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"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig ’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example. The costume design (led by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran ) and production design (led by six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood ) are constantly clever and colorful, befitting the ever-evolving icon, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (a three-time Oscar nominee) gives everything a glossy gleam. It’s not just that Gerwig & Co. have recreated a bunch of Barbies from throughout her decades-long history, outfitted them with a variety of clothing and hairstyles, and placed them in pristine dream houses. It’s that they’ve brought these figures to life with infectious energy and a knowing wink.

“Barbie” can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout. They come from the insularity of an idyllic, pink-hued realm and the physical comedy of fish-out-of-water moments and choice pop culture references as the outside world increasingly encroaches. But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad. Such is the anticipation industrial complex.

And so you probably already know the basic plot: Barbie ( Margot Robbie ), the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, begins experiencing an existential crisis. She must travel to the human world in order to understand herself and discover her true purpose. Her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), comes along for the ride because his own existence depends on Barbie acknowledging him. Both discover harsh truths—and make new friends –along the road to enlightenment. This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “ The Truman Show ” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.

This is a movie that acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the kinds of very real body issues they can cause in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. After all, there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) before there was an actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), an achievement “Barbie” commemorates by showing two suited-up women high-fiving each other among the stars, with Robbie’s Earth-bound Barbie saluting them with a sunny, “Yay, space!” This is also a movie in which Mattel (the doll’s manufacturer) and Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) at least create the appearance that they’re in on the surprisingly pointed jokes at their expense. Mattel headquarters features a spacious, top-floor conference room populated solely by men with a heart-shaped, “ Dr. Strangelove ”-inspired lamp hovering over the table, yet Will Ferrell ’s CEO insists his company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” are evidence of diversity. It's a neat trick.

As the film's star, Margot Robbie finds just the right balance between satire and sincerity. She’s  the  perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner completely looks the part, of course, but she also radiates the kind of unflagging, exaggerated optimism required for this heightened, candy-coated world. Later, as Barbie’s understanding expands, Robbie masterfully handles the more complicated dialogue by Gerwig and her co-writer and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Noah Baumbach . From a blinding smile to a single tear and every emotion in between, Robbie finds the ideal energy and tone throughout. Her performance is a joy to behold.

And yet, Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer as he revels in Ken’s himbo frailty. He goes from Barbie’s needy beau to a swaggering, macho doofus as he throws himself headlong into how he thinks a real man should behave. (Viewers familiar with Los Angeles geography will particularly get a kick out of the places that provide his inspiration.) Gosling sells his square-jawed character’s earnestness and gets to tap into his “All New Mickey Mouse Club” musical theater roots simultaneously. He’s a total hoot.

Within the film’s enormous ensemble—where the women are all Barbies and the men are all Kens, with a couple of exceptions—there are several standouts. They include a gonzo Kate McKinnon as the so-called “Weird Barbie” who places Robbie’s character on her path; Issa Rae as the no-nonsense President Barbie; Alexandra Shipp as a kind and capable Doctor Barbie; Simu Liu as the trash-talking Ken who torments Gosling’s Ken; and America Ferrera in a crucial role as a Mattel employee. And we can’t forget Michael Cera as the one Allan, bumbling awkwardly in a sea of hunky Kens—although everyone else forgets Allan.

But while “Barbie” is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again. The breezy, satirical edge she established off the top was actually a more effective method of conveying her ideas about the perils of toxic masculinity and entitlement and the power of female confidence and collaboration.

One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us. The middle-aged mom in me was nodding throughout in agreement, feeling seen and understood, as if this person knew me and was speaking directly to me. But the longtime film critic in me found this moment a preachy momentum killer—too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights.  

Still, if such a crowd-pleasing extravaganza can also offer some fodder for thoughtful conversations afterward, it’s accomplished several goals simultaneously. It’s like sneaking spinach into your kid’s brownies—or, in this case, blondies.

Available in theaters on July 21st. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Barbie (2023)

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.

114 minutes

Margot Robbie as Barbie

Ryan Gosling as Ken

America Ferrera as Gloria

Will Ferrell as Mattel CEO

Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie

Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha

Issa Rae as President Barbie

Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler

Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie

Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie

Alexandra Shipp as Writer Barbie

Michael Cera as Allan

Helen Mirren as Narrator

Simu Liu as Ken

Dua Lipa as Mermaid Barbie

John Cena as Kenmaid

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Ken

Scott Evans as Ken

Jamie Demetriou as Mattel Executive

• Greta Gerwig
• Noah Baumbach

Cinematographer

• Rodrigo Prieto
• Alexandre Desplat
• Mark Ronson

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Barbie review: A pink, plucky, and poignant rumination on womanhood

Margot robbie and ryan gosling play iconic mattel dolls facing an existential crisis in greta gerwig's terrific high-concept comedy.

In 1959, a mere 64 years before the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie , Mattel’s signature doll hit store shelves for the first time and quickly became a Rorschach test for many girls and women as they transposed their own identity onto a plastic plaything. The small-scale doll was created by company co-founder Ruth Handler—pulling inspiration from Germany’s Bild Lilli doll—as a way to empower girls like her daughter Barbara (the brand’s namesake) to use their imagination in creating limitless worlds where they can be and do anything they want. It revolutionized play patterns for pint-sized consumers who weren’t just seeking the pretend solace of motherhood and domesticity. Yet for some adults, this tiny wonder represented an unattainable, manufactured version of perfection, subsequently transforming her into a lightning rod for controversy and feminist critique.

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Nevertheless, Barbie persisted, blessedly changing with the increasingly enlightened times, diversifying her size and skin tone to become a more inclusive toy line. Co-writer and director Greta Gerwig repackages these goods in Barbie , her hilarious and heartfelt homage to the brand . By lovingly lampooning corporate missteps along with celebrating the successes, the film’s self-effacing humor, out-of-the-box smarts, and emotional potency strike the right tone. Gerwig and her creative collaborators—including co-writer Noah Baumbach—not only give the formerly inanimate figure a sparkling personality and a pastel-shellacked pop-art playground, they also deliver genuinely meaningful sentiments surrounding the complexities of gender politics. It’s the year’s best tear-jerking, thought-provoking comedy.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) has always had the quintessential Best Day Ever. She’s awakened each morning by a song (Lizzo’s “Pink” provides her daily mojo), dines on perfect meals, wears the cutest fashions, and hangs out with her fellow Barbies (played by Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Emma Mackey, Alexandra Shipp, and Nicola Coughlan) and Kens (played by Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Scott Evans). There’s also Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) and Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge (Emerald Fennell), whose presence is purposeful even though their dolls were both discontinued. In the plastic fantastic Malibu-meets-Miami enclave of Barbie Land, all jobs are held by women while the men exist to frolic on the beach and the dance floor. It’s a fantasy utopia without walls or negativity.

That is until Stereotypical Barbie begins suffering from the throes of an existential crisis manifested in the form of bad breath, too-cold showers, flat feet, and pervading thoughts of death. Hoping for a quick fix, she pays a visit to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a spiky-haired, shaman-like Barbie that’s been “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie advises her to go into the Real World to find the person playing with her in doll form and cheer them up so life can return to normal. However, when Stereotypical Barbie and a stowaway Ken (Gosling) arrive in Southern California, they face fish-out-of-water hijinks while dealing with humans’ dysfunctional nature stemming from patriarchal toxicity, loss of adolescence, and adult disillusionment.

Since Gerwig and Baumbach are telling a story of a doll who has encapsulated all walks of womanhood over six decades, they find narrative weight in a multitude of supporting angles. In addition to Barbie’s main odyssey, there’s a mother-daughter story between surly tween Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her deflated mom Gloria (America Ferrera) that’s touching and empowering. There are also heady statements about artistic creation, both in the visuals (one recalls Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam) and in Stereotypical Barbie’s relationship with her god-like creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), who receives her share of ribbing. Initially defining the tertiary Barbies by their profession speaks satirically to all the one-dimensional female characters we’ve seen before in cinema, only here they’re given space to grow and acquire a richer sense of internality.

The filmmakers don’t pull any punches when skewering the commercialist underbelly of the brand. They allot screen time to a few ill-advised creations, like Tanner the pooping dog and Growing Up Skipper (“The doll who grows breasts!”). They make the all-male Mattel brass (led by Will Ferrell’s CEO) look like buffoons tripping over themselves and their faux-feminism to put Barbie and womankind back in a box—both physically and metaphorically. Still, at times it talks out of both sides of its mouth, celebrating what it also condemns. Crass commercialism is handled with a sly wink and a nod, playing to audiences’ nostalgic memories while simultaneously encouraging them to purchase new dolls.

The world-building in Barbie is exceptional. Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set designer Katie Spencer have created a candy-colored confectionary dream for Barbie’s environments, heightening the carefully constructed stylistic surrealism. They’ve coated it with vibrant pink paint, molded plastics, and tactile backdrops harkening back to classic Hollywood musicals. Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt’s pop soundscape bolsters the synthetic atmosphere in Barbie Land, but they thread the needle perfectly in the Real World, blending musical themes from Billie Eilish’s ballad “What Was I Made For?” to land the palpably moving moments.

Robbie nimbly handles the comedic rhythm of these worlds, igniting the spark of the dialogue and the slapstick as well as nailing the nuance and vulnerability of the grounded sequences. Her work sings in chorus with that of costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whose textures and tailoring augment the performance, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who illuminates the hidden facets within Barbie’s evolving psyche. Gosling’s portrait of Ken as a jealous, competitive himbo is absolutely divine, allowing him to show off his comedic chops, Gene Kelly-esque moves, and singing talents. (And abs!) Supporting cast members all shine, especially Rae, who plays President Barbie with crackling confidence, and Simu Liu, who plays Gosling’s adversary Ken with vigor.

It’s a tall order for Gerwig and company to deliver a feature that’s reverent and revelatory while speaking directly to the pressures of living up to an impossible feminine ideal. And yet they did it with crafty aplomb. Though a tad overstuffed with too many good ideas, pulling from loads of subtly identifiable cinematic references (everything from Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 drama A Matter Of Life And Death to the more recent The Truman Show ) , Barbie ultimately leaves us entertained, emotionally exhausted, and ready to play again soon.

Barbie opens in theaters on July 21

‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century

By David Fear

It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing this movie about everyone’s favorite tiny, leggy bearer of impossible beauty standards suddenly transformed it from “dual corporate cash-in” to “dual corporate cash-in with a very high probability of wit, irony, and someone quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

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Every morning, Barbie (Robbie) wakes up in her beautiful, open-faced mansion, waves to the legion of other Barbies in their beautiful, open-faced Barbieland mansions, and greets the day with a smile. Early afternoons are reserved for listening to President Barbie ( Issa Rae ) make executive decisions, or watching a Barbie journalist win a Barbie Pulitzer, or cheering a Barbie Supreme Court that lays down the law for the good of all Barbiekind. Late afternoons are for going to the beach, where Ken (Gosling) endlessly competes for Barbie’s affections against Ken (Simu Liu) and Ken (Kingsley Ben-Adir), among other Kens. Nighttime is for extravagantly choreographed disco-dance parties , DJ-ed by none other than Barbie (Hari Nef), and — much to Ken’s dismay — all-girl sleepovers. Eventually, the cardboard backdrop will rotate from moon to sun, and it’s time for yet another day in utopia.

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Once in our world, Barbie will encounter sexual harassment, gender inequity, the benefits of crying, the CEO of Mattel ( Will Ferrell ) and the mother (America Ferrara) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who’ve introduced such morbid thoughts into her brain. Ken will discover horses, Hummer SUVs, and toxic masculinity . She returns with her new human friends to Barbieland in a state of dazed enlightenment. He comes back as a full-blown Kencel, spreading a gospel of full-frontal dude-ity.

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Critical thinking isn’t mind corruption, of course. Nor is pointing out that you can love something and recognize that it’s flawed or has become inflammatory over time, then striving to fix it. It’s definitely not a bad thing to turn a potential franchise, whether built on a line of dolls or not, into something that refuses to dumb itself down or pander to the lowest common denominator. And the victory that is Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling — along with a supporting cast and crew that revel in the idea of joining a benefic Barbie party — slipping in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, under the guise of a lucrative, brand-extending trip down memory lane? That’s enough to make you giddy. We weren’t kidding about the “subversive” part above; ditto the “blockbuster.” A big movie can still have big ideas in 2023. Even a Barbie movie. Especially a Barbie movie.

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• Movie Review
• This Barbie is a feminist parable fighting to be great in spite of Mattel’s input

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is often good and sometimes great, but it always feels like it’s fighting to be itself rather than the movie Warner Bros. and Mattel Films want.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Barbies might “just” be toys, but Barbie™ is an impossibly perfect paragon of glamorous femininity who’s had as many specialized professions over the course of her 64-year-long existence as she has bespoke outfits. There are few pieces of corporate-owned IP that are truly as Iconic (in the pre-social media sense of the word) as the doll that put Mattel on the map and taught children of all genders — but especially little girls — to long for hot pink dreamhouses. That’s why it isn’t all that surprising to see Mattel Studio’s brand protection-minded influence splashed all over Warner Bros.’ new live-action Barbie movie from writer / director Greta Gerwig.

Valuable as the Barbie brand is, it makes all the sense in the world that Mattel would want Gerwig’s feature — a playful, surreal adventure that does double duty as a deconstruction of its namesake and her technicolor, dreamlike world — to play by a set of rules meant to protect their investments. But as well meant as Mattel’s input presumably was, Gerwig clearly came with a bold vision built around the idea of deconstructing some of the more complex realities of what Barbie represents in order to tell a truly modern, feminist story.

Watching the movie, you can often feel how Mattel and Gerwig’s plans for Barbie weren’t necessarily in sync and how those differences led to compromises being made. Thankfully, that doesn’t keep the movie from being fun. But it does make it rather hard to get lost in the fantasy of it all — especially once Barbie starts going meta to poke fun at the studios behind it in a way that seems to be becoming more common .

Along with celebrating innumerable pieces of Mattel’s history, Barbie tells the story of how the most Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in all of Barbie Land gains the tiniest bit of self-awareness one day and starts to find her growing sense of complex personhood so alarming that she sets off for the Real World to find out what the hell is going on. Like the vast majority of Barbies who call Barbie Land home, all Stereotypical Barbie knows about her own world is based on the picture-perfect, idealized experiences she and her friends are able to breeze their ways through solely using the power of their imaginations. 

Things don’t just happen to Barbies. They’re very much the arbiters of their own wills who’ve worked hard to become people like President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), and Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp). But life for Barbies also isn’t especially difficult or complicated, partially because they’re all dolls living in a plastic paradise. Mainly, though, it’s because Barbie Land’s an expressly woman-controlled utopia reminiscent of Steven Universe ’s Gem Homeworld , where neither misogyny nor the concept of a patriarchy exists because that’s not what Barbie™ is about.

As an unseen Helen Mirren — who seems to be playing a version of herself as Barbie ’s narrator — points out who’s who in the film’s opening act, you can see how Mattel’s willingness to let Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script poke fun at Barbie™ led to some extremely good world-building.

Barbie Land isn’t just a predominantly pink pocket dimension where Life-Size -like dolls live in life-sized, yet still toy-like dream homes. It’s the embodiment of the easy-to-digest, corporate-approved feminism and female empowerment that Mattel and many other toy companies deal in. Only in Barbie Land, the idea of a predominantly female supreme court or construction sites full of nothing but hardworking women aren’t just dreams — they’re a regular part of everyday life. And all the Barbies are better for it because of how it reinforces their belief that they can do anything.

But outside of the Stereotypical Barbie-obsessed Ken whose job is to stand on the beach (Ryan Gosling), none of the other Kens (Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, and John Cena) are ever really given personalities to speak of. It’s clearly a purposeful decision meant to reinforce the idea that Ken dolls, which were invented after Barbie dolls, are the Eves to their Adams — accessory-like beings created to be companions rather than their own people. But as solid as the idea is, in practice, it has a way of making the Kens of color feel like thinly-written afterthoughts hovering around Gosling and like Barbie isn’t sure how to utilize its entire cast — a feeling that intensifies more and more as the movie progresses.

Long before Barbie even starts to have her existential crisis and seek guidance from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), it becomes painfully clear that there was a strong desire on either Mattel or Warner Bros. parts for audiences to be spoon-fed as much of the film as possible before actually sitting down in theaters. If you’ve watched even a couple of Barbie ’s lengthier ads or the music video for Dua Lipa’s (who plays Mermaid Barbie) “Dance the Night,” you’ve seen a significant chunk of this film and its more memorable moments.

What you’ve seen less of is how often Barbie slows down to have characters repeat jokes and belabor points as if it doesn’t trust the audience to catch beats on their initial deliveries. Some of that can be attributed to the PG-13 movie trying to make sure that viewers of all ages are able to engage because as existentially heavy and slightly flirty as Barbie gets at times, it’s a movie about Barbies, which is obviously going to appeal to a bunch of literal children. But once Barbie’s in the real world being harassed by lascivious men, ruthless teen girls, and a bumbling, evil corporation that the movie goes to great lengths to make fun of, you also get the sense that more than a bit of the movie’s unevenness on the backend stems from Mattel putting its foot down about how it, too, needed to be a part of Barbie’s live-action, theatrical debut.

There’s a time and a place for corporations to try getting in on the fun of events like this by way of meta humor that acknowledges their own existence and the role they play in bringing projects like movies about Barbie dolls into being. But rather than creating the necessary conditions for those kinds of jokes to land, not need explanation, and add substance to Barbie, both Mattel and Warner Bros.’ self-insert jokes work more to remind you how the movie is ultimately a corporate-branded endeavor designed to move products.

That doesn’t keep Gerwig’s latest from being an enjoyable time spotlighting a decidedly inspired performance from Robbie. But it is going to make the rabid Barbie discourse even more exhausting than it already is when the feature hits theaters on July 21st.

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Barbie review – Ryan Gosling is plastic fantastic in ragged doll comedy

Greta Gerwig’s bubblegum-fun-cum-feminist-thesis indulges Ken but pulls its punches as it trips between satire and advert

A re Barbie dolls demeaning or empowering? Director Greta Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach opt for the latter theory in this beamingly affectionate and deliriously pink-themed fantasy comedy-adventure produced by Barbie’s corporate manufacturer Mattel, and starring Margot Robbie whose own superhuman blond beauty makes her the only possible casting as Barbie herself. It is maybe down to Gerwig’s confidence and generosity as a feminist film-maker that she gives all the best lines to Ryan Gosling, who is allowed to steal the whole film playing Barbie’s non-genitaled boyfriend, Ken.

Yet the film has to keep second-guessing and pre-empting the anti-Barbie impulse with a stream of knowing references and self-aware meta-gags, which acknowledge that, sure, yes, Barbie’s uber-blond-slim persona is arguably conformist and oppressive, but we know all that, we’re past all that; these charges are redeemed by Barbie’s ethereal innocence and there is in any case now a range of Barbies, diverse in terms of ethnicity and body-image – among whom Robbie is first among equals as Stereotypical Barbie – including a wheelchair-using Barbie. But even this is hedged with a quirky admission that the real world that imposed these changes is still itself imperfect and tokenist.

The result is a good-natured but self-conscious movie, whose comedy is rooted in that very self-consciousness, often funny, occasionally very funny, but sometimes also somehow demure and inhibited, as if the urge to be funny can only be mean and satirical. And so often Barbie winds up playing the bland comic foil to comic characters like the outrageous metrosexual Ken, obsessed with his “beach” habitat and longing for the patriarchy, and to Weird Barbie, the Barbie who has been abusively over-played-with and crayoned-over, always dishevelled on the floor doing the splits, played here by Kate McKinnon.

Barbie herself is living her best life in her perfect Barbie world, partying of an evening with Barbies who are political leaders, supreme court judges and Nobel laureates (including Dua Lipa and Issa Rae), and a castrato chorus of beach-bunny Ken clones (including John Cena and Simu Liu) and Ken’s gloomy beta-male mate Allan (Michael Cera) when suddenly she is assailed with the terrible thought of dying.

Weird Barbie tells her she must journey to the real world outside to sort this out and so she and Ken arrive in scuzzy Santa Monica in time-honoured fish-out-of-water style to discover that this existential anxiety has been psycho-cosmically transmitted to her from Gloria, a former Barbie owner, now a hardworking mom who is an assistant in the Mattel empire: a nice performance from America Ferrera. Gloria has a whip-smart, discontented teen daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and those squeamish about spoilers or disloyalty might want to look away before the revelation that Sasha starts out fiercely and boldly critical of Barbie before being tamely converted. It is with this conversion that politics is definitively banished.

Ken is thrilled by male dominance in this real world and tries replicating it back in Barbieland, to Barbie’s dismay. Will Ferrell plays the Mattel CEO and chair of the all-male board and Rhea Perlman has a cameo as Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie who reportedly named the doll after her daughter Barbara. (The movie does not acknowledge the alternative theory, that Barbie was named after Barbara Ryan, wife of Mattel’s chief designer Jack Ryan whose life-story gives us an actual #Barbenheimer connection: before designing Barbie for Mattel, he designed missiles for the Pentagon as an employee of aerospace giant Raytheon, an important player in the postwar military-industrial complex.)

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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. In interviews about Barbie, Gerwig has referenced Milton and Powell and Pressburger: judging from this, I would say the influences are Toy Story, Pinocchio and Clueless. It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.

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“Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell

By Richard Brody

It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially, fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life, the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived reality, as Wes Anderson recently did in “ Asteroid City ,” and as Greta Gerwig has done spectacularly in her new film, “Barbie.” Unlike Anderson, who has spent his entire career on the far side of the imagination, Gerwig’s previous features as solo director, “ Lady Bird ” and “ Little Women ”—both ardently crafted, both modestly literal—did little to foreshadow the overwhelming outburst of inventive energy that makes “Barbie” such a thrilling experience. Though “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s breakthrough feature, is a fictionalized story of her own adolescence, her family life, and her home town, “Barbie”—yes, a movie about a doll made under the aegis of its manufacturer, Mattel —is the far more personal film. It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

The underlying subject of “Barbie” is how to play with Barbie dolls and why. Playing with Barbies, after all, is the D.I.Y. version of adaptation, the enactment in private of the kind of free and wild play that Gerwig (who wrote the script with her romantic and creative partner, Noah Baumbach ) enacts in the movie. “Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making preëxisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property. Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of them. “Barbie,” in other words, is a film of the politics of culture and, by extension, of the need for a creative rebellion to reëstrange the familiar for the sake of social change.

The movie begins with one of the most ingenious parodies I’ve seen in a while, an origin story of the Barbie doll based on the opening sequence of “ 2001: A Space Odyssey .” A group of girls is stranded in a barren primordial landscape. A voice-over narration (by Helen Mirren) explains that, since the beginning of time, they had only baby dolls to play with, leaving them nothing to imagine themselves as except mothers. Then came Barbie (Margot Robbie), who, with her many varieties and guises, offered the girls (who now smash their baby dolls to pieces) the chance to imagine themselves as astronauts, doctors, judges, even President, and thus heralded a future of equality and opportunity. It’s in the abyss between this promised utopia and the world as we know it, between the merchandising of professional feminism and the endurance of patriarchal realities, that the movie is set.

“Barbie” contains a potent paradox that is fundamental to its effervescent delights. A single frame of the film packs such profuse and exquisite detail—of costume and settings, gestures and diction—that it’s impossible to enumerate the plethora of inventions and decisions that bring it to life. With its frenetic pace and its grand-scale, wide-ranging inspirations, it plays like a live-action cartoon, and captures the anything-is-possible spirit of classic Looney Tunes better than any other film I’ve seen. Yet its whimsical plot is constructed with a dramatic logic that manages to transform phantasmagorical leaps into persuasive consequences, with the result that the details of the story seem utterly inseparable from, and continuous with, the riotously ornamental visual realms that it sets into motion.

The driving conceit is that Barbie comes to life and enters the real world, but Gerwig grounds that transformation ingeniously by giving Barbie a prior life of her own as a doll. The Barbie played by Robbie, who’s called Stereotypical Barbie, lives in Barbieland along with all the other Barbies who have been put on the market, whether Astronaut Barbie or Doctor Barbie or President Barbie, as well as Barbies of a wide range of ethnicities and body types, all named Barbie, all residing in doll houses, all calling to one another every bright and sunny morning, “Hi, Barbie!,” and offering identical side-to-side hand-wave greetings. Stereotypical Barbie drinks imaginary milk poured from a carton to a cup, eats a plastic waffle that pops from a toaster as a perfectly shaped dollop of butter lands atop it, and—because, as the narrator explains, Barbies can be carried and placed anywhere—glides from her balcony through the air to behind the wheel of her pink fifties-style Corvette convertible.

Stereotypical Barbie has a stereotypical suitor, the hunky blond Ken (Ryan Gosling)—one of many in Barbieland—who courts her with a droll sexual ignorance to match hers. There’s a strong gay subtext to the movie’s well-coiffured and accessorized Kens; in one scene, Ken and another Ken (Simu Liu) get into a dispute and threaten each other to “beach you off.” (A nerdy friend of the Kens, called Allan, played by Michael Cera, is the only non-himbo around.) The narrator makes the distinction—one that proves to be of great narrative significance—that for Barbie every day is a good day, whereas for Ken a day is good only when Barbie looks at him. Ken takes awkward pains to get Barbie to look, but she’s content in her Barbie-centric world. In lieu of a date, she invites him to a girls’-night bash at her house—the best party ever, but then, they all are—complete with a whirlwind-spectacular dance sequence. In the middle of the festivities, though, Barbie embarrassingly blurts out her own sudden premonition of death.

Something troubling is disturbing the pristine perfection of Barbie’s permalife in Barbieland, and she consults the closest thing to a troubled outcast in her midst, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), to find out what’s going on. Weird Barbie has a punk haircut, a malformed body, and something like face tattoos—the result, it is said, of a human who played with her “too hard.” To get to the source of her disturbance, Barbie will have to make passage to the human world and find her own owner, whose play has perhaps left an emotional mark just as Weird Barbie’s has left a physical one. Travelling between Barbieland and the human world involves transit via, among other Mattel-certified vehicles, Barbie’s convertible, a space rocket, a tandem bicycle, and a Volkswagen camper van. Ken stows away on Barbie’s journey, and the duo eventually lands on the beach in—where else?—Los Angeles, another land of artifices, where Barbie quickly has her illusions burst.

In L.A., Barbie encounters such human-world phenomena as catcalling, old age, anxiety, and the social dynamics of real-life girls, most notably a young high-school intellectual named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who calls Barbie a “bimbo,” a menace to feminism, even a “Fascist.” Barbie finds her way into Mattel headquarters, where the C.E.O. (Will Ferrell) wants to trap and twist-tie her in a display box. Instead, Barbie escapes, but, while she’s on the run, Ken—who’s read up in the school library about patriarchy—heads to Barbieland and exports the notion there. When Barbie returns home, she finds it transformed into a manosphere, full of Kens slaking grudges against Barbies and Barbies content with subservience to Kens, and she has to plot to restore it to its ostensible original form as a feminist paradise. Spoiler alert: the Ken-centric patriarchy that Barbie finds at home is both appalling and hilarious, with lots of horses (“man extenders,” Ken calls them) and ardent guitar playing “at” Barbie, especially of the Matchbox Twenty song “Push,” which the Kens have adopted as a male anthem.

The trait that enables Barbie to fight to take back Barbieland is the very weirdness that she’d sought to cure. It’s the “hard” play of a human owner—the use of Barbie as an avatar of a real person’s emotional crises—that gives Stereotypical Barbie the perspective to see what’s wrong with Barbieland, the wiles to take action to reclaim it for herself and the other Barbies, and the open-mindedness to see that she herself is in need of personal change. The uninhibited expression of Barbie’s human has taught Barbie, above all, the concept of freedom; and it’s no spoiler to note that the concept, here, meshes with an existentialist tradition that links such freedom to the inevitability of death. (In a magnificent meta-touch, Barbie has an encounter with the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, who, in real life, died in 2002; here, she’s played by Rhea Perlman.)

Far from being a feature-length commercial for Barbie, Gerwig’s movie puts in bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Instead of projecting their own imperfections or thoughts onto the doll, girls have been socialized to strive for an impossible doll-like perfection in their own lives. Barbie can be anything in Barbieland—a doctor, a President, an astronaut—but only because Barbieland is a frictionless Brigadoon. There’s no Fox News in Barbieland, no political demagogy, no religion, no culture. Any girl who plays with Barbie and imagines that she can do anything will discover, eventually, that she’s been the victim of a noxious fantasy. Playing weird with Barbie means ascribing the tangled terms of one’s own environment to Barbieland, one’s own conflicts to Barbie. It means turning Barbie human—into a character whom a child can use to give voice to an inner life, in the second person, when her first person feels stifled or repressed.

“Ordinary”: pay attention to the arrival, in “Barbie,” of that word, which reverberates like a tuning fork through the entire story, conveying longing for the day when a woman’s life doesn’t demand heroic struggle against societal limitations and contradictory demands. (The movie features a fervent monologue on the subject, built of familiar talking points that are energized by the fast and furious indignation of the speaker, Sasha’s mother, a Mattel employee played by America Ferrera.) The idea inflects Gerwig’s aesthetic, too, in a way that’s made clear, again, in the contrast between her filmmaking and that of Wes Anderson, the current cinema’s preëminent stylist. Anderson’s films borrow copiously from pop culture without making films of pop culture; his rigorous visual compositions set the action at a contemplative distance that keeps one eye on history and the other on the future. Gerwig, by contrast, is out to conquer the moment, and her visual compositions reflect this immediacy. Her images (with cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) offer, in effect, a mighty sense of style without a corresponding sense of form: they teem and overflow, because they’re meant not to be limited to the screen but to burst out and fill the theatre and take their place in the world at large. She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and thereby to transform viewers’ relationship to it and to render that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic. Her art of reinterpreting society’s looming, shiny cultural objects, in the interest of progress, dramatizes the connection between playing in a child’s doll house and on the big screens of the world. ♦

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'Barbie' review: Sometimes corporate propaganda can be fun as hell

Aisha Harris

Based on one of America's most emblematic pieces of intellectual property, Greta Gerwig's Barbie starring Margot Robbie, above, was never going to be just a movie, because Barbie was never just a doll. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Based on one of America's most emblematic pieces of intellectual property, Greta Gerwig's Barbie starring Margot Robbie, above, was never going to be just a movie, because Barbie was never just a doll.

At some point long before the film was unveiled to us critics, Greta Gerwig's Barbie became more than just a movie based on one of America's most emblematic pieces of intellectual property. Maybe it kicked off in the wake of oh-so-many memes , or in being pit against another highly-anticipated movie deemed its aesthetic and ideological opposite in a silly box office showdown. Then again, nearly every retailer catering to femmes has jumped on this bandwagon , too, either directly or indirectly. (My inbox and Insta feed are currently flooded with weeks' worth of shameless promos for blazing hot pink and fluorescent items I'll never wear; even my local barre studio is getting in on the action with a forthcoming Barbie-themed class.)

What to know about the 'Barbenheimer' double feature frenzy

In any case, Barbie is officially and unequivocally The Moment™, The Vibe™, The Toy™ so many of us suddenly wish to play with again, even if it's been decades since the last time. It was never going to be just a movie , because Barbie the doll was never "just a doll"; its creator Ruth Handler had grand ambitions for this free-spirited plastic woman, ones which, famously, haven't always aligned with the public's perceptions. Gerwig's offbeat technicolor fantasy (co-written with her partner, Noah Baumbach) builds upon this historic push-and-pull to imagine a more harmonious ideological relationship between the brand and the consumer of today.

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Go see 'barbie' and 'oppenheimer' in theaters — doubleheader or not is your call.

That doesn't make the movie's existence as a corporate propaganda piece any less fraught – Mattel Films is a producer – but to its credit, Barbie is eager to at least try confronting its own conundrums. And let's be real: sometimes, corporate propaganda can be fun as hell.

Cleverly riffing on the " dawn of man " sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey , the opening scene positions its product as the ultimate game changer in the doll universe, expanding the playtime horizon for young girls beyond the maternal default. The film's cheeky unseen narrator voiced by Helen Mirren channels the ghost of Handler (and, perhaps, Chaka Khan ) by noting Barbie can be anyone and everyone: a doctor (Hari Nef), an author (Alexandra Shipp), a president (Issa Rae), brunette, Black, and so on.

After months of marketing, memes, and a sense of momentousness, we unboxed the Barbie movie: It is both a delight and at times, too much. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

After months of marketing, memes, and a sense of momentousness, we unboxed the Barbie movie: It is both a delight and at times, too much.

Her symbolic malleability and ambition have led to a sort-of utopia called Barbie Land, where every version of Barbie lives blissfully in their own perfect Dreamhouse. There are many versions of Ken, too, though he's merely "superfluous," an accessory of lesser importance than Barbie's many flashy outfits or prized convertible. Patriarchy? Where? (We'll find out soon enough.)

The main Barbie is Stereotypical Barbie, played with verve and bite by Margot Robbie; she spends days at the beach and evenings throwing slumber parties, while awkwardly side-stepping the persistent advances of Ryan Gosling's Ken – "just Ken" – much to his chagrin. One night, in the middle of a fabulous, elaborately choreographed ensemble dance number, she's suddenly overcome by "irrepressible thoughts of death" she can't shake off, try as she might. Those thoughts give way to other wonky occurrences that upset Barbie's perfect world, which in turn set her and Ken on a journey to the very imperfect real world. There she searches for answers from her human owners, a jaded tween named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera), a Mattel employee.

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This rundown only begins to touch on the myriad of ideas and metacommentary funneling throughout Gerwig and Baumbach's Barbie vision, which is both a delight and, at times, a bit much. The jokes are plentiful, and the cast, which also includes Kate McKinnon as – who else? – Weird Barbie and Will Ferrell as Mattel's unnamed CEO, looks as if they're having a blast. This is most true of Gosling, whose handsome himbo, deeply insecure about Barbie's indifference toward him, is the movie's secret weapon and an unsubtle, pitch-perfect rumination on American masculinity. Gosling makes Ken more than "just Ken" – he's an instantly recognizable dude, exaggerated enough to fit in at Barbie Land, and relatable enough to evolve as a character apart from his far more famous and beloved counterpart.

Ryan Gosling makes Ken more than "just Ken." Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Ryan Gosling makes Ken more than "just Ken."

American masculinity will never not be ripe for ribbing, but conflict inevitably arises in considering Barbie 's blunt self-critiques, sealed as they are with Mattel's approval. Stereotypical Barbie is rendered exactly as her name suggests: blond, thin, [presumably] straight, and Margot Robbie ... i.e., the first image that likely comes to mind when anyone thinks of Barbie, as she herself proudly admits early on. Pointing this out is subversive, to a point. For all the brand's exaltations about representing everyone – in recent years, to combat plummeting sales , Mattel has expanded the doll's shapes, shades, and facial features – the movie is also admitting that the symbol that still looms large is white and supermodel-esque. And there's a case to be made that Stereotypical Barbie is a sly swipe at superficial white progressivism, and in particular, the #Girlboss era; I wouldn't put it past Gerwig, who's proven an astute thinker and filmmaker in her previous works.

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Yet Barbie 's limitations as a vehicle for substantial commentary are two-fold. For one, the execution is sometimes awkward, like a long, stilted monologue about how "impossible" it is to be a woman because, The Patriarchy. (Nevertheless, this speech elicited claps of approval from my audience, which I saw coming as soon as the character started going in on unrealistic beauty expectations.)

The other rub is inherent – critique can only mean so much when the entity under the microscope also happens to be the one writing (and cashing) the checks. Even the sillier and less overtly self-referential punches come off favorably for Mattel, breathlessly burnishing the brand's legend in nearly the same fashion as Marvel's ongoing exaltations of Stan Lee.

Issa Rae, Scott Evans, Simu Liu, Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa as Barbies and Kens. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

That being said, Barbie isn't just a movie that could never fully escape out from under the weight of its artistic compromises. It's a hoot, a feast for the eyes and ears. Sarah Greenwood's production design is sensorially astounding; Barbie Land is conceived as it's appeared in kids' imaginations for decades – both tangible (plastic shower, toaster, or car) and intangible (invisible water, toast, or motor). The makeup team confidently balances an essence of plasticity without drowning in it to the point of the uncanny. There are musical numbers and A+ cameos. (I'd love to get Lizzo to sing-narrate my life, too, please!)

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And did I already mention Ryan Gosling? RYAN. GOSLING. YES.

It's a movie that sits at an interesting inflection point in moviemaking and movie consumption, when almost every idea seems born from a pre-existing product. While it's easy to balk at – and believe me, I have; many, many times – the truth is, the tension between filmmaking and commerce has and always will be present in the work itself, be it a broad Hollywood blockbuster or the most idiosyncratic and Terrence Malick-y of endeavors. Something like Barbie lays that tension bare and exposed in its unabashed commercialism and heightened sensiblities, so that you can't not think about how its aims may be at odds with its execution.

But that's also part of what makes it such an interesting oddity to witness. It's a Barbie world you'll be more than happy to have visited, even as it confounds.

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• <i>Barbie</i> Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

Barbie Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

T he fallacy of Barbie the doll is that she’s supposed to be both the woman you want to be and your friend, a molded chunk of plastic—in a brocade evening dress, or a doctor’s outfit, or even Jane Goodall’s hyper-practical safari suit—which is also supposed to inspire affection. But when you’re a child, your future self is not a friend—she’s too amorphous for that, and a little too scary. And you may have affection, or any number of conflicted feelings, for your Barbie, but the truth is that she’s always living in the moment, her moment, while you’re trying to dream your own future into being. Her zig-zagging signals aren’t a problem—they’re the whole point. She’s always a little ahead of you, which is why some love her, others hate her, and many, many fall somewhere in the vast and complex in-between.

With Barbie the movie —starring Margot Robbie, also a producer on the film—director Greta Gerwig strives to mine the complexity of Barbie the doll, while also keeping everything clever and fun, with a hot-pink exclamation point added where necessary. There are inside jokes, riffs on Gene Kelly-style choreography, and many, many one-line zingers or extended soliloquies about modern womanhood—observations about all that’s expected of us, how exhausting it all is, how impossible it is to ever measure up. Gerwig has done a great deal of advance press about the movie, assuring us that even though it’s about a plastic toy, it’s still stuffed with lots of ideas and thought and real feelings. (She and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script.) For months now there has been loads of online chatter about how “subversive” the movie is—how it loves Barbie but also mocks her slightly, and how it makes fun of Mattel executives even though their real-life counterparts are both bankrolling the whole enterprise and hoping to make a huge profit off it. The narrative is that Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art , or at least just very smart entertainment.

Read More: Our Cover Story on Barbie

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too. The things that are good about Barbie — Robbie’s buoyant, charming performance and Ryan Gosling’s go-for-broke turn as perennial boyfriend Ken, as well as the gorgeous, inventive production design—end up being steamrollered by all the things this movie is trying so hard to be. Its playfulness is the arch kind. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute.

That’s a shame, because the first half-hour or so is dazzling and often genuinely funny, a vision that’s something close to (though not nearly as weird as) the committed act of imagination Robert Altman pulled off with his marvelous Popeye. First, there’s a prologue, narrated by Helen Mirren and riffing on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, explaining the impact of early Barbie on little girls in 1959; she was an exotic and aspirational replacement for their boring old baby dolls, whose job was to train them for motherhood—Gerwig shows these little girls on a rocky beach, dashing their baby dolls to bits after they’ve seen the curvy miracle that is Barbie. Then Gerwig, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran launch us right into Barbieland, with Robbie’s approachably glam Barbie walking us through . This is an idyllic community where all the Dream Houses are open, not only because its denizens have no shame and nothing to hide, but because homes without walls mean they can greet one another each day with the sunrise. “Hello, Barbie!” they call out cheerfully. Everyone in Barbieland—except the ill-fated pregnant Midge , based on one of Mattel’s many discontinued experiments in toy marketing—is named Barbie, and everyone has a meaningful job. There are astronaut Barbies and airline pilot Barbies, as well as an all-Barbie Supreme Court. Garbage-collector Barbies, in matching pink jumpsuits, bustle cheerfully along this hamlet’s perpetually pristine curbs. This array of Barbies is played by a selection of actors including Hari Nef, Dua Lipa, Alexandra Shipp, and Emma Mackey. The president is also Barbie—she’s played by Issa Rae. (In one of the early section’s great sight gags, she brushes her long, silky tresses with an overscale oval brush.)

Barbieland is a world where all the Barbies love and support one another , like a playtime version of the old-fashioned women’s college, where the students thrive because there are no men to derail their self-esteem. Robbie’s Barbie—she is known, as a way of differentiating herself from the others, as Stereotypical Barbie, because she is white and has the perfectly sculpted proportions and sunny smile of the Barbie many of us grew up with—is the center of it all. She awakens each morning and throws off her sparkly pink coverlet, her hair a swirl of perfectly curled Saran. She chooses an outfit (with meticulously coordinated accessories) from her enviable wardrobe. Her breakfast is a molded waffle that pops from the toaster unbidden; when she “drinks” from a cup of milk, it’s only pretend-drinking, because where is that liquid going to go? This becomes a recurring gag in the movie, wearing itself out slowly, but it’s delightful at first, particularly because Robbie is so game for all of it. Her eyes sparkle in that vaguely crazed Barbie-like way; her smile has a painted-on quality, but there’s warmth there, too. She steps into this role as lightly as if it were a chevron-striped one piece tailored precisely to her talents.

Barbie also has a boyfriend, one Ken of many Kens. The Kens are played by actors including Kingsley Ben-Adir and Simu Liu. But Gosling’s Ken is the best of them, stalwart, in a somewhat neutered way, with his shaggy blond hair, spray-tan bare chest, and vaguely pink lips. The Kens have no real job, other than one known as “Beach,” which involves, as you might guess, going to the beach. The Kens are generally not wanted at the Barbies’ ubiquitous dance parties—the Barbies generally prefer the company of themselves. And that’s why the Kens’ existence revolves around the Barbies . As Mirren the narrator tells us, Barbie always has a great day. “But Ken has a great day only if Barbie looks at him.” And the moment Robbie does, Gosling’s face becomes the visual equivalent of a dream Christmas morning, alight with joy and wonder.

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You couldn’t, of course, have a whole movie set in this highly artificial world. You need to have a plot, and some tension. And it’s when Gerwig airlifts us out of Barbieland and plunks us down in the real world that the movie’s problems begin. Barbie awakens one morning realizing that suddenly, nothing is right. Her hair is messy on the pillow; her waffle is shriveled and burnt. She has begun to have unbidden thoughts about death. Worst of all, her perfectly arched feet have gone flat. (The other Barbies retch in horror at the sight.) For advice, she visits the local wise woman, also known as Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the Barbie who’s been “played with too hard,” as evidenced by the telltale scribbles on her face. Weird Barbie tells Robbie’s confused and forlorn Barbie that her Barbieland troubles are connected to something that’s going on out there in the Real World, a point of stress that turns out to involve a Barbie-loving mom, Gloria (America Ferrera), and her preteen daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who are growing apart. Barbie makes the journey to the Real World, reluctantly allowing Ken to accompany her. There, he’s wowed to learn that men make all the money and basically rule the land. While Barbie becomes more and more involved in the complexity of human problems , Ken educates himself on the wonders of the patriarchy and brings his newfound ideas back to empower the Kens, who threaten to take over the former utopia known as Barbieland.

By this point, Barbie has begun to do a lot more telling and a lot less showing; its themes are presented like flat-lays of Barbie outfits , delivered in lines of dialogue that are supposed to be profound but come off as lifeless. There are still some funny gags—a line about the Kens trying to win over the Barbies by playing their guitars “at” them made me snort. But the good jokes are drowned out by the many self-aware ones, like the way the Mattel executives, all men (the head boob is Will Ferrell), sit around a conference table and strategize ways to make more money off selling their idea of “female agency.”

The question we’re supposed to ask, as our jaws hang open, is “How did the Mattel pooh-bahs let these jokes through?” But those real-life execs, counting their doubloons in advance, know that showing what good sports they are will help rather than hinder them. They’re on team Barbie, after all! And they already have a long list of toy-and-movie tie-ins on the drawing board.

Meanwhile, we’re left with Barbie the movie, a mosaic of many shiny bits of cleverness with not that much to say. In the pre-release interviews they’ve given, Gerwig and Robbie have insisted their movie is smart about Barbie and what she means to women, even as Mattel executives have said they don’t see the film as being particularly feminist. And all parties have insisted that Barbie is for everyone.

Barbie probably is a feminist movie, but only in the most scattershot way. The plot hinges on Barbie leaving her fake world behind and, like Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit before her, becoming “real.” Somehow this is an improvement on her old existence, but how can we be sure? The movie’s capstone is a montage of vintagey-looking home movies (Gerwig culled this footage from Barbie ’s cast and crew), a blur of joyful childhood moments and parents showing warmth and love. Is this the soon-to-be-real Barbie’s future, or are these the doll-Barbie’s memories? It’s impossible to tell. By this point, we’re supposed to be suitably immersed in the bath of warm, girls-can-do-anything fuzzies the movie is offering us. Those bold, bored little girls we saw at the very beginning of the film, dashing their baby dolls against the rocks, are nowhere in sight. In this Barbieland, their unruly desires are now just an inconvenience.

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Fox is elevating this very bad 'Barbie' take

When I was 5 years old, my family happened to be staying at the hotel in California where Mattel was holding a closed-door meeting about the following year’s Barbie line . My parents caught wind of it and begged the meeting organizers to let us take a peek, because their daughter was an absolute Barbie fanatic. The woman we spoke to agreed under one condition: that only I, a child, would be allowed in. 

The diverse casting of the new film underscores what every Barbie girl has always known to be true: that she was whoever you needed her to be at any given time.

Sure, it’s possible they thought my parents were spies from American Girl who wanted to snag trade secrets, but I like to think they also knew it meant the most to me, a young person just forming her ideas about the world and using Barbie as a conduit for self-discovery. 

And that’s why it’s so scary to me now that, in light of the upcoming live-action Barbie movie, conservatives and religious fanatics are trying to limit what it means to be a Barbie girl. 

A 275-word blurb on a Christian film review site titled “WARNING: DON’T TAKE YOUR DAUGHTER TO BARBIE” would most likely have gone unnoticed had it not been for Fox News’ celebration of the moral panicky take. Thanks to its insatiable need to pounce on anything related to the mere existence of transgender people , a much wider audience was introduced to unhinged thoughts like “The new BARBIE movie forgets its core audience of families and children while catering to nostalgic adults and pushing transgender character stories” and “These studios perform best when they make movies that promote pro-family and biblical values.”

Much of this anti-LGBTQ sentiment stems from the casting of trans actor Hari Nef as “Doctor Barbie” in director Greta Gerwig’s imagining of the iconic doll’s world. In a land of pure pink-hued fantasy, this was somehow a bridge too far.

Nef’s casting was met with little pushback or attention when it was revealed last year . It wasn’t until April, when she posted on Instagram about how much the role means to her, that the usual suspects crawled out of their bigot bunkers to crank the faux-outrage machine.

Right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Daily Signal disparaged her casting, and commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin purposely misgendered her. To them, Barbie is a cisgender, heterosexual woman, and any suggestion otherwise threatens to break their fragile world views.

“Me and my girlfriends — okay, yeah, me and my other transgender girlfriends — we started calling ourselves ‘the dolls’ a couple of years ago,” Nef wrote in her Instagram post, along with a photo of herself dressed as her Barbie character. “Maybe it’s a bid to ratify our femininity, to smile and sneer at the standards we’re held to as women. … ‘Doll’ is fraught, glamorous; she is, and she isn’t. We call ourselves ‘the dolls’ in the face of everything we know we are, never will be, hope to be. We yell the word because the word matters. And no doll matters more than Barbie.”

While the title character is played by white, thin, blond actor Margot Robbie, the naysayers are ignoring the fact that about a dozen other actors in the film have also been honored with the character name Barbie. “Saturday Night Live” alumna Kate McKinnon, a queer comic and actor; Issa Rae, a Black writer, actor and producer; Ritu Arya, a British actor of Indian descent: It’s no coincidence that these women were cast to play not Barbie’s friend but Barbie herself. Robbie is whom you might classically think of as the physical embodiment of Barbie, but these other actors are presumably treated as equally legitimate versions of the doll.

The inclusive casting is a direct result of Mattel’s objective of making Barbie more representative, not just the vision of some liberal Hollywood director: Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz told CNBC last year that the company very intentionally brought on Gerwig to create a fresh vision of Barbie based on the new brand direction, which came after some missteps, like creating a line of diverse “Role Models” for International Women’s Day in 2018 who were all impossibly thin . 

“Barbie is very much more than a toy,” Kreiz said. “And more than a doll. Barbie is a cultural icon, a pop icon. And this movie is really shaping up to be what we believe would become a societal moment.” 

Kreiz’s comments last year came in the weeks following the introduction of a Barbie in the likeness of trailblazing transgender actor and activist Laverne Cox.

In celebration of her very own Barbie, Cox explained to People magazine the doll’s importance in her journey to self-acceptance. “I begged my mother for a Barbie doll and she said no because I was assigned male at birth,” Cox said. “And when I was in my 30s, I was in therapy and telling my therapist that I was denied the opportunity to play with Barbie dolls. And my therapist said, ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and what you should do for your inner child is go out and buy yourself a Barbie doll.’”

So Cox went out and bought one and told her mother about her purchase. “And that first Christmas after that, my mom sent me a Barbie doll,” she said. “And she’s been sending me Barbies for Christmas and for my birthday.”

The diverse casting of the new film underscores what every Barbie girl has always known to be true: that she was whoever you needed her to be at any given time. She tried on different jobs for size, never put limits on her potential and always had a great time trying new things. She inspired kids to imagine their dream house, dream car, dream date and offered a blank canvas on which to project their fantasies, whether they be President Barbie presiding over a Cabinet meeting or making Ken and Barbie hump each other. 

“One of the trailers said, ‘If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.’ And it is so true,” plus-size actor Sharon Rooney, who plays Lawyer Barbie, recently told Glamour UK . “It’s for everyone. And Barbie’s for everyone because Barbie has everything. And that’s why I loved her growing up because I didn’t look like Barbie. Well, I do now.”

And that’s what kills Fox News and Ben Shapiro and all the other people looking for any reason to discourage people from seeing the film: that they can’t gatekeep something as culturally influential as Barbie. Unlike actual American women whose bodies they’ve managed to impose controls on, Barbie remains beyond their grasp. 

Marisa Kabas writes about politics, media and gender and their many intersections. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, HuffPost and The New Republic, and she writes a newsletter called  The Handbasket . She is based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Shakira’s Sons Hated ‘Barbie’ Because It’s ‘Emasculating,’ and She Agrees: ‘I Like Pop Culture’ That Empowers Women ‘Without Robbing Men of Their Possibility to Be Men’

By Zack Sharf

Digital News Director

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Shakira graces the cover of Allure magazine and holds nothing back when asked about her thoughts on “ Barbie ,” the Greta Gerwig-directed blockbuster that topped the 2023 box office with $1.4 billion worldwide and earned eight Oscar nominations, including best picture. The music icon said she somewhat agreed with her two sons who strongly disliked “Barbie,” suggesting that it was a piece of pop culture that robbed “men of their possibility to be men.”

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“Just because a woman can do it all doesn’t mean she should?” the interviewer asked.

“Why not share the load with people who deserve to carry it, who have a duty to carry it as well?” Shakira answered.

Shakira’s interview is not the first time a public figure has perceived “Barbie” as emasculating. The fantasy comedy ruffled the feathers of some conservative figures  during its theatrical release, with podcaster Matt Walsh condemning it as “the most aggressively anti-man, feminist propaganda fest ever put to film.” Bill Maher later slammed the film as “man-hating.”

Gerwig, who also co-wrote the “Barbie” script with Noah Baumbach, weighed in on the backlash in an interview with  The New York Times in which she said she never expected such a response.

The backlash prompted other celebrities to speak out in support of “Barbie,” including Marc Maron.

“The fact that certain men took offense to the point where they, you know, tried to build a grift around it in terms of their narrative is right wing [explicative],” Maron said on his podcast. “It’s so embarrassing for them. I mean, so embarrassing for them. Any dude that can’t take those hits in that movie, they’ve really got to look in their pants and decide what they’re made of. I mean, Jesus Christ, what a bunch of fucking insecure babies.”

Shakira is making the press rounds in support of her new album, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran.” Read her full Allure magazine cover story here .

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Margot Robbie's New Film Look Is a Big Departure from  Barbie  — See Her Bangs!

The upcoming film marks her first major acting project since 'Barbie'

Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.; BACKGRID

Margot Robbie is saying goodbye to Barbie 's signature blonde locks with a new makeover!

On Monday, April 8, Robbie, 33, was spotted on the set of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey rocking long honey-blonde hair and wispy bangs sitting just below her eyebrows.

The upcoming film marks her first major acting project since Barbie and finds her starring alongside Colin Farrell .

While plot details have yet to be revealed, it is described as "an imaginative tale of two strangers and the unbelievable journey that connects them," per Variety . Kogonada, who directed Farrell in After Yang , is directing the movie, which was written by The Menu 's Seth Reiss.

It's no surprise that Robbie was okay with transforming her look for the new film, as she's often been one to fully immerse herself into her characters.

The actress previously wore curly, light brown hair for 2018's Mary Queen of Scots and dark-colored hair to film David O. Russell 's Amsterdam in 2021.

Most recently, Robbie brought outfits from the iconic doll's past to life on the red carpet during her Barbie press tour.

"We're finding Barbie references from decades past and just doing it really for the big Barbie fans out there, people who are actually collecting those Barbies. We're hoping to get them excited. We're pairing Barbie references with great designers," Robbie told PEOPLE in July 2023 during the film's premiere in Los Angeles.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

The movie star created unforgettable red carpet moments, including bringing the Day to Night Barbie to life at the film's Seoul, South Korea, premiere and paying homage to  the original 1950s Barbie  swimsuit at an event in Sydney, Australia.

Her stylist, Andrew Mukamal, told PEOPLE in March 2024 that they achieved picture-perfect looks after a 10-hour wardrobe fitting .

"I had a board where every city was mapped out. We knew exactly which looks, which Barbies and which references were archival, and everything was very specific for each destination," he recalled during an event celebrating the release of their collaborative book  Barbie: The World Tour, which looks at the behind-the-scenes of the process.

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Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up to date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

"That day, I had a huge studio in New York filled with everything Barbie and pink and fluffy and glittery that you could ever imagine," continued Mukamal. "Margot and I marathoned through 50 or 60 outfits, and every 30 minutes, one of the brands would come and [help] tailor the outfit that I had been working on for months already."

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Margot Robbie making ‘Monopoly’ movie following 'Barbie' success

'ms. monopoly' game pays women more than man.

Ms. Monopoly is listed on Walmart’s website for $19.99 and rated for ages 8 and up.

LOS ANGELES - Margot Robbie has her sights on another toy: Monopoly. 

The "Barbie" star and producer will be making a Monopoly movie with Lionsgate and Hasbro, the companies announced recently at the CinemaCon conference in Las Vegas. A packed house of cinema owners at Caesars Palace loudly cheered at the news.

On Wednesday, Lionsgate also announced they signed a deal with LuckyChap, the production company headed by Robbie, Tom Ackerley, and Josey McNamara, to produce the film.

According to the Associated Press, Robbie and LuckyChap, were the ones who got " Barbie " to the finish line after many years in development stagnation. The film topped the box office in 2023 with over $1.4 billion in ticket sales worldwide. 

LEFT: Margot Robbie, RIGHT: Monopoly game board (Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images for Warner Bros., Lynne Cameron/PA Images via Getty Images)

According to a release, Lionsgate extended its development rights to the multi-generational board game with its purchase of eOne, which was completed in December 2023. The movie is currently in development.

"I could not imagine a better production team for this beloved and iconic brand than LuckyChap," Lionsgate Motion Picture Group chair Adam Fogelson said. "They are exceptional producers who choose their projects with great thought and care, and join Monopoly with a clear point of view. We are tremendously excited to be working with the entire LuckyChap team on what we all believe can be their next blockbuster."

'Barbenheimer:' Barbie v. Oppenheimer

Will you see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Or both? LiveNOW from FOX's Tania Sims spoke with actor and director, Stefano Da Fre about the double feature and the latest on the ongoing actors and writers strikes.

It’s unclear how Robbie and the company will spin the story from the world of the classic board game, but LuckyChap said, "Monopoly is a top property – pun fully intended." 

RELATED: 'Barbie' star Margot Robbie paid off her mother's mortgage after finding success in Hollywood

"Like all of the best IP, this game has resonated worldwide for generations, and we are so excited to bring this game to life alongside the wonderful teams involved at Lionsgate and Hasbro," LuckyChap said.

This story was reported from Los Angeles.

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Kristen Wiig’s Aunt Linda Returns To ‘SNL’ For First Time In 14 Years

By Peter White

Peter White

Executive Editor, Television

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Aunt Linda returned for some new movie reviews.

Kristen Wiig ’s angry, middle-aged film critic was back on SNL ’s Weekend Update to give her hot take on Barbie and Oppenheimer .

Wiig has appeared as Aunt Linda three times before tonight including twice in 2006 and once in 2010, while she was a cast member of the venerable NBC show.

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In regards to Best Picture winner Oppenheimer , she called it “Nopenheimer”, directed by “Christopher Nothanks”. “Why would anyone make a movie about the person who invented the microwave,” she added.

Aunt Linda has also started watching television, “like everyone else”. She said The Bear had a “very misleading title”. “I thought it was going to be about bears living in the woods or at the very least a sitcom a very hairy gay man looking after his sister’s kids,” she said.

Watch the video above.

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'Civil War' review: Kirsten Dunst leads visceral look at consequences of a divided America

We see “Civil War” trending on social media all too commonly in our divided country, for one reason or another, and usually nodding to extreme cultural or ideological differences. With his riveting new action thriller of the same name, writer/director Alex Garland delivers a riveting cautionary tale that forces viewers to confront its terrifying real-life consequences.

“Civil War” (★★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) imagines a near-future America that’s dystopian in vision but still realistic enough to be eerily unnerving. It's a grounded, well-acted ode to the power of journalism and a thought-provoking, visceral fireball of an anti-war movie.

Played exceptionally by Kirsten Dunst , Lee is an acclaimed war photographer covering a fractured America: The Western Forces led by California and Texas have seceded from the USA and are days away from a final siege on the federal government. Lee and her reporting partner Joel (Wagner Moura) have been tasked with traveling from New York City to Washington to interview the president (Nick Offerman) before the White House falls.

After visually capturing humanity's worst moments, Lee is as world-weary and jaded as one can be. But after saving aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) during a Brooklyn suicide bombing, Lee becomes a reluctant mentor as the young woman worms her way into their crew. Also in the press van: senior journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), hitching a ride to the Western Forces military base in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Most of “Civil War” is an episodic odyssey where Lee and company view the mighty toll taken by this conflict: the graveyard of cars on what’s left of I-95, for example, or how an innocent-looking holiday stop turns deadly courtesy of an unseen shooter. Primarily, however, it’s a disturbing internal examination of what happens when we turn on each other, when weekend warriors take up arms against trained soldiers, or armed neighbors are given a way to do bad things to people they just don’t like.

'No dark dialogue!': Kirsten Dunst says 5-year-old son helped her run lines for 'Civil War'

Given its polarizing nature, “Civil War" is actually not that "political." Garland doesn’t explain what led to the secession or much of the historical backstory, and even Offerman’s president isn’t onscreen enough to dig into any real-life inspirations, outside of some faux bluster in the face of certain defeat. (He’s apparently in his third term and dismantled the FBI, so probably not a big Constitutionalist.)

Rather than two hours of pointing fingers, Garland is more interested in depicting the effect of a civil war rather than the cause. As one sniper points out in a moment when Lee and Joel are trying not to die, when someone’s shooting a gun at you, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on or who’s good and who's bad.

The director’s intellectual filmography has explored everything from ecological issues ( “Annihilation” ) to AI advancement ( “Ex Machina” ), and there are all sorts of heady themes at play in “Civil War.” “What kind of American are you?” asks a racist soldier played with a steady, ruthless cruelty by Jesse Plemons (Dunst's husband) in a disturbing scene that nods to an even deeper conflict in society than the one torching this fictionalized version. There's also an underlying sense of apathy that the characters face, with hints that much of the country is just willfully ignoring the conflict because they'd rather not think about it. But this hellish road trip also maintains a sense of hopefulness − via the growing relationship between Lee and Jessie – and is pretty exciting even with its multitude of horrors.

'You get paid a lot of money': Kirsten Dunst says she's open for another superhero movie

“Civil War” is a thoughtful movie with blockbuster ambitions, and while it does embrace more of a straightforward action flick vibe toward its climactic end, Garland still lands a lasting gut punch. He immerses audiences in the unpredictable nature of war, with gunfire and explosions leaving even the calmest sort on edge, and paints a sprawling canvas of an America forever changed. Thankfully, it’s just a warning and not a promise, using the movie theater as a public service announcement rather than an escape from the real world.

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Movie Review: In Alex Garland’s potent ‘Civil War,’ journalists are America’s last hope

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Nick Offerman in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Stephen McKinley Henderson in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows promotional art for “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

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The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland’s sharp new film “ Civil War, ” a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we’re invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing an impossible interview with the president.

Garland, the writer-director of films like “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina,” as well as the series “Devs,” always seems to have an eye on the ugliest sides of humanity and our capacity for self-destruction. His themes are profound and his exploration of them sincere in films that are imbued with strange and haunting images that rattle around in your subconscious for far too long. Whatever you think of “ Men ,” his most divisive film to date, it’s unlikely anyone will forget Rory Kinnear giving birth to himself.

In “Civil War,” starring Kirsten Dunst as a veteran war photographer named Lee, Garland is challenging his audience once again by not making the film about what everyone thinks it will, or should, be about. Yes, it’s a politically divided country. Yes, the President (Nick Offerman) is a blustery, rising despot who has given himself a third term, taken to attacking his citizens and shut himself off from the press. Yes, there is one terrifying character played by Jesse Plemons who has some pretty hard lines about who is and isn’t a real American.

But that trailer that had everyone talking is not the story. Garland is not so dull or narratively conservative to make the film about red and blue ideologies. All we really know is that the so-called Western Forces of Texas and California have seceded from the country and are closing in to overthrow the government. We don’t know what they want or why, or what the other side wants or why and you start to realize that many of the characters don’t seem to really know, or care, either.

This choice might be frustrating to some audiences, but it’s also the only one that makes sense in a film focused on the kinds of journalists who put themselves in harm’s way to tell the story of violent conflicts and unrest. As Lee explains to Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie, a young, aspiring photographer who has elbowed her way onto their dangerous journey to Washington, questions are not for her to ask: She takes truthful, impartial pictures so that everyone else can.

“Civil War” a film that is more about war reporters than anything else — the trauma of the beat, the vital importance of bearing witness and the moral and ethical dilemmas of impartiality. Dunst’s Lee is having a bit of an existential crisis, having shot so many horrors and feeling as though she hasn’t made any difference — violence and death are still everywhere. She’s also a pro: Hardened and committed to the story and the image. Her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) is more of an adrenaline junkie, chasing the gunfire and drinking himself into a stupor every night. There’s Jessie (Spaeny), the wide-eyed but ambitious newbie who is in over her head, and the aging editor Sammy (the great Stephen McKinley Henderson), wise and buttoned up in Brooks Brothers and suspenders, who can’t imagine a life outside of news even as his body is failing him. All are self-motivated and none of them have a life outside of the job, which might be a criticism for some movie characters but not here (trigger warning for any journo audiences out there).

The group must drive an indirect route to get from New York to Washington as safely as possible, through Pittsburgh and West Virginia. The roads and towns are set-dressed a little bit, but anyone who knows the area will recognize familiar sights of dead malls, creaky off-brand gas stations on two lane roads, boarded up shops and overgrown parking lots that all work to provide an unsettlingly effective backdrop for the bleak world of “Civil War.”

Dunst and Spaeny are both exceedingly good in their roles, effectively embodying the veteran and the novice — a well-written, nuanced and evolving dynamic that should inspire post-credits debates and discussion (among other topics).

Dread permeates every frame, whether it’s a quiet moment of smart conversation, a white-knuckle standoff or a deafening shootout on 17th street. And as with all Garland films it comes with a great, thoughtful soundtrack and a Sonoya Mizuno cameo.

Smart, compelling and challenging blockbusters don’t come along that often, though this past year has had a relative embarrassment of riches with the likes of “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer.” “Civil War” should be part of that conversation too. It’s a full body theatrical experience that deserves a chance.

“Civil War,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong, violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout.” Running time: 119 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

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A massive scam targeting older Americans who own timeshare properties has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars sent to Mexico.

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What would really happen if a civil war broke out? New dystopian movie depicts conflict in near-future USA

Experts discuss unlikelihood of actual civil war breaking out, but also how to survive one.

Cast of 'Civil War' joins 'The View," says the movie is a 'love letter to journalism'

The cast of "Civil War" joined the co-hosts of "The View" on Wednesday to discuss their new movie and explained that the film was a "love letter to journalism," as the heroes are journalists. 

Online conversations around potential conflict in the United States have gone mainstream amid the release of Alex Garland's "Civil War" film, with Americans questioning the probability of political upheaval and how they can survive the dire, though unlikely, event.

Ajit Shipekar, a data analyst with Straits Research, noted to Fox News Digital that director Garland has depicted a virus-caused pandemic, uncontrollable AI and societal warfare in his films and sees these issues as a reflection of current realities rather than predictions.

The "Civil War" cast told the co-hosts of "The View" on Wednesday that their new movie is a "love letter to journalism." The A24 film details the violent conflict in a near-future America following the secession of 19 states, although it's not made clear in the plot why they're fighting and explicitly doesn't have a "red states vs. blue states" framework.

The American Civil War, beginning in 1861, remains the deadliest conflict in the country's history, with approximately 620,000 deaths (approximately 360,000 Union casualties and 260,000 Confederate casualties).

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Debates have raged online about the likelihood of a second American civil war breaking out as depicted in the new A24 Alex Garland film.   (Photo by Murray Close/Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Matthias Merz/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Shipekar also noted that the military communications market was valued at $34.46 billion in 2021. It is projected to reach $48.3 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8%.

Given these statistics, Shipekar predicted that, unlike the Civil War of 1861, a hypothetical civil war in the future would not see a split into two opposing zones, such as Republican and Democratic, nor would it fall to "roving bands of anarchists and the like."

"In contrast, I think that various paramilitary groups and research groups, both those that are known as well as those that are secret, will come out, take over local or regional pieces of territory, and assert themselves as Medieval lords, propped up by any advanced military hardware that they may possess," he said.

While Shipekar believes there is a much higher probability of a natural disaster occurring versus another civil war in the U.S., he does not think the scenario is entirely impossible.

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"In a civil war scenario, civilians must prepare to reduce casualties and maximize survival," he said.

Shipekar said civilians should expect intentional blockage of water access and an overwhelmed healthcare system. He added Americans should equip gloves, eye and ear protection, masks and sturdy shoes, protect windows with plywood, stack sand or soil outside windows and walls to reduce blast fragmentation, train in victim stabilization and minimize mobile signals in areas with military presence to avoid targeting.

Kirsten Dunst (L) and Jesse Plemons attend the Los Angeles Premiere of A24's "Civil War" at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on April 2, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Getty Images)

Husband and wife Colton and Carrie, who run the popular social media account "Housewife Prepper" with nearly 100 million combined views, said people should prepare to live independently without the aid of other individuals in the community. That includes food for long-term storage, water, self-defense and a secure shelter.

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"Dress to blend in so you don't draw attention to yourself," Carrie said. "It's a war zone, pretty much. So, when people ask, at what point do you bug out? That's when you bug out, especially if you live in the city. You kind of realize money can't buy you things at that time and that's when learning to live in that self-sustaining way is important."

Colton said to look at population densities and find an area with low human activity. He also noted that people should have a spare gas tank. That way, if they are driving, they can bypass gas stations that may be full or under the control of a malicious group.

Carrie and Colton also said Americans should acquire an old-fashioned paper map to steer clear of major U.S. highways and have a solar crank radio as well as a battery backup power bank.

"You got to think about the seasons and the weather. So, if you're going up north, you want to make sure that you can stay warm in the wintertime. You want to have adequate water. So somewhere that's near, whether that's a lake or a river. You want to have some form of food source. If you are by a lake, maybe you learn how to fish, or there's somewhere you can hunt squirrels, small game, or even larger game, like deer and elk," Colton said.

The graves of a Union soldier with Confederate soldiers are shown at sunset at the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park April 7, 2015, in Appomattox, Virginia.  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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In the new "Civil War" movie trailer, actress Kirsten Dunst's journalist character provides one of the film's most potent quotes. The movie, which is rated R in part for intensely graphic violence, follows her and other media members on the front lines of the war's conflict that's torn the country apart. 

"Every time I survived a warzone, I thought I was sending a warning home. 'Don't do this.' But here we are," she says.

St. Joseph's College of Maine Philosophy Professor Jake Thibault told Fox News Digital that he also believes the true cost of war is its ability to erode humans' best qualities, leading to discrimination and violence.  

"In considering the specter of civil strife, we are reminded that our foremost duty is to cultivate peace and understanding, even amidst the throes of conflict. The true peril lies not in the actions of our neighbors, but in the erosion of our own humanity should we succumb to the tactics of fear and division," he said.

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Nikolas Lanum is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.

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