I don't mean to get you too excited, but the newest clickbait trailer for a movie based on a 60-year-old brand just dropped:
Wow, that just looks so bad.
Which is really surprising, you know, because I figured a loud, unsubtle movie made for nostalgic Gen Xers and Millennials about characters that have already existed for decades would be top-shelf!
Let's go over what's obviously really lame about this movie:
- The 2001: A Space Odyssey sendup at the beginning. Boring, trite, overdone. Kubrick made that movie in 1968, which means it's almost as old as the Barbie product line itself. Younger viewers won't get the reference and older viewers have seen it parodied 3,500 times already. Completely played-out and unoriginal. So many movies these days are bereft of originality and just resort to clumsily standing on the shoulders of giants. Pathetic.
- The corny, garish set design. Of course, it all looks convincingly like a Barbie playset — big, loud, pink, plastic. That's the point. But you can imagine a more boring take on Barbie than just recreating the Malibu House on a budget of $100 million? Rumor has it that part of this movie will involve Barbie and Ken venturing out into the "real world;" if so, we can most assuredly expect an endless stream of lame jokes wherein the doll-people encounter things like toilets and one-story houses and kitchens that actually function.
- The LGBTQ/feminism vibes. This movie will almost certainly be hip-deep in LGBTQ stuff — gay dolls, gay camp jokes, whatever. It also looks like it will shoehorn some insufferable feminist dirge in there, as well. I mean the trailer opens up with little girls smashing open their baby dolls, literally splitting porcelain baby heads open on rocks. This is not a subtle message.
