First minutes Barbie they phrase it very well: Kubrick’s quote is so obvious that it is easy to catch (“open” or) to a large part of the audience and understand vaguely (“close” or). This is a preliminary statement about myself – I movie “Barbie” but this is not a stupid film – and it tries to connect with its viewer, making them feel the pleasure of recognizing something familiar, inviting them to play, that is, look for the references that will come, and cultivating a kind of intimacy that almost creates a community of Barbie viewers. which should be a lot of and everyone feels calm. Below is the film’s first caption (the first of many), which blurts out voiceover, without much ado, is key to understanding the Barbie doll as a hypothetical push for female emancipation, as it (theoretically) has the potential to convince girls that they can be anything they want. And here we come to what I would say is the fundamental characteristic of the film as a whole: a significant balancing of the circle, a seeming imbalance in the direction of a position that is then immediately contradicted with equal force until it arrives at a rather innocuous intermediate solution. The little girl Sasha, in fact, in a dialogue with Barbie herself, dismantles the initially presented positive idea, accusing her of representing unbridled consumerism, an unattainable ideal of beauty and therefore very harmful for girls, and even fascism.
The film continues in the same vein, firmly sticking to its “circular bottista” design idea, a little more clearly in the feminist/anti-patriarchal direction, even if it then ends up portraying the male figures as naive big boys who can be manipulated (including CDA Mattel) , thereby neutralizing, in a roundabout way, the catastrophic result of patriarchy itself (as if men were bad almost without their knowledge, out of ignorance or stupidity, almost). But perhaps what is interesting is that it is the ideological substrate, so to speak, of the film that eats up the film itself. The zero degree of the film, the plot and the entire Barbie style set design/costume apparatus are full of good ideas, but overall weak (and monotonous). The depiction of Barbieland exhausts its potential after only a few minutes, along with other gimmicks (raised heels, Weird Barbie), Barbieland’s interaction with the Real World is carried out approximately, even from a simple point of view of internal coherence, and some passages are essentially incomprehensible (why the puppet/robotic movements in chase scene between CDA Mattel and Barbie?).
In the end, what stands out most is the captions, explanations, almost didactic dialogues/monologues, for example, about what it means to be a woman (you should be thin, but not too thin, you must love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the time etc., etc.), the one – unclear, actually – in which Barbie tells Ken that he needs to understand who he is, or the dialogue between Barbie and her creator, for decisive effect but fundamentally unconvincing, except for vague emotional inspiration about what it means to “be human.” Barbie so overall it’s a weak and threadbare film, with its feet in many stirrups, littered with ideas that remain (intentionally?) that way, sporadically enlivened by clever jokes but a little out of context and subtle humor (there’s also Baumbach) that nonetheless resonates a little dated and recycled (the voiceover breaks the fourth wall and points out that Margot Robbie is unsuited to recite this part of the script). It was a cunning to the point of risky operation, which had to meet many obvious and hidden needs, but it must be said that on the whole it was carried out with professional, very calculating dignity.