With rather less than a month to go till its launch, the curtain is lastly beginning to peel again on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, largely due to a very nuts full-court press advertising and marketing scheme. However curiously, even after two trailers and a canopy story with Ken himself, the plot remains to be being saved underneath thicker wraps than your common Christopher Nolan film. A brand new Time cowl story printed this week, that includes interviews with Barbies Margot Robbie, Hari Nef, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, and Alexandra Shipp (along with Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz), offers us our most full sense of the plot of Barbie but.
Within the piece, author Eliana Dockterman notes that the film is “stuffed stuffed with concepts, and infrequently overwhelmed by them,” likening it to plucky blonde heroine classics corresponding to Clueless and Legally Blonde. Dockterman explains that the film’s motion kicks into gear when Robbie’s Barbie “begins to consider mortality” and all of a sudden begins experiencing bodily signs of growing old like sunken arches in her as soon as ballerina-level pointed toes. These modifications are what drive her and Gosling’s Ken to depart Barbie Land looking for a solution, which is the street journey we see them on within the movie’s trailer.
Their journey leads them to meta face-to-face second with Mattel executives, together with Will Ferrell as the corporate’s CEO, who “make disingenuous speeches about feminine empowerment” that appear like a rebuke of the hole company activism that manufacturers have seized on these previous couple of years. Robbie even admitted that there have been some conflicts with Mattell, and that the corporate’s president even flew to London to debate with she and Gerwig about one scene that the corporate “felt was off-brand.” (It’s unknown if the scene in query includes the fictional Mattel staff.) There’s additionally reportedly a scene the place younger individuals are crucial of the way in which that the unique Barbie design enforced unattainable magnificence requirements.
The Time piece will get into the prolonged historical past of makes an attempt at making a Barbie film, which has concerned a number of A-listers. Amy Schumer was concerned at one level, however departed the unique pre-Gerwig iteration over important inventive variations round its depiction of feminism. Even within the Time story, there look like variations of opinion over the movie’s feminism, with some at Mattel insisting it’s “not a feminist film,” however many actors expressing they really feel that it includes a vary of feminist themes. Having a various array of Barbies, from Rae’s president to Nef’s physician and Ritu Arya’s journalist, was one of many key elements in getting a number of the topline stars concerned.
“My fear was that it was going to really feel too white feminist-y, however I believe that it’s self-aware,” Rae informed Time. “Barbie Land is ideal, proper? It represents perfection. So if perfection is only a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anyone can get on board with that.”
