→ December 24, 2023
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The Mission.

If you’re like me and are fascinated by geography – I would pore over maps and atlases as a kid, always finding something new and interesting, as if they were telenovelas – then you may be familiar with North Sentinel Island and its residents, the Sentinelese, one of the last ‘uncontacted’ tribes on earth. The island is part of the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, and is part of India, which patrols the waters around the island and prohibits anyone from landing on the island or trying to contact the Sentinelese, who have in fact been contacted, but very rarely, and in the last few decades only by sanctioned anthropologists … and one very deluded American.

John Chau was 25 years old and a rabid fundamentalist Christian who believed in the nonsense doctrine that anyone who had never heard the Gospel would be condemned to hell. He read about the Sentinelese people online – how he first learned about them isn’t entirely clear – and decided that God wanted him to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them. The Sentinelese are extremely hostile to outsiders, and a few years prior had killed two fisherman whose boat drifted ashore on their island. Chau made several visits to the Andamans and approached North Sentinel Island several times, making contact with its people, before they finally killed him too – sparking mockery online of this idiot colonizer breaking several Indian laws to go shout, in English, to people who wouldn’t understand him, about his own superstitions, even though these people are well known to shoot arrows at anyone who comes near their shores.

The Mission, a new documentary from National Geographic, tells some of Chau’s story, exploring his life to try to answer the question of why a seemingly intelligent young man, raised in some privilege, would do such a profoundly stupid – and likely suicidal – thing. It’s riveting and infuriating, a severe indictment of the evangelical circles in which John traveled and the various people who enabled him to do this illegal, dangerous, and frankly inhumane thing, but I don’t think it adequately answers that fundamental question of why.

The North Sentinelese have good reason to fear and loathe outsiders. They were targets for slavers who saw the Andaman peoples, many of whom appear to be descendants of African migrants from several millennia prior, as chattel. British colonial authorities would take a break from subjugating what is now India and Pakistan to treat the Andamanese as a sort of circus freaks, with one measuring the sizes of their crania and genitals in the name of “science.” Any contact with people from beyond the islands also introduced the Sentinelese to pathogens to which they had no immunity. Since Partition & independence, India’s government has largely protected the tribes of the Andamans, some of which have chosen, in a way, to assimilate with broader Indian society, while the Sentinelese remain apart.

Where The Mission succeeds is in its depiction of the history of Christian missionaries trying to convert these ‘lost’ tribes, including an endeavor in Ecuador in the 1950s where the Huaorani tribe killed five white missionaries, but further efforts eventually led to the conversion of many tribe members and the subsequent deterioration of their culture. One of the experts who talks on camera is the linguist and former missionary Daniel Everett, who went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã with his wife and children, but after several years lost his faith and became an ardent atheist, giving him a unique perspective on Chau’s religious mania and willingness to ignore all voices telling him not to do this terrible, dangerous thing. The film also interviews several of Chau’s enablers, including one group that specifically targets these uncontacted or low-contact tribes to spread the Gospel, regardless of impact on the people involved or risks to the missionaries, coming off very much like members of a cult. (Their leader claimed he posed no threat to the Sentinelese because we have antibiotics.)

Where The Mission falls a little short is in depicting Chau as anything more than a very naïve evangelical who started down this missionary path and didn’t seem able or willing to stop until he hit the bottom. His father is a psychiatrist who nearly lost his license for reasons that are only hinted at in the film, while his mother was the evangelical parent yet is barely mentioned here. It’s clear that at least some of his fervor came from his time at Oral Roberts University, one of the most evangelical and also one of the most homophobic/transphobic colleges in America, including one man, Bobby Parks, who was “Missions/Outreach Coordinator” at ORU until 2016 and still runs a nonprofit that uses soccer as a way to indoctrinate kids in refugee camps and other high-risk areas around the world. Parks appears to have been a Svengali to Chau, yet he declined requests to appear in the documentary or speak to its makers, so his exact role and level of influence is only implied. So how Chau went from a good student with a strong interest in the outdoors to a stark raving madman who hatched an intense months-long plan to invade North Sentinel Island remains unanswered.

I suppose my views on Chau and such efforts are quite clear, and I think he was both an aggressor and a victim here. I knew Chau’s story from this 2018 Outside story, which appeared in my links roundup on November 24th of that year, and which I think goes a little more into his own personal journey and at least asks more questions about how he got to that kayak in the Indian Ocean. (This Guardian story has more.) I know the documentary just left me fuming at how willing others were to waste Chau’s life, and how easily he fell into this downward spiral, where even his Christian faith, one founded on respect and love for one’s fellow man, led him to disregard the significant dangers he posed to the very people he was trying to save.

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→ December 18, 2023
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Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse.

I was one of the few skeptics when it came to the first Spider-verse animated film, the Oscar-winning 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which I thought got too much credit for interesting animation and some great cameos but still adhered too much to the traditional superhero fight scenes to resolve its plot. However, this year’s sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, is a banger. Not only do I think it’s going to end up the best animated film of the year*, it might be one of the best of all time.

* I haven’t seen The Boy and the Heron yet, and that’s already won some best-of-2023 awards as well.

We return to the story of Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino boy bitten by a radioactive spider, who discovers there’s a whole multitude of spiderpeople and even spideranimals throughout the multiverse, including Gwen Stacy, who we saw in the first film, along with some new characters who have formed a sort of transdimensional guild to try to maintain the various timelines and prevent the multiverse from collapsing. This film, like the first one, doesn’t worry too much about the cosmological implications and focuses on the story and characters – actually, it does better with the characters than the first film did – and plunges Miles right into a complex story that has some fight scenes but relies far more on character development. There’s a villain, The Spot, who of course has a very personal beef with the titular hero, although as the story progresses he fades somewhat into the background of the plot. If anything, it’s more of a mystery than a typical superhero plot, as something is wrong with the timelines and Miles is in a unique position to find out what’s going on.

The animation in the first Spider-Verse film was different from that in most animated films, mixing some hand-drawn elements with CGI, dubbed “2.5D” animation because it combined the 3D style of computer animation with the 2D style of traditional hand-drawn work. The innovation didn’t go beyond that, however, and at times it became a little tiring to watch because my eyes would struggle to figure out the perspective. This film really perfects the method, though, and both enhances it to give it that comic-book-plus feel while also exploring different artistic styles – each instance of the multi-verse, and each Spider-entity that hails from it, gets its own unique look and feel, making the entire endeavor a visual feast unlike any animated film I can remember. It’s not the ultra-realism of Pixar’s computer wizardry, nor the artistic marvels of Miyazaki’s work, but a cornucopia of colors, styles, and textures that would alone make the movie worth watching.

The story, however, is miles ahead – pun intended – of its predecessor. That film set up the main character, but the plot was garden-variety superhero stuff. We’ll have to see if the writers stick the landing in the sequel, but the story here is much richer, with more complexity to Miles’ character, some more depth to Gwen’s, and a plot that doesn’t depend on beating the bad guy up – in fact, they try that and it doesn’t work terribly well. I didn’t see the ending and cliffhanger coming, although I may be unusual in that bit, and even so I don’t think it would have altered my appreciation of the plot up to that point anyway. There’s some “how will he ever get out of this?” to it, but that part is uninteresting – of course he’s getting out of it – relative to the broader stories of how they’ll repair the timeline and stop the Spot. (An aside: Jason Schwartzman voices the Spot, and might have the best performance among the voice actors in the film. On top of his strong performance in Asteroid City, he’s fighting to change the opinion I’ve held of him since turning off Rushmore 20 minutes into it.)

My daughter, who has been a big MCU fan for years (although that’s tapering off), absolutely loved this movie other than the cliffhanger and long wait for the final installment, for almost all of the same reasons I did: the clever story, the two interesting characters, and the wildly innovative animation. I assume it’s going to win the big Best Animated Feature prizes this winter, although The Boy and the Heron might get a boost as Miyazaki’s farewell film (maybe), and I can’t argue with that. It’s at least a lot more deserving of the honors than the first film.

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→ November 25, 2023
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Wish.

Wish, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they’d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it’s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old.

The movie takes place on the island of Rosas in the Mediterranean, which seems to draw on Spanish, Italian, and Maltese cultures and architecture, where the population is ruled by a benevolent king named Magnifico. Before creating the kingdom, Magnifico lost his family to an invading tribe and chose to become sorcerer, and in so doing learned how to grant wishes. When Rosas residents turn 18 or emigrants become citizens, they give their greatest wish to Magnifico, who stores it in his castle for safe keeping. Once a month, he grants one wish of his choosing. Enter Asha, whose grandfather Sabino turns 100 the day of one of these wish ceremonies, and who wishes to become Magnifico’s apprentice, only to discover that he’s not the benevolent king he appears to be. Since it’s a Disney movie and you know things will work out in the end, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that Asha will lead the people of Rosas as they work to overthrow the tyrant Magnifico and free their wishes.

The story here has potential, and the ending is one of the better ones among Disney movies, at least incorporating the film’s themes of hope and community into a resolution that’s internally consistent. Getting there, though, is a real drag. Asha (Ariana Dubose) is a mostly one-note character, driven by good intentions without much depth or complexity, and she experiences zero growth or development over the course of the film. She wins by being good, and by being smart, but that’s it. She doesn’t have an arc so much as she has a straight line. Magnifico (Chris Pine) at least changes as the film progresses, and while it’s for the worse, hey, at least it’s an ethos. There’s something to be said for a villain who starts out as just a little bit evil and becomes all the way evil by the film’s conclusion, and who gets there for an entirely mundane reason – he’s corrupted by power. He wants something Asha has, but his story is ultimately one of absolute power corrupting absolutely. There’s more depth to his character than there is to Asha’s, and that’s one of the film’s main flaws.

It has more flaws, though, believe you me. It’s just not funny at all – there are a few decent sight gags, maybe, but the Comic Relief Goat (Alan Tudyk) is just painful because you know he’s supposed to get laughs and he doesn’t. I can’t fathom how this script got through the number of people at Disney who are involved in making movies without anyone pointing out just how devoid of humor it is. The music is also wildly disappointing; I would argue there are two decent songs of the seven originals in the movie, the rousing “Knowing What I Know Now” (which feels like a big Broadway number that might take you into intermission) and “This Wish,” which has some clumsy lyrics but solid music, and plays a key role in the story. Magnifico’s main song is dreadful, and “I’m a Star” feels like a deleted track from a Kidz Bop record.

Then there’s the fact that this movie is a 90-minute celebration of the studio that released it. Rosa’s seven friends map one-to-one to the seven dwarfs, without much embellishment or expansion. (Grumpy/Gabo is probably the best of the bunch.) There are direct and indirect allusions to past Disney films, many of which are just too obvious to be enjoyable – part of the fun of references and Easter eggs is finding them, but most of the allusions here might as well have pop-up bubbles pointing them out. Even the attempt to nod back to the classic Disney films with CG animation that evokes the hand-drawn style fails, because the characters look extremely flat and cartoonish.

Wish seems on pace to be the studio’s third financial flop in its last four, after last year’s Strange World (which I haven’t bothered with) and Raya and the Last Dragon (which opened in March 2021, so the pandemic hurt its box office). I don’t think commercial performance has any bearing on a film’s worth, but Wish seems to serve no purpose beyond making money. It’s a movie about how great Disney movies are, except it’s not great and it isn’t doing well at the box office. With a slew of great animated films this year, including the second Spider-verse movie, Nimona, and the upcoming The Boy and the Heron, Wish probably won’t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, which would mark the first time in sixteen years that two straight Disney Animation films missed the cut. Perhaps that’s as indicative as anything of how far the studio seems to have fallen.

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→ November 21, 2023
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The Killer.

David Fincher’s Mank was a passion project for the director, but despite its critical acclaim and awards, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable film, or even that interesting. His follow-up is both of those things, a neo-noir thrilled called The Killer that follows a hit man on his quest for revenge after a botched hit leads to an attack on his home and his girlfriend. (It’s exclusively on Netflix and in select theaters.)

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, whose real name we never learn; he uses a series of aliases that provide one of the movie’s best gags. The film opens with a long monologue from our antihero about the nature of his life and his work, all of it as he waits for his target to appear in Paris. The hit goes awry, and he’s forced to flee, but when he returns home he finds out that two people ransacked his (very nice) house in the Dominican Republic and violently assaulted his girlfriend. He works backwards from there to find out who the assailants were and who ordered the attack, and you can probably imagine what he does with each person he finds as he moves up the chain.

The Killer is all style and vibe, without trifles like character development or story arcs. You have to be on the wavelength of a genre film like this, just like you might with a mystery, and be comfortable with rooting for a ruthless, violent protagonist because he’s persuaded you that his cause is just. The opening scene is slow and meditative, but it’s probably three-fourths of the insight we’re going to get into the main character, because once he fires that single shot that sets the remainder of the story in motion, the plot never lets up.

One of the plot’s more curious aspects is that Fassbender’s character doesn’t kill everyone. He spares at least two people he encounters who he might have killed, one of whom wasn’t involved in the crime but could potentially identify him. He also doesn’t kill the dog, which is an interesting contrast to some of the people he does kill in what seems like … overkill is a poor word choice, I admit, but there’s one in particular that just didn’t seem necessary. Fassbender provides a voice-over through much of the film that makes us privy to his inner monologue, and thus to his personal ethos, and explains some of these choices, but there’s still some mystery left over to give you something to ponder after the film ends.

Fassbender, who had just one film credit between 2017 and this film, is superb in this role, entirely credible and chilling as someone with little to no moral compass and that ideal level of confidence that allows him to act like he belongs in every setting. The screenplay, by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, gives that character nearly all of the air time, threading the needle between exploring the character and keeping him at arm’s length. Most of the other supporting performances are solid but minor, other than Tilda Swinton, who plays another contract killer, where I can’t decide if the role is ridiculous, or if she’s just playing it that way, or if I’m just reacting like this because she’s Tilda Swinton and I expect this from her.

Only one of the many confrontations the Killer has with his various targets turns into a fight scene – the rest involve a lot of talking, and then a gun happens – and it might be a tremendous one. I have no idea, because that scene is so unbelievably dark that I could barely tell anything that was happening, including whether Fassbender was hitting or getting hit. (Both, obviously, but I mean more specifically.) It’s part of a well-documented trend in movies and TV towards making everything too dark to see, but in this case it may have ruined one of the film’s best scenes. I can’t say for sure.

I’ve commented before that I can tolerate violence in film if it furthers the plot, but not suffering as entertainment, which is generally the idea in “torture porn” and slasher films. There is some extreme violence in The Killer and a couple of the kills are stomach-churning, so while I won’t defend its use of violence, I will say that the camera isn’t playing it for entertainment or laughs. Fassbender’s character kills in service of the plot, and it’s up to us to decide if we’re comfortable with some of them.

This isn’t as serious a work as some Fincher’s other films, but it’s a detour into a genre I particularly like (neo-noir, not murder and mayhem), and the lead performance really anchors the film. There’s enough moral ambiguity that it’s not strictly a revenge thriller, but it offers plenty of revenge and plenty of thrills, along with the slightly inscrutable antihero that neo-noir demands.

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→ November 13, 2023
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Asteroid City.

I’m not a huge Wes Anderson fan, which I think is a key disclaimer if you’re going to talk about any of his films. I loved both his animated features and felt pretty close to that about Grand Budapest Hotel, but Bottle Rocket annoyed me throughout, and I turned off Rushmore after 20 minutes because I wanted to punch the television. He’s got a style, and clearly actors will go well out of their way to work with him, but you have to get on his wavelength and stay there for the length of a film, which doesn’t always work for me given his stilted dialogue and idiosyncratic ways of framing shots.

Asteroid City might have his most impressive cast ever, with at least three Oscar winners and twice that many more nominees, almost to the point where the value of a star cameo is diminished because you stop being tickled by the time Hong Chau (nominated last year for The Whale) shows up for five minutes. At the same time, the film requires so much of its actors because most of them get relatively little time on screen – and everyone talks so quickly, par for the Anderson course – and because, unfortunately, the story here kind of stinks. (It’s streaming on Peacock or available to rent on Amazon.)

The conceit behind Asteroid City is that we are watching a televised play within the movie, although the play itself shows up on our screens as a movie (rather than taking place on a stage, where we get some interstitial moments instead). The playwright (Ed Norton) and the host of the television series (Bryan Cranston) introduce the setting and, very briefly, some of the main characters, after which we are thrust into Asteroid City, population 78, a desert town in the American Southwest whose only claim to anything is that a very small meteorite hit the town and left a “crater” maybe slightly larger than a divot left by John Daly. In this town, there’s a convention for the Junior Stargazers science competition, and we meet several families, most of whom arrive with one parent and anywhere from one to four children in tow. The convention is hosted by Dr. Hickenlooper (a surprisingly normal Tilda Swinton) and General Griff Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), and after they give out the awards for the best projects, there’s a viewing using pinhole cameras, during which an alien shows up and takes the meteorite. Hilarity ensues. There’s also a group of grade schoolers led by teacher June (Maya Hawke), a weird country band led by Montana (Rupert Friend), and the hotel proprietor and the only resident of Asteroid City we meet (Steve Carell). Outside of the play, we get black-and-white shots of the playwright, the play’s director (Adrien Brody, so underutilized here), an acting teacher (Willem Dafoe), and an actress whose part in the play was cut (Margot Robbie).

Almost all of those folks do the best they can in very limited roles, with Wright and Hawke the real standouts, but the core of the movie is the relationship that forms between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and the actress Midge (Scarlett Johanssen, made up to look a lot like Annette Bening), and the one that develops between Augie’s son (Jake Ryan) and Midge’s daughter (Grace Edwards). Schwartzman is one of Anderson’s most frequent partners in crime, but he has dialed it way back here in the most likeable performance I’ve ever seen him give, even though Augie himself isn’t all that likeable – it’s Schwartzman giving depth to a father who’s, well, out of his depth on multiple levels. He’s also able to provide a strong foil for Johanssen’s performance as a troubled film star, one that could have overwhelmed a lesser actor in the opposite role. Schwartzman also appears as the actor playing Augie in the play in several black-and-white segments showing us the actor and Norton’s playwright or the actor discussing the play with Robbie’s character.

The script requires a lot of tolerance for Anderson’s stilted dialogue, and he pushes that too far at many points, including most of the interactions among the various prize-winning teens – other than the memory game they play while they’re all quarantined in Asteroid City by the military, which is one of the best scenes in the movie – and some of the dialogue from the side characters. It’s also just overstuffed with ideas, so that quirky bits like Hawke’s nervous, I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this teacher trying to teach astronomy to a bunch of elementary schoolers who just saw an alien, wash over the audience too quickly. It is coherent, but it is not cohesive, and by the time the last tourists pack up and leave Asteroid City, the lack of a real through-line to connect most, let alone all, of the characters overshadowed the many funny or clever bits scattered through the film.

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→ October 24, 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I’m a bit of an oddball for my age bracket when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve played the pen and paper game, while in middle school, and liked it but found the actual process kind of slow, and of course when you put a bunch of teenaged boys together in a room, they will begin to act like idiots at some point and the game becomes secondary. (They didn’t stay idiots, though; that group now has two successful lawyers, one of whom has defended death-row inmates; a senior VP at a big insurance company; and whatever I am.) I loved some parts of it, including the character creation, and thought others were slow. I did get very into video role-playing games, both within the D&D universe, such as the Pool of Radiance (which I never completed – I couldn’t beat the final boss, even when I tried to play the game again in my 20s), and without, like the Bard’s Tale and some Ultima Games. Regular readers know I became obsessed with the original Baldur’s Gate trilogy about twenty years ago, and I won’t try the newest game because I’m afraid I’ll disappear into it for days or weeks. So I have some nostalgia for the game, but it’s limited, and when people ask if I was a D&D player I generally answer with something like “not really,” because I don’t know the lore or the rules anywhere near like dedicated players do.

Thus I approached the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie (free on Amazon Prime) without any particular bias towards or against the film; I don’t think I was predisposed to like or dislike it, or to criticize it for any lack of fidelity to source material. I did worry it would be too fan-servicey, or corny, or maybe just boring because plenty of video-game stories lack the depth required for a two-hour film. D&D: Honor Among turned out to be a lot of fun, witty, fast-moving, a little too silly at times, but very enjoyable, and the rare film that left me hoping we’ll get a sequel.

Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who begins the film in prison with his comrade Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian fighter, after the two were part of a large robbery gone very wrong, which also led to Edgin’s daughter Kira going with one of the members of their crew who escaped the authorities, the thief Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). We see their parole hearing, where Edgin dissembles at length, waiting for one particular judge to arrive, allowing the script to give us Edgin’s and Holga’s back stories – he was part of the peacekeeper group the Harpers until a Red Wizard they’d arrested killed his wife, after which he teamed up with Holga, who became a sort of surrogate mother to Kira, and later Forge and the elf Simon (Justice Smith), a young mage who, like low-level magic users in D&D, isn’t good for much because he’s so inexperienced. When Edgin and Holga finally get out of prison, they find out that Forge is now Lord of Neverwinter, and perhaps not the welcoming old friend they expected to find. They reunite with Simon and draft the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifter who, we find out quickly, Simon is rather sweet on. Hijinks, magic, and combat ensue as they try to find the missing magic item they were after in the busted burglary that landed the two in prison, while also rescuing Kira and uncovering whatever Forge’s game is.

The story’s fine, although you can see in general where things are heading and the film doesn’t rely too heavily on big twists and plot surprises. It’s the characters and the actors who make this so much fun, notably Pine, who wisecracks like Michael Bluth with a bit more savoir-faire and less befuddlement at what people around him are doing. Pine sets the tone from the rambling monologues he gives to stall for time at the pardon hearing, making it clear that the script is going to lean heavily on humor and his personality, and less so on the lore of the source material – which is good, because I don’t think anyone needs a film about the 5e core rules set or lengthy soliloquies about critical hits and saving throws. His interplay with Rodriguez is very strong, as she’s doing a sort of Rosa Díaz/Cara Dune mashup that contrasts nicely with his “I’ve got this under control” smartass vibe. Smith has his moments as a supporting character whose importance increases as the story moves along – again, thematically consistent with the rules of the game – and it seems like the script sets his character and Lillis’s up for bigger roles in any future installments. Grant is a complete ham, but it works, and having some knowledge of his behavior over the years, including on the set of this movie, well, perhaps it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him.

Combat in role-playing games can be a slog for players, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still driven by probabilities whether through dice or cards or some other similar mechanism, which would not translate very well to screen or page. The combat sequences in Honor Among Thieves dispense with all of that – the characters just fight, mostly Holga, who can take out a whole army, although Simon plays more of a role as the party gains experience. It’s a subtle nod to the way the game is played without ever slowing down the overall story; the fights are entertaining, well choreographed, and, most importantly, quick. (There’s also very little blood or actual on-screen violence – it’s all cartoonish or out of sight, less violent than a typical Marvel movie.)

There are some clear plot conveniences here and a visit to the Underdark that raises all sorts of questions about architectural stability and sanity. I also wouldn’t call any of the character development or overall themes “deep,” as the script is happy to give us these four adventurers and allow their chemistry to keep things light and fun, which is this film’s greatest strength. I laughed quite a bit, and I was reasonably invested in the plot, even though I think anyone can guess the general outline of the conclusion. It’s a great, not too serious adventure film in a genre that doesn’t often get this treatment.

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→ August 17, 2023
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Barbie.

Barbie had already crossed the billion-dollar mark before I got to see it on Saturday, on top of weeks of positive reviews, hype, and discourse, which combined to both set a very high bar in terms of expectations while also likely predisposing me towards the movie a little bit because everyone seemed to like it – especially film critics and fans I know and respect. So bear all of that in mind when I tell you I pretty much loved this movie from start to superb-last-line finish.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script takes existing IP but does something wildly ambitious with it, turning a kids’ doll with very little lore or mythology other than the series of toys in the line’s history into a wide-ranging social commentary and satire on patriarchy, feminism, toxic masculinity, and consumerism, among other things. It’s also a visual feast, at least when the movie is in Barbie’s world, and packed with allusions, references, and entendres that appear to be double. (I was most partial to the Zack Snyder reference, although the Proust and Stephen Malkmus ones were close.) Aside from a slight slowing near the end of the film as the script grapples with how best to get the main characters to the finish line, it maintained its pace with quick wit and snappy dialogue that never talked down to the adults in the audience and provided plenty to keep the kids interested as well.

Barbie starts out with its titular character (Margot Robbie) in Barbieland, driving her tiny car, saying hi to all of the other Barbies, while an obnoxiously catchy song (“Pink”) by Lizzo plays. We also meet several Kens, including Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), and discover that in Barbieland, girls run everything, and the guys are just various flavors of eye candy, competing for the Barbies’ attention. Beach Ken is obviously in love with Robbie’s Barbie, who we find out later is Stereotypical Barbie, but she doesn’t really need him – he needs her far more. Everything is perfect, every day, in every way, until Barbie is plagued by a sudden existential dread and things suddenly aren’t so perfect any more, which leads to the actual plot of the story, where she ends up going to the Real World to find the kid who’s playing with her and putting all of these thoughts and problems into Barbieland. This leads to a rather rude awakening for Barbie; a massive epiphany for Ken, who sneaks into her car as she’s leaving Barbieland and then discovers the glories of patriarchy; and a problem for the executives at Mattel, who would really rather not have a repeat of the time Skipper showed up in Key West.

I cannot praise this script enough; other than the set design, it’s the strongest part of a very strong movie. Gerwig and Baumbach had to satisfy so many stakeholders and, I presume, mandates: make it funny, make it smart, make it appeal to kids and adults, make it look great, make it authentic to the limited source material, don’t denigrate the doll or the line or its history, and so on. It is often laugh-out-loud funny, with Gosling actually delivering many of the better lines, and when it’s not, it’s mining humor from satire, or just from wry observations.

The pace is also superb, as we’re barely into the movie, with about ten minutes of worldbuilding in Barbieland, before Barbie utters the out-of-character line that kicks the plot in motion. So many movies, whether prestige films or films built off outside IP, are 150 minutes or more; Barbie didn’t need to be, and it isn’t, coming in at about 114 including the credits. The result is a movie that’s packed without feeling dense, and that only slackens a little towards the end as the movie has to focus entirely on resolving the main storyline.

Gosling does kind of steal Robbie’s thunder, though, which is a little ironic for a movie that’s not just about her character but about feminism and the absurdity of patriarchy. He’s just so good as Himbo Ken – well, it seems like all of the Kens are himbos, but he’s especially dim – and the script provides him with more chances to flex. Barbie is dismayed and annoyed in the real world, but Ken thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever seen, and his reactions to little things like someone asking him for the time are priceless. The remainder of the cast is probably more impressive on paper than in the movie because there’s barely enough for anyone else to do. About half of the cast of the Netflix series Sex Education is in this movie, including Emma Mackey (Physicist Barbie), who is the best actor on that series and seems destined for superstardom, and Ncuti Gatwa (Artist Ken), who’s taking over as the Doctor in the next season of Doctor Who. Both stand out when they’re on screen here, but neither gets much definition. Simu Liu is very, very funny as Tourist Ken, Beach Ken’s main rival, playing an obnoxious dudebro version of the character, although it’s also a pretty two-dimensional role. Michael Cera might have the best supporting performance here as Allan, Ken’s best friend, whom Cera plays as every character Michael Cera has ever played on TV or in film – and it’s hilarious. If it’s not him, it’s Rhea Perlman, who is also quite wonderful but in a character that gives the film its most saccharine moments. Bonus points if you spot Lucy Boynton’s cameo; I missed it until the credits, and jumped when I saw the Sing Street actress’s name – and that of her character, which completes a great joke from within the movie.

Given the critical acclaim and commercial performance, Barbie seems likely to earn a slew of awards nominations this cycle … and win very few of them. It might be the best lock for any set or production design awards, followed by costume design, but this could be the sort of movie that has to be happy with the honor of being nominated. The dark horse category here would be the screenplay, where Gerwig – who I really, really hope gets a director nomination now after she was snubbed for Lady Bird and especially for Little Women – and Baumbach get points both for technical merit and artistic integrity. They chose a high level of difficulty and still succeeded, while also slipping in plenty of inside-Hollywood jokes to please that crowd. I’ll go on a limb and predict it gets eight Oscar nods: Picture, Director, Song, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Film Editing, Makeup/Hairstyling, and Costume Design. That’s not what I’m saying it will deserve – I haven’t seen any other contenders yet, with most of them still unreleased to the public – but a wild guess on what it will end up getting. I wouldn’t be the least bit upset to see Robbie or Gosling get a nod, although my gut says that enough voters will decide that the movie isn’t serious enough, the same way actors in genre films have had a hard time breaking through for nominations. Barbie totally captured me once the 2001 homage ended, and I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t end up among my ten favorite movies of the year.

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