I mean I didn’t expect it to be great but seriously. The most sanitised corporate liberal brainworm rubbish. Completely undercooked story. The film is basically just a vessel for monologues about women’s empowerment, albeit in a completely shackled liberalist framework where the extent of empowerment is just female president and female CEO - standard lib feminist stuff. This film falls into the bucket of “virtue signal by consumption” media where just by seeing and enjoying the film, and more importantly understanding the wisecrack cultural references and feeling smug about it, the viewer becomes an active political agent. On a technical level, the writing is just bad. Like I said there’s nothing but a very shallow plot. The writers just resort to monologues to present the politics of the film rather than allowing the themes to present themselves organically through narrative. The film is stacked with minority “representation”, disabled, trans, fat, etc. But this so called representation is purely cosmetic, they are merely tokens in the choreography routines (which incidentally was one of the only parts of the movie I could kinda get into). This ended up being longer than I thought itd be. In short its nothing but a virtue signalling showpiece to stoke the fires of the culture war. I can already imagine what the right wing pundits will be saying about this film and what the liberal mob will be saying in defence of this corporate vacuous cash grab.
Maybe they thought this was too much of a low hanging fruit and dunking on movies like this is just too easy? And for an educated communist it is, but i think there is still value to these sorts of analyses. There are always newer comrades and potential comrades who can benefit from reading something like this. Learning via a concrete case study how the ideology of the ruling class permeates through all forms of mainstream media - be it news, movies, shows, games, etc. - is important.
Agreed, it isn’t exactly a shocker that the “Barbie” movie is incredibly pro-status quo neoliberal claptrap, but it is still important to discuss and consider how media influences people and how something like this will just contribute to the overall reframing of women’s liberation into “More 👏 Female 👏 CEOs! More 👏 Female 👏 War 👏 Criminals!”