C’mon Barbie, let’s go party!

Screen writers investigate the hype around the upcoming Barbie film

GRETA Gerwig’s upcoming film Barbie is already taking the internet by storm, despite not being released until the end of July. From the ‘Barbiecore’ fashion trend consisting of bright pink clothing seen in 2022 following the drop of the first photos of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Ryan Gosling (Ken) in costume, to the more recent memes inspired by the colourful character posters (“She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”) it is clear that public expectations and hype surrounding this movie are very high.

The film follows Barbie as she lives in ‘Barbieland’, a seven-year-old girl’s fever dream complete with pink everything who, in a Truman-Show-esque turn of events, has an existential crisis and must go to the Real World to find out “the truth about the universe.” Barbie looks to be fun-loving, colourful and unapologetically girly, in a way not many major movies are, and with beach scenes, dance sequences and a star-studded cast and soundtrack, it is set to be a movie that screams ‘summer’.

Coincidentally, Christopher Nolan’s also star-studded and highly-anticipated film Oppenheimer (a biopic about ‘the father of the atomic bomb’) will come out on the same day as Barbie, the 21st July, and a fierce box-office battle between the two is expected. The stark contrasts between the films are obvious: happy, almost cartoonish Barbie versus dark and brooding Oppenheimer. With such different films debuting on the same day, it will certainly be interesting to see which comes out on top.

For me personally, a film doesn’t have to be deep, dark and depressing to be enjoyable, so I am very excited for Barbie and the return of fun-filled cinema that it will hopefully kick off. If successful, Barbie will show that these kinds of stereotypically ‘girly’ films don’t have to just be for children or teenage girls, and that femininity is something that should be celebrated, not scorned. In short, we can all be Barbie girls living in a Barbie world.

Lauren Walsh, Arts & Lit Editor

NOT only have we been given three trailers for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie — including a scene-for-scene parody of the iconic opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey — but a near-complete setlist of ‘Barbie The Album’ was also revealed on the 25th May. Expectations of the film being the hypercamp summer blockbuster we all needed were already high, and now a dream lineup of artists, including Charli XCX, Lizzo, and Nicki Minaj, solidifies the film’s already iconic standing. The album will also include a single from Ryan Gosling himself, called ‘I’m Just Ken’, which can only be described as high camp. While some grew up playing with the Mattel doll and watching the 2000s animated Barbie films, this film will be a liberating experience for many as the doll is brought into the modern mainstream whilst featuring a plethora of queer, POC, and plus-size actors and artists, including (but not limited to) Hari Nef, Ice Spice, Ncuti Gatwa, Lizzo, and Sharon Rooney.

Details of the film’s plot have been very limited until recently, as the nearly threeminute trailer showed more of Barbie’s existential crisis and journey to the ‘real world’, where she finds that living among humans is not an easy task. The message of ‘humans can be problematic’ may become labour- some and patronising, so I hope what we’ve seen in the trailers only represents a small part of the themes in the film. Despite this, taking a more existential slant is an exciting premise, especially as Barbie herself (as realised by Margot Robbie) is found in a Truman Show-esque situation as she and Ken venture outside the comfort of the wall-less dreamhouse. Questions of self and the nature of humanity are nothing new to Gerwig, with films like Lady Bird and Little Women as bold stories that ask these questions, so other than nailing that aspect, I’m sure we can expect nostalgia, dance sequences, and pink!

Jess Cadogan