Life is plastic and fantastic in the first Barbie trailer

Margot Robbie dons a great many outfits as the iconic children’s plaything in Greta Gerwig's technicolour dreamland.

Words

Charles Bramesco

@intothecrevasse

Every year’s movie calendar brings with it a slew of subplots, mini-narratives that accumulate and eventually cool into what we accept as history. This summer promises a resolution to one of 2023’s big ones, the Graduation/Curtis face-off of our time – by which we of course mean the impending box-office duel between Christopher Nolan‘s destroyer-of-worlds biopic Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig‘s plastic, fantastic movie treatment of iconic children’s plaything Barbie.

Can Gerwig, one of the few name-brand filmmakers in her generation making distinctive work at the studio level, best the reigning king of the thinking man’s blockbuster? Moreover, can she make it through Hollywood’s IP Factory with her sense of wit and personality intact? The first proper trailer for her salute to the game-changing dolly has arrived this morning, and offers an encouraging answer to both questions.

The trailer deliberately withholds the details of the plot, instead more focused on exploring Barbieland, a chipper dimension in which everyone appears as smiley and smartly attired as Barbie (Margot Robbie) herself — except, it seems, for our Ken (Ryan Gosling), fuming with jealousy over those competing for his gal’s affections. An adventure to the real world may be in the cards, if the road signs are to be believed, but there’s plenty of trouble in the paradise of Barbieland to go around. We’ve got a beach-off on our hands!

As a fleet of 24 character posters confirmed earlier, Robbie is not the Barbie, but rather Barbie, joined by Hari Nef, Emma Mackey, Dua Lipa, Sharon Rooney, Ana Cruz Kayne, and Issa Rae, while the posse of Gosling’s Kens includes Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, Scott Evans, and Ncuti Gatwa. Emerald Fennell also has a character poster of her own, as Midge, whose only defining features seem to be that she is pregnant and Midge. She’s Midge! And Michael Cera plays Allan. You know Allan. He’s Ken’s best friend.

Most intriguing of all, it appears that Gerwig has embraced the color-saturated artifice of digital filmmaking for an aesthetic that foregrounds its fakeness until it circles back to hyperreality, the same trick deployed by the Wachowski sisters in Speed Racer. That film was another big-swing attempt to make something clever and idiosyncratic from big-budget IP adaptation, consigned to the sad fate of a megaflop only appreciated with time. America wasn’t ready, but this time around, they just might be.

Barbie comes to cinemas in the UK and US on 21 July.

Published 4 Apr 2023

Tags: Barbie Greta Gerwig Margot Robbie Ryan Gosling

Suggested For You

Greta Gerwig: ‘I like the process of how a film becomes owned by different people’

By David Jenkins

The Lady Bird director espouses filmmaking as a team game and writing scripts inspired by personal memory.

Why Barbie and Oppenheimer will make the perfect cinema double bill

By Joshua Price

Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan are two modern auteurs with more in common than an upcoming summer release date...

Little Women

By David Jenkins

Greta Gerwig delivers one of the great modern literary adaptations with her second feature as writer/director.

review LWLies Recommends

Little White Lies Logo

About Little White Lies

Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.

Editorial

Design