Barbie was a relentless attack on men with pro abortion imagery showing all men to be patriarchal, misogynistic, low intelligence, easily manipulated, greedy and violent. I cannot tell you how relentless it was, you have to see it to understand. If I was not at the drive in I would have walked out. My wife was appalled as well. We both felt sick when we left.
Here is a summary: It starts in Barbieland where the Barbies are in charge and the Kens are submissive. Stereotypical Barbie and White Ken go to the real world from Barbieland to find a girl that needs help. They depict the real world as a patriarchal misogynistic world where men rule everything and women are subjugated. White Ken sees this and learns from this "real" society. He goes back to Barbieland without Barbie and brainwashes the Barbies and institutes a patriarchal, misogynistic society that oppresses women. Barbie goes back to find this and manipulates the men into fighting a violent war between themselves so the Barbies can take over again. When this is done, everything is back to the way it should be. The Kens are submissive again and the Barbies are in charge.
Key Takeaways:
1. First scene bashed motherhood and literally had little girls bashing baby dolls heads on strollers, cribs and rocks to destroy them
2. Heard the word patriarchy at least 40 times.
3. All men acted like it was 1950.
4. The only "good" male in the movie was shown as meek and powerless.
5. Showed the Mattel board of directors as all misogynistic men when in actuality Mattel has 5 of the 11 board members as women.
6. All men were shown to be dumb.
7. The white Ken was shown to be a moron and the leader of the rebellion that brainwashed the Barbies into complying with an oppressive patriarchal society.
8. Long monologues of how women are oppressed and how hard it is to be a woman in a patriarchal society with no talk at all of any real issues men have.
9. Ken was "reformed" at the end of the movie depicting him as meek, submissive and powerless.
I wanted to like this movie hoping it was a fun movie with a good message for women and girls. It was worse than anything I could have imagined and a bait and switch. No trailer showed what the movie was really about. My 12 yo son will not be watching this movie. He would come out of it thinking that he is terrible just for being a boy. Instead of cleverly bringing up issues men and women have and have them work together to resolve or at least understand each other, they used hate and bigotry to get their view across.
Before you write this off as some kind of male fragility or something, take time to understand the movie or watch it. It was unfair and divisive.
