The internet is losing its collective mind over Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, and that includes me. Right before dropping the trailer earlier this week, the official Barbie movie Twitter account also unleashed a series o🉐f images of its ensemble cast, and it’s a doozy.
The cast is absolutely stacked, with Dua Lipa (mermaid Barbie), Hari Nef (doctor Barbie), Issa Rae (president Barbie), and more playing various career-oriented Barbies, and a variety of male actors like Ryan Gosling, Simu Li♔u, and Ncuti Gatwa all playing, just simply, versions of Ken. Helen Mirren plays the narrator, and Will Ferrell, the Mattel CEO. Michael Cera, to my great surprise, is in the movie as Allan. Margot Robbie’s Barbie, according to her poster, is ‘everything’.
Do I have a clue what Gerwig is planning? No. Does Barbie have a coherent, meaningfꦆu🍸l plot? Who cares! From the opening shot of Robbie’s Barbie taking her high heels off and still being stood on her tip-toes just like the doll, I was sold. It looks, from the trailer, like Barbie wants to go to the Real World and Ken tags along without her permission. There’s a scene where she meets the Mattel CEO, a scene where Simu Liu and Ryan Gosling argue on a beach and threaten to “beach” each other off, and a whole ton of Barbies. All I really know is that the trailer is camp, and that’s all I need.
I’ve been invested in this movie from its first announcement, because I love Gerwig’s work, sparse as her directorial filmography currently is. But since the first teaser trailer dropped, I haven’t just been interested, I've been enraptured. It paid heavy homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s widely considered one of the most influential films ever made, but the Barbie movie’s trailer using 2001’s famous opening sequence as a template was not in my 2022 bingo card. I could write an entire academic paper on the usage of this sequence in the Barbie movie and the meta-joke of it all – Barbie, like the monolith, inspires ideas, evolution, revolution. Her cheeky wink leads little girls to search for a bigger world.
It was because of that first trailer that I began to be🍃lieve that Barbie isn’t going to just be a straightforward movie about a doll’s life. I generally have objections to directors and studios using existing IPs as a cash grab, but Barbie doesn’t seem to be one of them. It’s the first live-action Barbie movie to ever be made, features a huge, star-studded ensemble cast, and in its marketing makes allusions to having something more beneath the surface. Plus point, I can’t imagine we’re going to get a Barbie Cinematic Universe out of it, and for that I thank God.
We see a wealth of Barbies in the posters – Diplomat Barbie, Pulitzer-having Barbie, Nobel Prize in Physics Barbie. We get Supreme Court Justice Barbie, and Lawyer Barbie. Ken? He’s always just Ken, or another Ken, or, you guessed it, a Ken! Barbie has dreams. She has things she wants to do. She wants to see the Real World. From the trailer, it looks like Ken is just🌳 a hanger-on, clueless, competing to get the girl’s attention. Barbie has a whole life, and ideas. Ken just wants to be there. The Barbie movie isn’t about Barbie, it’s about women. Barbie is anything she wants to be. Barbie 🌌is everything.