The power of a strong feminist message in a popular film can stir quite a reaction, especially from a particular group of disgruntled internet users.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is the latest victim of such polarized responses.
While most moviegoers eagerly embraced the film, adorned in pink feather boas and sunglasses, a cohort of keyboard warriors opted for a different approach: hate-watching the summer blockbuster and unleashing scathing critiques online.
Here are some entertaining excerpts from these critics’ hilarious reviews of a seemingly harmless movie. But before we dive in, consider this a SPOILER ALERT!
The infamous Ben Shapiro wasted no time expressing his disdain on his YouTube channel, labeling Barbie as a “s**tshow” and ranking it among the worst films he’s ever seen.
Meanwhile, blogger Jim Schembri shared his take on Rotten Tomatoes, commending the film’s initial lighthearted and satirical tone.
However, he felt that the focus on patriarchy shifted the movie into a thinly veiled #metoo commentary, losing its comedic essence and resorting to excessive man-bashing and a confused attempt at addressing sexism.
Over at the same platform, Christian Toto chimed in, asserting that neither Margot Robbie nor Ryan Gosling could salvage a story entangled in a perceived “man-hating agenda.”
Taking the hilarity a step further, comedy writer Aaron Gillies, known by his Twitter handle @TechnicallyRon, cleverly incorporated some of these reviews from Letterboxd onto a movie poster.
The discontent didn’t stop there; IMDB harbored similar sentiments. One user, nhsiposm, criticized the film’s “radical views,” dismissing it as an “extended radical feminist diatribe” masked as a lighthearted summer blockbuster.
Another user, pat-394, denounced the movie as “shameful cinema,” reserving its appeal only for those subscribing to a specific ideological belief. For everyone else, the advice was to steer clear.
Amidst the myriad of critiques, jasonburnscorp deserves credit for coming up with the witty headline, “Barbage.”
While expressing dissatisfaction with the film’s content, he deemed it to be a mishmash of radical feminist themes intermingled with corporate propaganda, ultimately suggesting that Ken’s character was never given a fair chance due to the overarching narrative of male vilification.
Though some of these reviews may not entirely make sense, they do serve as a window into the intense reactions sparked by Barbie’s feminist message among a certain group of online users.
What were your thoughts on the movie?
