Barbie

➤Rated PG-13
➤ Theaters
➤ S3 / V3 / L4*

No matter what the ubiquitous marketing says, writer/director Greta Gerwig’s new movie Barbie is not for kids. And despite some fun and stylish elements, it’s not very good either.

The movie begins with an homage to the monkey scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with little girls smashing their baby dolls now that they’ve found the Barbie. The feminist message is pretty clear. Pretending to be a mother and playing with baby dolls is the kind of prehistoric mentality that the progressive Barbie doll ­supposedly freed girls from.

After the bizarre intro, the movie cuts to Barbieland, where all the different versions of Barbie and Ken live in harmony—mostly. In Barbieland, the Barbies rule, and the Kens merely serve as arm candy. The Barbies congratulate themselves on being good role models to little girls and bringing female empowerment and equality to the real world. Barbies and Kens spend their days on the beach and their nights at dance parties. Barbieland is an idyllic paradise until the Stereotypical Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, starts to worry about dying.

Dark thoughts aren’t Barbie’s only problems. She also develops flat feet and a patch of cellulite. To fix things, Barbie travels to the real world. Beach Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, who might be the best thing about this movie, decides to tag along.

When they get to the real world, Barbie and Ken are shocked to ­discover things aren’t what they expected. Barbie is horrified women don’t enjoy perfect lives of empowerment. Ken’s excited when he ­discovers a new concept called patriarchy. He’s always been subservient to Barbies, but the real world he’s found is a man’s world.

Ken brings patriarchy back to Barbieland, causing a huge mess. Stereotypical Barbie and the other Barbies, with the help of a Mattel employee, must tear down Ken’s new world and restore women to the top of the pecking order.

This is a very silly movie featuring choreographed dance scenes juxtaposed with philosophical ­discourse. The movie pretends to be satire, but it eventually devolves into earnest promotion of a feminist agenda. The notion that marginalized Kens would assert their rights could have offered an interesting payoff, but it goes nowhere, and when Ken experiences existential dread because he can’t define himself apart from Barbie, Gerwig resolves the tension with platitudes.

Instead of offering a reflection of what it means to be a human living alongside other humans, Gerwig falls into a clichéd existentialism in which life is essentially meaningless and it’s up to us to create our own meaning. Barbie begins her journey to the real world singing the Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine, which claims happiness comes from not thinking about who made you. Toward the end of the movie, Barbie meets her maker, who pretty much tells her the same thing.

The film includes some suggestive references about Ken and Barbie’s lack of anatomy and a bleeped out F-bomb. One of the Barbies is played by a male pretending to be a woman. That’s some irony in a movie about women freeing themselves from men, but it fits with the movie’s theme. Ignore what you were made to be and create your own meaning.

The angry feminism eclipses the fun in the second half of the film, with one character repeatedly delivering a rant about the double standards modern women face. Gerwig has a point here. Many of these ­double standards are real. But as with most of the movie, she misses the point too. She doesn’t see that some of these impossible standards weren’t imposed by the patriarchy, but by feminists who told women they should have unfettered sex, important careers, perfect families, and still have time for activism.

Gerwig’s answer to the difficulties of womanhood is to go your own way and embrace the imperfections of life. There’s a hollowness at the heart of this film. The kind of hollowness that can only be filled by seeking purpose in one’s Creator, a notion this film sadly rejects.

* Ratings from kids-in-mind.com, with quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high