Film: Barbie

If anything, the idea of a Barbie movie solicited a range of reactions, which broadly fall into the following categories:

1. Those girls (and boys and men and women) who were hugely looking forward to a film about their favourite doll/merchandise;
2. Those who hate everything about Barbie (and women, and men and the world) who felt it a duty to protest;
3. Those who wanted to watch the film out of some kind of irony for the 'gram (we call these the barbenheimer crowd); and
   
4. Those who had faith that this film was going to be genuinely great, self aware and knew exactly who its various audiences were.

And if a film is judged by how it fulfils the expectations of its audience, well then Barbie is one of the greatest films of all time, since all the, quite disparate, groups above seemed to have come away relatively satiated.

Of course it's not one of the greatest films of all time, but Barbie is a good movie - or as good as a movie about Barbie can be. Like any good family movie, it manages to entertain on various levels, and although the social commentary does labour at times the film knows it and even calls that out. Put another way, it takes the audience with it.

It's well produced, and everyone manages to pull off the kind of plastic acting you'd want from a Barbie movie. And of course everyone is so pretty. Yes, the plot is thin, but it does the job.

The point is that Barbie is a good movie and only offensive and problematic if you really spend the time and effort looking for that - and even then it does a good job. Recommended.