Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: Forecasting the entire film from the trailer alone
Barbie’s honest synopsis: Prepare to violently vomit into your popcorn bucket as you endure a cinematic waterboarding akin to being hungover while in charge of a toddler’s party down at the funfair. Along the bewildering way, Barbie must escape her plastic existence and enter the real world in order to fulfil a feminist allegory regarding objectification via a few comic quips about Ken’s lack of genitalia, shots of chiselled abs, and a roller-dance segment set to the Bee Gees.
That’s our best stab in the dark with this one. Of all the vague trailers released in this era of vague trailers, Barbie proves the vaguest of all… and that strikes me as perhaps not a great sign. Not to put a dampener on the buzz, but neither does Greta Gerwig describing the film as a potential “career-ender” and musing “where do you even begin? What would be the story?”
The hope is that Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach managed to reach a storyline before they got caught up in an endless stream of tedious jokes about every character being called either Barbie or Ken and filled proceedings with an array of comic dance numbers that feed off the sort of laugh whereby you go ‘omg, that’s funny because they’re a really famous star and they’re not usually like that and it’s fun because we’re now getting to see a daft side of them wearing something outrageous and losing their inhibitions in a choreographed environment’.
Those charming/tiresome jokes seem certain but what of the ever-elusive plot? Well, the glimpse of Barbie and Ken about to drive through the desert with a notable utterance of the famed line “I’m coming with you,” implies that the story may well be a venture into reality. That’s a journey that could prove cliched, but you’d have to also hope that there is enough pedigree involved with the project that some sort of satirical depth is brought in to add stark contrast to the gaudy sugar-coated beginning of the picture.
In this regard, you may well expect 80-90% of the film to be a sort of adult SNL parody of Toy Story with a few Charlie Kaufman-esque surrealist moments, and Britney-inspired dance numbers thrown in there too (after all, watching Michael Cera bust a move will be hilarious). Then, in a sudden slap of juxtaposed contrast, the indie filmmakers behind the feature will whisk it towards something they are more familiar with and provide a bleak closing 10% that says something profound about society, relationships in the real world and women being forced to live life on their tip-toes, literally.
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