Traditional tentpoles just aren't cashing in anymore. Marvel's chokehold at the box office is loosening; Pixar's lost its steam. What's a Hollywood exec to do except throw a wad of cash at some decades-old IP?
This year alone, we've had adaptations based on Beanie Babies, BlackBerry, Tetris, and Air Jordans. Some might even be called films! None, though, have arrived as freighted with expectation as Barbie: the candyland adaptation of the 64-year-old doll that is, depending on who you ask, either the reigning girlboss or the worst thing to happen to children since measles.
Barbie, per its slightly cloying slogan, is aimed at both camps. "If you love Barbie, this movie is for you," its trailer proselytises. Then: "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you."
For months preceding its release, Barbie's hype machine – simultaneously the most tireless and tiresome of any film in recent memory – has been ensuring its ubiquity, its utter monopoly over the cultural domain.
Spare a thought for the overworked and underslept PR peons behind the scenes: There are Barbie Xboxes, Barbie desserts, and Barbie burgers. There is a Barbie toothbrush set described as "the best oral beauty collection ever". The tube stop for a certain London arts institution has been renamed the Barbiecan.
All of it, of course, is drenched in a highly specific shade of pink: a hue used so abundantly on the Barbie set that there was a worldwide paint shortage.
Needless to say, this is a work inseparable from its promotion. For its Mattel masterminds – if not necessarily for its director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird; Little Women), who wrote the screenplay with her creative and romantic partner Noah Baumbach (White Noise; Marriage Story) – the brand is the point; an adaptation is merely an exercise in puffery.
So is it any good?
Well, it is certainly a movie – though it often plays like an extended advertisement, however tongue-in-cheek its screenplay may be.
Its narrative – which has remained notoriously mysterious throughout all of its frenzied marketing – splits time between two settings: There is Barbie Land, and there is the real world.
The former is a coastal idyll of lurid colour and beaming perfection. It is a Barbie oligarchy populated by dolls of all varieties: among others, a president (Issa Rae), a doctor (Hari Nef), a physicist (Emma Mackey) and a diplomat (Nicola Coughlan).
Barbie Land has eradicated the follies and foibles of human society; its inhabitants believe the real world is similarly utopian, constructed in their image. "Who am I to burst their bubble?" a narrator (Helen Mirren) intones.
Unmarred by outside intrusion, the Barbies roam around their isle in splendid harmony. Each male resident is relegated to second-class citizen: an Adonic himbo whose sole purpose in life is "just…beach", as put by Ryan Gosling's Ken, moments after he sprints full-speed towards a plastic ocean wave.
Like that wave, Barbie Land goes to great lengths to demonstrate its artificiality: The clothes sparkle with a CGI twinkle, characters float through the air, the sky is an uncanny shade of turquoise.
At the centre of it all is Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, who also conceptualised and produced this film), who wakes each morning to a cheery chorus of greetings from her peers.
No sooner have we been plunged into this Edenic setting than strange rumblings begin to emerge. Ken is disgruntled at Barbie's lack of reciprocal affection; Barbie deals with the first glimmers of existential dread. Dolls: they're just like us!
Barbie's world is crumbling: Suddenly, her milk is "expired", her once-arched soles are flat, and she has developed – quelle horreur! – a single patch of cellulite.
(It all feels eerily close in structure to last year's Don't Worry Darling – that other Truman Show-indebted film about a glitching fantasy land.)
Before long, Stereotypical Barbie is whisked away for a rendezvous with Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon): an oracle-slash-outcast, spiky in both hair and manner, who's been exiled to a house in the hills along with her pooch Tanner – based on a defecating dog toy that was discontinued by Mattel in 2006 for its choking hazard.
The real world, Weird Barbie deduces, is leaking into theirs. In an effort to "restore the membrane" between the two realms, Stereotypical Barbie – with a surprise Ken in tow – wends her way past desert highways and frosty mountaintops to arrive in Venice Beach, where the pair bear witness to all the depravities of this place called Earth.
It is here that the film grows unwieldy.
Gerwig, to date, has excelled at tales of relationship tension streaked with neuroticism. As an actor, she garnered a reputation for her downbeat and inept mumblecore heroines. Meanwhile, the titular protagonists of her Oscar-nominated Lady Bird as well as Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha – which she co-wrote – stake their claim in the world with a healthy, mercurial disregard for polite society.
As her star has grown, so too have her films: "Her ambition is to be … a big studio director," her agent told the New Yorker earlier this year.
Barbie, in this sense, is capacious to a fault. It's so abundant in scope that the film often sacrifices Gerwig's greatest talent: observing and replicating human dysfunction.
Barbie and Ken might be caricatures – and rightfully so – but so are the people they meet outside of Barbie Land.
The contrarian adolescent Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera) – Barbie's human owners – are so thinly sketched that they remain little more than ciphers for great tides of public opinion.
Sasha comes armed with every Barbie critique from the past six decades: she's promoting unhealthy bodies, she's an agent of consumerism, she's vapid and anti-intellectual. Gloria holds the exact inverse view; to her, Barbie is a bastion of aspirational womanhood who can – and should – shoulder the responsibility of representation.
Sasha and Gloria, inevitably, become entangled in Barbie's quest as she goes on the lam from her captors at a fictionalised version of Mattel. The mother-daughter duo spearheads a plot to reclaim Barbie Land from Ken, who, having tasted the spoils of patriarchy in the real world, has transformed into an Andrew Tate type – boxing gloves and all – and has brainwashed all the women around him into doting servants with brewski in hand.
It is mythical, operatic in scale.
But the film can't sustain such heaving plot demands, so unfocussed are its aims.
It is a film for kids that exaggerates its hammy antics and slapstick capers. It is an adult meta-comedy about the weight of womanhood – with a few throwaway lines about the Snyder Cut and Stephen Malkmus thrown in for good measure.
It is for the suits at Mattel – a studio with 45 toy adaptations currently in development, that makes $US1.5 billion in profit from Barbie annually, and indoctrinates any prospective filmmakers via a "brand immersion" experience. It is for reviewers, critic-proofing itself with increasingly tired asides and interjections to attest that yes, it is aware of Barbie's corporate associations.
It nods to camp, in all its aesthetic excess and fuschia hegemony. But the vision that triumphs is as straight and strait-jacketed as it ever has been, any attempts at diversity merely mirroring Mattel's own production line of Barbies – an endlessly iterating range of moneymakers designed to capture an ever-increasing sweep of minorities.
It winks at cinema nerds, proving its bona fides in a slew of visual references to Kubrick, Tati, Demy. But it aims for the general public, with its crowd-pleasing jokes, focus-grouped soundtrack, and one overlong monologue which plays like the best feminist manifesto of 2016.
By its own admission, it is a film for everyone – and therefore no-one.
For all its confectionary diversions, Barbie is a hardened attempt at wholesale appeal: as plastic as its candy-coloured sets.
Barbie is in cinemas now.