People from the real world have thoughts on Barbie
Barbenheimer Friday is upon us, which means that people who aren't paid to write about movies can finally weigh in on the films
If you woke up this morning feeling a little floatier than usual, it’s probably because, from this day forth, the world has forever changed. And no, we’re not talking about the atomic bomb movie, although, as you may have heard once or twice, that film opens today as well.
No, we’re obviously talking about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, this writer’s film event of the year (the decade?) and early box office favorite in the war of Physics vs. Fantastic. While early press screenings (and fabulous pink carpets) began rolling out on July 9 to glowing reviews from critics, it’s well known at this point that sometimes those first viewers of a film can be swayed by the rose-colored glasses of the whole experience (literally, in this case).
To get the full truth of the universe, then, it’s important to also take the real world—e.g. the Rotten Tomatoes audience score—into account. But at a whopping 90%, the truth is just about as glittery as we hoped. As Margot Robbie, John Cena, and Ryan Gosling have all been waxing for a year, people simply love Barbie.
Among the over 1,000 audience reviews Rotten Tomatoes aggregated to get their score, people hailed the film as the “biggest surprise of the year” and “literally perfect in every way.” As one commenter wrote: “Greta Gerwig, I love you. Thank you for my full circle moment, this movie made me feel understood… AI could not make something like this.”
Over on Twitter, users praised the film as “an ALL TIME CLASSIC… A movie you’ll be rewatching again and again and you’ll never get tired” and gave special shouts to Ryan Gosling for his “A+” performance and America Ferreira for delivering a “monologue… that I have not stopped thinking about.” In one user’s opinion, the film has “thought of all the jokes and criticisms you could possibly make already,” but some people are going to “HATE it.”
That largely does not seem to be the case on Letterboxd, where the movie is currently sitting at a 4.3 star average out of 5300 reviews. Popular reviews by “the film drunk” and “CinemaJoe” said of the film, respectively, “I cannot believe this is a real movie and not something just in my dreams,” and “Jubilant, but never comes off as corny. Moving, but never comes off as disingenuous.” User Zoë Rose Bryant also praised the film’s depiction of womanhood as follows: “what i didn’t know was how much barbie would mean – not truly, not fully. how much it would mean to me, to the women sitting to my left and right, to all of us.”