Successful Barbenheimer weekend in the books…while I don’t think I want to spend that much of my weekend in a movie theater again for a while, it was fun to get caught up in the hype of everything.
As for Barbie, it’s an overall very fun, solid movie. I was surprised to find it was more focused thematically than Oppenheimer and though it never reached the highs of Oppenheimer, it’s so consistently fun and breezy that there weren’t really any lows either. I do think everything was a little heavy-handed and could’ve been handled with more finesse and respect for the audience, but I’m guessing those were WB notes.
I do wonder who the target audience was for this. I found myself actually really gripped by the more reflective and serious scenes, but they seemed out of place next to the movie’s sense of humor…really goofy, irreverent, referential humor. It almost had the tone of a Scary Movie for a lot of it, which on one hand made it more entertaining but also sort of undercut the tone some scenes needed to be effective. I also don’t necessarily see the movie aging too well because of this. There’s a goofy, teen-oriented, meta-humor movie here that kept getting in the way of a more adult-oriented dramedy that (in an ideal world) would’ve gone into more detail about the patriarchy takeover and would have built up the human world’s characters more. I’m not sure which movie I would’ve preferred, but it didn’t quite stick the landing for either.
But at the end of the day, I laughed when there were jokes and I felt empathy when I was supposed to—I even learned something. Overall can’t ask for much more than that.