Consistently entertaining, imaginative, and occasionally wickedly funny, Greta Gerwig helms an audaciously original take on the iconic doll, fashioning a pastel wonderland with deeper, albeit crudely pushed, morals and ideas. Margot Robbie stars as Barbie, the stereotypical perfect doll whose carefree existence in the utopian Barbieland is one day disrupted, leading her eventually into the real world, accompanied by the hapless Ken, played by Ryan Gosling in a valiant attempt to drag character from caricature.

Baumbach and Gerwig's script is loaded with references and nods to many aspects of pop culture, pulling them off pretty successfully with the aid of Gerwig's direction, which matches the tone of the script perfectly, at turns breathlessly light and then scathingly precise.

The production design team in particular clearly got much of the funding, with lush and detailed sets, picture-perfect outfits, and enough pink to cause a temporary world shortage of the colour. Robbie in particular does a fabulous job of capturing the subtleties of inner struggles behind a perfect facade, and it is on her character that the movie finds its feet and produces sparks of deeper emotion. Gosling, meanwhile, delivers some of the best comedic timing and lines of the movie, and does his best to convince us that the script did not severely underwrite his role, or in fact the roles of everyone save the idea of womanhood.

For a movie which purports to deliver a nuanced take on the influence of Barbie and the implications of its commercial success in a world admittedly mostly governed by men, parts of the script come off as overly preachy and about as subtle as the amount of pink in this movie. This does detract from the entertainment factor, especially with the mild stakes and average pacing, meaning that when you're looking at it, it's nice to look at, but you could easily not be looking at it either.

Many of the ideas introduced are thought-provoking and interesting in the context of the meaning of humanity, especially in the first two acts. In the third, much of those ideas get resolved far too easily, and on a couple occasions, in a manner which undercuts the message of equality it purports to show.

There are some standout moments, especially a ridiculously funny and entertaining sequence featuring Gosling's Ken towards the end, and one or two impactful, quiet moments where Robbie and Gerwig gel together perfectly, but in between them is a vacuous fantasy that rests somewhere comfortably between bubblegum fluff and feminist hit piece.

Another thing to note is the music, which is superb throughout, and matched mostly by Gerwig's direction and her staging of some great sequences.

Never a struggle to watch, shot through with occasionally successfully executed ideas, it leaves one with a good feeling, but nothing as lasting as it wishes it could be.