Not a promotion, so not against strike rules. Just think of this as an interpretation/review from someone who happens to really like movies.
Spoilers ahead. (Duh.) spoiler
In my obviously super duper unbiased opinion, the movie was pretty good. Especially that lead actress whose name I forgot, who did some sweet dance moves and wore some cute outfits and should totally win an Oscar for this. (also, cellulite free)
If you think the movie was just about feminism, you’re wrong. (Well, not entirely, but it’s not the main point.)
In the beginning, the little girls smashed their baby dolls to defy their motherly stereotypes and replaced their dolls with the grown-up Barbies, which in time just turned into yet another stereotype for little girls to defy.
The role of Barbie has indeed evolved over time to be inclusive: more people of color, more gender identities, smarter, more career driven, more powerful, and sometimes, more ordinary. Barbie is now everything, yet the stereotype remained.
Our protagonist lived in a world of absurd privilege where Barbies ruled the world, she had this perfect life with everything she ever wanted and partied every night away. Until she was somehow struck by the very human fear of death (and also cellulite and dirty heels) so she decided (kinda…) to go real world to return to her perfect, plastic life. I don’t really know how dimension travel is achievable by rollerblades or the exact mechanisms of how these two worlds relates to each other or how Will Farrell works either, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not that kind of movie. Don’t think too hard about it.
It’s absurd and is meant to be absurd. Almost as absurd as some bored Hollywood actress (and also, marketing genius) shitposting about her own movie promotion on some obscure tech forum called Lemonworld as some kind of weird meta commentary.
And once our protagonist escaped to the real world, she discovered that unlike the Truman Show, compared to the place she left behind, everything is no less absurd, just reversed now. The little girls whom she thought she inspired hated her, and everything she thought the Barbies have ever accomplished have only existed in the minds of men who wants nothing more than to put her back in a box. They just learned to hide it better now.
Then, somebody brought part of the absurdity of the real world back to Barbieland, and Barbieland was polluted with cynicism, and men’s thought on the nature of war, and also, a lot of horses. (A bit disappointed that no one here ever asked any questions about why the “Blood Meridian” quotes.)
It turns out that it’s really the cynical grown-ups of the world with grown-up worries like you (yes, YOU in particular) who needed Barbie in their life, to remind them of who they once were and rediscovering what they once had, their humanity and sincerity, in spite of the absurdity of the world.
Jokes are indeed way less funny once you explain them.
In the end, things was handwaved back to “normal” with society being improved somewhat, but our protagonist discovered that she does not belong in Barbieland anymore, in the same way that you don’t belong in reddit anymore. She choose to exist as a human, even if it means death or worse, cellulite.
(I will, however, concede that the 4th wall breaking narrator aside gags were a bit overused.)
You are who you choose to be. This is not the ending for me or you here in this world. Not yet anyways.
Remember to support the strike.
Oh, also, for the record, I did say we couldn’t get Nicolas Cage to play a Barbie here, https://lemmy.world/comment/1010947
spoiler
so we had to get potato salad instead.
I have to be honest, I had no idea what I was in for. I hadn’t seen a single preview and had read one (relatively spoiler free) review of the movie.
I think it was really entertaining. The jokes were funny, edged on surreal, but didn’t get ridiculous. Of particular note, I usually cringe these days when it comes to Will Ferrell in a movie. He’s great, but I feel that he tends to run over directors (or maybe they misjudge his fit in the story), and they let him go absolutely nuts. He was definitely silly here, and retained his essential Ferrell-ness, but still managed to do that in a way that served the movie.
The references were top notch. The bit referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey had me rolling in my seat.
I feel that the movie did an excellent job of dealing with its core theme. It made value judgements without brow beating the audience about them. And it treated even objectively bad things with a degree of nuance and sympathy.
Edit: I forgot to mention this, but I am now also desperate for a bit in a Deadpool movie that opens on Barbie doing Barbie things while the narrator narrates something and then DP shows up, breaks the 4th wall and asks who the fuck is talking, and the narrator and him have a brief “wait, what?”-type exchange. Then DP has a recurring bit where he keeps glancing to the sky, expecting the narrator to come back.
(Sure it’s probably not contractually possible, or sensible from a story perspective, but Helen Mirren’s narration really made me think of DP.)
Ryan Reynolds works too hard and the Deadpool meta humor is pretty overused at this point. (See: Any video with Deadpool cosplayers at conventions). Let the man take a break.