I am not the demographic for this move. In current parlance, I am a 68-year-old cis-hetero member of the patriarchy and despite the fact that I actually once bought and still own a Barbie I can say this about the film; it is a very clever, engaging and entertaining movie.
It also aspires to some degree of profundity in the way that it attempts to frame the current iteration of the eternal struggle of the boys against the girls. Although it covers all of the modern or postmodern tropes in this regard, most of the ideas it espouses are for the most part either pedestrian or tongue in cheek. Anyone attacking the movie for being anti-male or woke has either not seen it or is so personally brittle that I can happily advise you to discount their opinions. That’s you Ted Cruz and you Ben Shapiro you pathetic excuses for representatives of the patriarchy.
The film at its heart is Pinocchio with a bit of Paradise Lost thrown in to pump it up to get our attention just as one of the Barbie’s breasts can also be enhanced in the twinkling of an eye. Ken wants to be a real boy, but Ken’s existential problem is that he is nothing more than an accessory, always was an accessory and always will be an accessory. He leads a half-baked revolution of the Kens against the Barbies based on having tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge of The Patriarchy as he perceives it to be in the real world and briefly and happily subverts and takes control of Barbie world.
However, it is Barbie that is really Pinocchio and as the Barbie counter revolution demonstrates, it was always Barbie who owns this role, and she does in fact become a real girl thus putting Ken as definitively back in his place as it is possible so to do. However, if anyone thinks that the movie is some kind of feminist manifesto aimed at emasculating men they are deluded. The Barbie counter revolution succeeds because of feminine wiles which subverts any so-called feminist message fairly completely.
The power of Barbie is not that she can be anything that she wants to be, it’s that any of us can project anything that we want to on to her. This, the film makes very clear.
