Movies

That's funny because my wife hated it and said it was just a two hour complaint session while I thought it just did a mediocre job of conveying its message (which I agree with) at best. She absolutely hated the rant about being a woman while I thought the message was just done in the Hollywood 'character rants at a crowd' cliche instead of being done in a better way. A better way would have been ranting to her kid after something immediate prompts it instead of in a group rant removed from any immediate conflict. It just felt forced.

All of the Barbies and Kens were Hollywood movie stereotypical dumb. Yes, I know they are supposed to be dolls who are influenced by their owners or something (per stereotypical Barbie), and mostly cared for by children. But it could have had some nuance. And why are some of them smart, like Allen and Weird Barbie but not the doctor or president Barbie?

Some of the jokes seem like punch lines without any setup. Like the 'I don't have genitals' came out of nowhere and since she seemed to be confused by catcalls it made no sense for Barbie to blurt that out at that point in time.

They did not actually explain the patriarchy besides 'only men in charge'. They didn't cover how even women can prop it up, unless the Kens just saying Patriarchy over and over without any explanation was supposed to convey that. I don't know, that scene made zero sense too. Like the Kens being possibly homeless only needed a line about where they stayed at night like maybe camping on the beach and the Barbies thinking they were fine with it. Or even a two second moment of them packing up their tents at the beach in the morning. No time is needed, just context for why they might want to take over other than not being invited to girl's night.

Apparently men being in charge was bad, but they just ended up going back to only women in charge. They didn't do anything with the suggested possibility that the Kens were homeless, or that the matriarchy is just the reverse of patriarchy and they seemed to just go back to the Barbie world status quo at the end. Was that supposed to be a happy ending as an alternative to the children's understanding of how the real world is a patriarchy? Addressing that would have been great! That would at least make keeping Barbieland a matriarchy a somewhat happy ending.

So many things just came out of nowhere. Why did president business know about previous Barbies coming into the real world? Was that a bad thing? Was there something that came about from it? Are we supposed to just assume that he wanted to sort things out to avoid something? That was very unclear.

So in summary, I think all of the events of the movie could have been done far better with better writing with the exact same message, jokes needed better set ups or at least some context for them to land instead of seemingly out of nowhere, and a few things that were implied could have been addressed with a single line or a second or two for visual context.