Her boyfriend Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) wishes she paid him more attention but it's girls night every night.
One day after some intrusive thoughts things start to go wrong. She's informed by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) that out in the real world there's a little girl in trouble who needs her help and she must travel there to help. This comes as something of a shock as Barbie knows nothing about the real world.
"Hey everybody, do you ever think about death?"
Greta Gerwig takes the poison chalice of making a toy tie-in movie and manages to make one of the most significant movies of the last decade. This is the surprise the Lego movie was but more so.
If you look at it with a serious head on you can easily find fault with it. There is however no denying its significance.
There's the obvious feminist agenda that on paper is hyper preachy/shrill but it turns that into an asset and manages to simultaneously be more subtle with how being male in the modern age is also difficult. It should make ideas about purpose and the role you have in society come to mind for anybody who pauses to think but also doesn't burden the movie down with it.
It's a visual feast.
Robbie and Gosling carry it perfectly.
It's both a marketing piece and anti-consumerist at the same time.
Most significant however is that it does all this while having been watched by absolutely masses of people and having taken absolutely massive amounts of money. Proving things don't have to be safe as fuck to succeed.
The willingness from Mattel to allow this to happen is astonishing but I'm expecting has paid off handsomely. It literally slags off Barbies in the dialogue and has Will Ferrell doing his irritating idiot schtick as the Mattel CEO and they signed off on it.
It is a little bit overwhelmingly twee/preachy in places but that's exactly by design 10/10. If you find yourself getting irritated switch it off, it's not for you.