Margot Robbie Barbie Review

In a five-star review, the Independent's Clarisse Loughrey said: Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory - a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism.

While it's impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, especially when consumer culture has caught on to the idea that self-awareness is good for business, Barbie gets away with far more than you'd think was possible.

The Telegraph's Robbie Collin was also positive, awarding the film four stars and describing it as deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious.

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It's an unexpected pleasure to report that Greta Gerwig's film - while still fundamentally being a summer comedy adventure about the Barbie toy line - is far from the blunt-force cash grab many of us feared, he wrote.

The satirical angle - likelier to strike a chord with older viewers than pre-teens - is enthusiastically and mischievously milked. (There are gags here that gleefully poke a number of masculine online beehives.)

However, the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine was less keen on the representation of men. She wrote: It's a deeply anti-man movie, an extension of all that TikTok feminism that paints any form of masculinity - other than the most anodyne - as toxic and predatory...

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Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser. If the roles were reversed, and a male director made a film about how all women were hysterical, neurotic, gold-digging witches, it would be denounced - quite rightly - as deeply offensive and sexist.

She concluded: It's uneven, disjointed, the plot makes no real sense - and the dead hand of corporate America weighs heavily upon it.

He suggested Barbie is a good-natured but self-conscious movie that is occasionally very funny, but sometimes also somehow demure and inhibited, as if the urge to be funny can only be mean and satirical.

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He added: This movie is perhaps a giant two-hour commercial for a product, although no more so than The Lego Movie, yet Barbie doesn't go for the comedy jugular anywhere near as gleefully as that.

Other critics were far more positive. Rolling Stone's David Fear said Barbie may be the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st Century, while NME's Alex Flood noted the script contains unexpected subtlety.

Barbie received its UK premiere last Wednesday - one of the last major showbiz events to be held before the Hollywood actors' strike was announced by industry union SAG.

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Robbie - who has been dialling it up to 11 since Harley Quinn - is hilarious, but the most consistent scene-stealer is Mr. Blond Fragility, she said.

Gosling submerges wholeheartedly into Ken's insecure psyche as he moves from Barbie's sidepiece to patriarchal poster boy. Every muscle flex, every hair flick, every guitar strum lands perfectly. There are moments where he will rob you of breath.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry, even if you're made of plastic.

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Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter struck a more dissenting note, writing: However smartly done Gerwig's Barbie is, an ominousness haunts the entire exercise.

The director has successfully etched her signature into and drawn deeper themes out of a rigid framework, but the sacrifices to the story are clear. The muddied politics and flat emotional landing of Barbie are signs that the picture ultimately serves a brand.

It stumbles somewhat in its handling of its characters of colour. They mostly are used as devices to push the Stereotypical Barbie and Ken narratives forward, she said.

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There is a tight 95-minute movie here, but it's crammed with pointless dance scenes and musical numbers that are just filler and nothing else.

The packaging of Barbie is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box, he said. To almost quote the Aqua song: Life in plastic - not fantastic.

The tone of the film was criticised by Time's Stephanie Zacharek, who said: It's a movie that's enormously pleased with itself. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it's being, every exhausting minute.

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Variety's Peter DeBruge concluded: It's kind of perfect that Barbie is opening opposite Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, since Gerwig's girl-power blockbuster offers a neon-pink form of inception all its own, planting positive examples of female potential for future generations.

Meanwhile, by showing a sense of humour about the brand's past stumbles, it gives us permission to challenge what Barbie represents - not at all what you'd expect from a feature-length toy commercial.Can a doll with an ingratiating smile, impossible curves and boobs ready for liftoff be a feminist icon? That’s a question that swirls through Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie, ” a live-action, you-go-girl fantasia about the world’s most famous doll. For more than half a century, Barbie has been, by turns, celebrated as a font of girlhood pleasure and play, and rebuked as an instrument of toxic gender norms and consumerist ideals of femininity. If Barbie has been a culture-war hot spot for about as long as it’s been on the shelves, it’s because the doll perfectly encapsulates changing ideas about girls and women: our Barbies, ourselves.

Gerwig carves a comic pathway into these representational thickets partly by means of mythology. In outline, the movie offers a savvy, updated riff on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, which has inspired myriad stories about men and the women they invent. In the original, a male sculptor creates and falls in love with a beautiful statue; in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and in the Lerner-Loewe musical “My Fair Lady, ” she’s a Cockney flower girl. In “Barbie, ” by contrast, it’s the imaginations of the girls and women who play with the doll that give it something like life, a fitting shift for a movie that takes sisterhood as a starting point.

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These imaginers first and foremost include Gerwig herself. The movie opens with a prelude that parodies the “dawn of man” sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (with girls, not ape-men), and then shifts to Barbie Land, a kaleidoscopic wonderland. There, Gerwig sets the scene and tone with Barbie (Margot Robbie) — who calls herself stereotypical Barbie — soon floating out of her Dreamhouse, as if she were being lifted by a giant invisible hand. It’s a witty auteurist flourish. The Mattel brand looms large here, but Gerwig, whose directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking, is announcing that she’s in control.

Written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, the movie introduces Barbie on yet another perfect day in Barbie Land, in which dolls played by humans exist in what resembles a toyland gated community. There, framed by a painted mountain range, Barbie and a diverse group of other Barbies rule, living in homes with few exterior walls. With their flat roofs, clean lines and pink décor — a spherical TV, Eero Saarinen-style tulip table and chairs — the overarching look evokes the era when Barbie first hit the market. It’s very Palm Springs circa 1960, an aesthetic that could be called bubble-gum midcentury modern.

Gerwig has fun in Barbie Land, and in her role as a friendly playmate, she works hard to ensure you do too. She takes you for a leisurely spin, cranks the tunes, stages some old-school, Hollywood-style musical numbers and brings in those eternal sidekicks, the Kens (with a scene-stealing Ryan Gosling chief among them). The production design (Sarah Greenwood) and costumes (Jacqueline Durran) offer ticklish pleasure but also underscore this place’s artificiality. Barbie, et al., are of our world and not, existing in a plasticky paradise that proves less hospitable when she begins having un-Barbie thoughts and experiences: She thinks of death, and then her feet, which are molded to fit high heels, go flat.

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This change to Barbie’s body is played for laughs — the other Barbies are horrified — but it’s crucial to the plot and to Gerwig’s intentions. Once Barbie’s feet touch the ground, she seeks advice from a misfit version of the doll (the invaluable Kate McKinnon), who prescribes Birkenstocks and a trip to the real world. Soon, Barbie — with Ken riding shotgun — journeys into something like reality; that they land in Los Angeles reads like a puckish joke. There, Barbie is astonished to discover sexism, and Ken is delighted to discover patriarchy, contrapuntal revelations that generate further comedy and something like enlightenment.

Gerwig handles the transition between realms smoothly, but even in this bouncy, happy movie, reality proves a bummer. It’s amusing when Barbie points out a billboard filled with women, mistaking them for the Supreme Court because that’s what the court looks like in Barbie Land, just with more pink. She learns how wrong she was, which is to Gerwig’s point. But the weight of our world, emblematized at least for this viewer by the real Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, proves unbearably heavy. However politically sharp, the gag is an unpleasant reminder of all the profoundly unfunny ways in which this world, with its visible and invisible hands, tries to control women, putting them into little