Standard Viewing

Rating Overall: 7.6