Existence in Barbie Land, the utopian crimson paradise that’s house to life-size variations of each Barbie doll that has ever existed, is one lengthy birthday celebration. Barbie (performed by means of Margot Robbie) wakes up in her dream space each morning, hangs on the seashore all day with the opposite Barbies and plenty of admiring Kens, then hosts a ladies’ evening that’s one lengthy choreographed dance series. This is a lifetime of prescribed pleasure, a brand-managed universe the place not anything is ever allowed to move unsuitable and Barbie’s completely arched heels are by no means allowed to the touch the ground. Which is what makes it in particular humorous when she, mid-dance, asks aloud, “Do you guys ever take into consideration loss of life?” Report scratch.

So starts the motion of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a blockbuster journey that bakes a large Mattel-branded cake and tries to consume it too, poking a laugh on the political barriers of The usa’s most famed doll whilst additionally giving her a plausible hero’s adventure. Combining the meta jokiness with a heap of motivational sincerity is not any simple job, however Barbie is an excessively captivating good fortune, an odyssey of self-improvement for a plastic idol whose explanation why for being is to by no means trade, to all the time be the similar highest very best. As with Gerwig’s earlier two motion pictures—the wildly a success Woman Hen and Little Girls—it’s a artful meditation at the nightmarish puzzle of merely seeking to exist as a girl in society, handiest with extra Day-Glo outfits.

To begin with, it kind of feels that Barbie will likely be following a system set by means of different motion pictures about manufacturers, akin to The Lego Film and Sonic the Hedgehog, the place a personality from the emblem international crosses some dimensional barrier into our personal, blunders round, and tries to reckon with the miserable mundanity of truth. As Robbie’s Barbie (her complete identify is Stereotypical Barbie, to tell apart herself from the Barbies with jobs like Physician or President) is made to strive against together with her existential angst via a series of dramatic occasions, she is tasked with a quest to the true international to determine what’s unsuitable together with her.

Barbie’s favourite Ken (Ryan Gosling) tags alongside, in part in improve, in part as a result of his handiest serve as in lifestyles is to be close to her. While Barbie is the item that Barbie Land revolves round, Ken is distinctly missing in goal, many times remarking that his process is designated merely as “Seaside”—now not lifeguard, now not even swimmer. He’s simply Seaside Ken, eternally status at the sand in his board shorts, a grin frozen on his face. Gosling’s efficiency hilariously illuminates the shallow however intense anguish of the purposeless motion determine, a form of Toy Tale psychodrama given flesh and blood (despite the fact that Barbie does make it transparent that she and all her pals have handiest featureless bumps the place their genitals can be).

Learn: Can Barbie truly have all of it?

When you have even a tiny query concerning the laws of Barbie Land and the way it coexists with our truth, please drop them. Gerwig, who co-wrote the movie together with her spouse and common collaborator, Noah Baumbach, isn’t too hung up at the laws of transit between universes—simply know that it’s in some way possible for Barbie and Ken to hop between environments comfortably. What’s extra a very powerful is that, when confronted with our international, Barbie should cope with dual horrors: the conclusion that lifestyles for ladies isn’t the manicured, you-can-do-anything dream marketed by means of Mattel’s merchandise, and that many real-world ladies in reality resent her for representing an unattainable usual.

It might be really easy for this self-referential gambit to fall flat on its face: Barbie’s limits as an icon of feminism were broadly mentioned since her release, in 1959. Mattel’s deep involvement with the movie additionally turns out like an inventive sinkhole that’d be tough for Gerwig to triumph over, regardless of how arduous she strives to wink on the target audience. However by means of striking Barbie on our glum planet and forcing her to reckon together with her goal, Gerwig does in some way dig up some genuine profundity. Take away Stereotypical Barbie from Barbie Land and plonk her into Los Angeles, and he or she’s simply any other girl suffering to search out which means in a global that’s inherently adversarial to her very presence. Her real-life avatar seems to be Gloria (a ravishing efficiency from The usa Ferrera), a Mattel worker who’s racked with an identical doubts about Twenty first-century womanhood.

Ken, in the meantime, encounters a global that affirms and helps him (or no less than the hunky male frame he occupies), which fills him with a radioactive sense of empowerment. That is the place Barbie’s meta cleverness in truth intersects with genuine plot stakes: Gerwig neatly realizes that while a real-life Barbie would face handiest skepticism and critique, Ken is without equal empty vessel simply ready to be stuffed up with nonsense. However Barbie by no means descends into an inexpensive girls-versus-boys ultimate showdown; it simply reckons with the alternative ways self-image will get bought to us, the weary, prepared shopper, at the same time as the sector grows savvier and extra cynical. That it does so via brilliant musical numbers, acidic quips, and the fitting scoop of sentimentalism is the entire extra spectacular. Barbie is understanding, nevertheless it nonetheless has an constructive twinkle in its eye about how its protagonist may transfer previous folks’s projections of her. Finally, there’s no disaster that may’t be solved with a excellent dance birthday celebration.