The IP adaptation has a near-perfect record of failure when it involves source material that has no inherent narrative. Battleship, Jem and the Holograms, the earlier Transformers sequels, the G.I. Joe films: the history of studios attempting to build a feature film around a brand rather than a story is a history of expensive lessons in the difference between recognition and affection. Barbie was announced over a decade before it arrived in theaters, and the announcement was greeted with the specific skepticism that its category historically warrants. Then Greta Gerwig was attached to write and direct, and then the cast was assembled, and then the marketing rolled out in the most confident sustained campaign in recent Hollywood memory. What actually arrived on screen is the most pleasurable surprise the studio system has produced in years: a film that is funny, visually unlike almost anything else in contemporary blockbuster cinema, and built around a message that is both specific and generous enough to earn the scale at which it is being delivered.
Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins the film in Barbieland, a perfect pastel world in which every Barbie is simultaneously successful, celebrated, and entirely untroubled by the questions that trouble humans. When she suddenly experiences thoughts of death and develops flat feet, she is sent on a mission to the real world to fix the anomaly. Ken (Ryan Gosling) follows. The real world proves to be considerably less accommodating to both of them than Barbieland, and what begins as a quest to restore equilibrium becomes something more complicated when Ken returns to Barbieland having discovered the concept of patriarchy and decides to implement it. America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Michael Cera, Will Ferrell, Emma Mackey, and a large ensemble also star.
The aesthetic is the film's first and most immediate achievement. The production design of Barbieland is not merely colorful but specifically calibrated: everything is demonstrably plastic in a way that communicates the world's logic without ever letting the artificiality become distancing. The performances across the ensemble are calibrated to match, operating in a register that is simultaneously aware of being toys and invested in their own experiences as persons. Gosling's Ken in particular is a comedic creation of real precision, a character whose discovery of masculinity as an ideology rather than an identity is played as both hilarious and genuinely observed. His musical number is the film's most technically accomplished sequence and one of the more purely enjoyable things a major studio comedy has produced in recent memory.
The discourse around the film's messaging is predictable in its contours. The argument that Barbie is anti-male misreads the film at a fundamental level. The Kens' adoption of patriarchal structures is not presented as an inherently male impulse but as the predictable outcome of identity built entirely around opposition to something else. The resolution does not require Ken to be defeated or diminished but to understand that his worth is not contingent on his relationship to Barbie or to any external measure of significance. The film's central argument, delivered most directly by America Ferrera's Gloria in the film's most overtly earnest sequence, is that people are not their gender or their job or their relationship to another person but inherently valuable as individuals. It is the same argument applied to both Barbie and Ken and to the audience watching both. The reading of this as an attack on men requires a determination to misread it that the film itself does not invite.
Gerwig directs with a confidence with an established tonal register she has that never wavers, even as the film moves between pure comedy, genuine feeling, and the kind of meta-awareness that most films attempting it collapse under. The sequence in which Barbie encounters the real world for the first time and is immediately subjected to the specific kind of male attention that the film is partly commenting on is handled with a precision that makes the comedy and the discomfort arrive simultaneously rather than in sequence, which is the harder achievement. The Dolby sound mix, which the theatrical experience brings out fully, treats the musical sequences with the same seriousness that the film treats everything else.
Barbie will eventually be streaming on Max for those who do not catch it theatrically, though the theatrical experience is definitely worth seeking out. It is one of those rare studio films that understood exactly what it was trying to do and executed it without compromise, which at the scale of this production and with this level of IP pressure is close to a miracle.
