I want to sincerely apologize to all SUGP members for the Ken puns I am going to make for a month straight. Now, I had to sit through a trailer for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 to see this fucking movie so let there be no doubt in any of your minds that I have suffered for my art.

Oppenheimer? Who gives a fuck about nuclear war! No cool tanks or jets? Pass! Gay! Dune? You aren't going to see that shit and they've cut my shill paycheck. Barbie? This is it right here. This is REAL cinema. Martin Scorcese said so, you can look it up, but you shouldn't since you should take my words at face value instead and it's much funnier if you do. That statement is only slightly irony twinged. Barbie is a REAL movie, not in the sense that it exists, but that it exists as an actual complex piece of cinema, though it's perhaps a bit over its head, it's still trying and striving to hit that mark. That's kind of crazy to think about, that in the hands of virtually anyone else, this would just be productslop. Maybe it still is, just a little bit, but the level of creative control that director Greta Gerwig had over this film shines in every moment and every scene. Much like the trailers promised, this is simultaneously a love letter to, and a dissection of, Barbie.

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat, the production design is A+ tier. Sets, costumes, whole nine yards, this movie captures a very distinct feeling and energy both inside and outside of its "Barbieland" scenes. This goes beyond just "making everything pink". Everything is done with practical, physical sets that maintain a distinctively toy-like and artificial feel, while also feeling like a real place where these characters live in their fantasy utopia. Every costume and outfit feels like it could've been ripped straight from one of the dolls, and you can tell there was a great love of detail and attention put into everything. This even extends into the real world to a degree, with Mattel's Headquarters taking on a surrealistic corporate dystopian feeling with a thin veneer of color plastered at its highest floors, cleverly tying into the secondary characters of soulless executives and their personalities and role within the story.

I recall some complaints about both Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling being "too old" for their roles, and these people are gay and retarded. I genuinely cannot imagine any other actors playing Barbie and Ken, as both nail the look, physicality, and emotion of their characters, which sounds really fucking stupid as I type it because I'm talking about fucking Barbie and Ken, but I'll get to that in a second. Everyone in this movie, at bare minimum, gets a "mild thumbs up". You have a whole plethora of endless actors and actresses playing various variations of Barbie and Ken that inhabit this fictional universe, each with their own fairly distinct personalities and performances that still encapsulate the KENERGY of this universe. My biggest complaints probably revolve around the "real world" human characters feeling a bit boring and preachy, but that kind of contrast with the rest of the cast is fine to differentiate between the two worlds, but this leads in to one of my complaints.

Barbieland is very campy and goofy and everything done and said there is sort of tongue-in-cheek and comical and highlighted up to an absurdist degree. So when Barbie and Ken get to the real world and they're immediately hit with an exposure to "reality" that also feels very tongue-in-cheek and comical and highlighted up to an absurdist degree, it kind of undermines the differences between these two places. It also leads to a kind of tonal dissonnance, one which intentionally permeates the entire film as it's more or less a comedy revolving around a crippling existential crisis, but in regards to the differences between utopian Barbieland and reality, it feels like there should've been a starker contrast, and doing so likely would've helped with the film's messaging, which leads in to my next complaint.

I'm not going to sit here and discuss or complain about politics. This is a Barbie movie. It is a feminist movie. It discusses and analyzes the role that women play in society, how the roles they play make them feel, and how Barbie ties into all of this both as an inspiration to girls, and as a product which has, intentionally or not, defined femininity. And it gets political about this, because no shit it does, and if you don't like that and aren't here for it, then the good news is that there's still stuff here for you, but this is the message of the film, and to its detriment, I feel it's delivered with the subtlety and bluntness of getting nailed directly in the nose with a Barbie Dream Convertible at full force. It's not even that it's hammering you over the head with it, because that's fine, that's whatever, it's just the way its delivered throughout the film is often through very direct, spell it out for you word by word, monologues and speeches, and I fucking hate that shit. And I can tell why it was done that way, because it very much feels like Gerwig wanted this message to be easily understood and digestible by the wide audience this film was targeted towards. That's not a bad thing in itself, but it was just handled incredibly clunkily.

All of this ends up building into what feels like a messy third act and a sort of rushed conclusion to the film, which isn't to say the third act is bad. In fact, this is where the film goes full force. Barbie is a comedy, and it nails the ever difficult challenge of "being funny". The film is packed with jokes and gags and sight gags, and honestly? Just about every one of them is executed perfectly, setup, punchline, execution, timing, one after the other. This reaches an insane fever pitch in the third act, culminating in a climax that is so insane, and absurd, and over the top, that I had the biggest fucking smile on my face the entire time. The third act also starts to touch on a lot of deeper messages in the film beyond what is spelled out and beaten over the audience. While I said this is a feminist film, I think that the message the film ultimately conveys at the end, is one of seeing the world through the opposite gender's eyes and striving for a sense of equality and self-worth regardless of who you are, and regardless of expectations. But like I said, I think that this message and the conclusion it wraps to ends up feeling a bit rushed, as these particular issues do not come into the forefront until the final moments of the film.

It's not some kind of masterpiece, but hey, it was a really good movie, far and beyond what I would ever expect from a god damn Barbie movie. Like I touched on in my Oppenheimer review briefly, I'm really glad that there's so much positivity surrounding both films and that they're each finding an unexpected audience in each other. It's really great to see people opening up to something they may not have enjoyed, and coming away from it happy. And that's why you're going to see this movie SUGP. Not now, but the moment this hits DVD/Digital/Streaming, I am hosting a group watch because this movie will be really fucking funny to watch together.