(Note: I highly recommend seeing both this film and Oppenheimer as a double feature. Both are heavy handed films that have characters going through an existential crisis and are consumed with thoughts of death. You would think these two films have nothing in common, but I'm dead serious - no pun intended.)

When your film has your narrator saying the word "feminism" in the first five minutes, you know it's going to be problematic.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with feminism and I consider myself a feminist. Some of my favorite films have feminist characters. I knew going in this film was going to be woke. I just didn't realize how woke till I saw it, which was kind of a disappointment anyway.

First off, don't let the cutesy pink marketing fool you. This is not a film for kids, but that happens quite a lot in Hollywood. For example, Drop Dead Fred was a film I saw when I was 10, but it was really for adults. But at least it wasn't woke. I felt kind of sorry for the little girls I saw wearing their pretty pink outfits and dresses knowing that probably much of the preaching against the patriarchy and lack of genitalia jokes were going to go over their heads.

Yep. I said what I said. It only gets worse from there.

Margot Robbie plays the titular Barbie who lives in Barbieland with all her fellow Barbies that can do it all and have it all. The Kens are kind of just...there. The main Ken played by Ryan Gosling, gets tired of being from friend zoned and taken for granted by Barbie. When Barbie starts to have thoughts of her own mortality, has flat feet, and cellulite, she is advised by Kate McKinnon (one of the few bright spots in the film as Weird Barbie) to go to the Real World to find the girl who's playing with her and make everything right. Ken decides to stow away in Barbie's pink Corvette. Both of them discover the Real World is not what it seems.

My biggest problem with this film was the constant preachiness, especially when Barbie and Ken go to the Real World, and it never really stops from there. I resented Greta Gerwig for "giving the game away". There's a way to talk about feminism without hammering it over the head and alienating half your audience, in this case men, but I doubt many men will see it. It's like that South Park episode when Randy makes a musical that explicitly talks about oral sex until he is advised to tone it down and hide the message in subtext. That's what Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach should have done with the story. This is a film that definitely skews toward a female audience. It needed to be more subtle with the messaging. I would have preferred a fun, silly, colorful Barbie film rather than having a woke agenda pushed on me. Unfortunately, that's the direction Hollywood seems to have embraced these days.

However, the visuals were bright, fun, and colorful along with the hairstyles and wardrobe. I liked that they filmed in the Venice Beach Boardwalk and other areas around LA. Despite the diversity of the cast, my mom was unhappy that she didn't see a Hispanic Barbie and Ken (even though we saw a white, black, and Asian Ken). If there were any in the cast, I didn't see them. America Ferreira and her daughter are indeed Latina, but that wasn't enough for her. She does have a point, though, but we could be wrong and missed them. Will Ferrell is wasted as the CEO of Mattel, but I don't care for him anyway, so it didn't really matter that I didn't see him much. Rhea Perlman did have a nice little part as the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler.

This film was very strange and I felt kind of alienated by it. Plus, the last scene of the film was anticlimactic and totally bizarre. I get the good intentions by the filmmakers, but it was way too preachy for me. Legally Blonde was the closest to a Barbie film up until this point and it was a feminist film that never felt like it was preaching to its audience. Elle Woods was a blonde Barbie type character who was underestimated because of her looks, but manages to showcase her intelligence and strength as a successful lawyer without the message of the story becoming too heavy handed and retaining the lighthearted playfulness throughout, which is what Barbie is missing. I think I'll just stick to that film instead.