Movie Reviews
‘Barbie’ one-star reviews from ‘furious men’ become hilarious viral meme
This Barbie has thick skin!
The highly anticipated and marketed “Barbie” movie premiered on Friday and broke box office records as people across the country rushed to theaters to see the pretty in pink feminist film.
With an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the majority of viewers seem to have enjoyed the comedy, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie, but not everyone felt the Ken-ergy.
Poking fun at the haters, someone on Twitter (rebranded as X) scrolled through online comments of the movie to find one-star reviews and turned them into hilarious faux-branded memes.
“I took 1 star reviews of #Barbie from furious men on letterboxd and put them on the posters because it makes the film seem ever cooler,” @TechnicallyRon tweeted during the film’s opening weekend.
They took several angry comments about the film and placed them in a Barbie-esque font on a movie poster featuring a smiling Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken.
“An alienating dangerous and perverse film,” one poster read.
“The feminist agenda will kill us all,” another one has written across it.
A third insisted: “They won’t be happy until we’re all gay.”
“A pink acid trip that feels like being slapped by lots of confusingly attractive people,” another quipped.
The original tweet quickly went viral with more than 15.6 million views and inspired a plethora of other social media posts.
Elon Musk also took a hit at the comedy, tweeting: “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘patriarchy’, you will pass out before the movie ends.”
The billionaire CEO of Twitter was replying to a Barbie-themed meme making fun of his recent decision to change Twitter’s blue bird logo to “X.”
He joined the ranks of Ben Shapiro, who also detested the frequent use of the word “patriarchy” in “Barbie.” Shapiro first complained last week about the number of times “patriarchy” was uttered in the film.
“All you need to know about #BarbieTheMovie is that it unironically uses the word ‘patriarchy’ more than 10 times,” Shapiro posted on Twitter.
The conservative commentator also shared a video of himself setting some Barbie dolls on fire by throwing them on a grill.
Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s wife, Ginger, went so far as to call for a boycott of “Barbie.”
But the film gained critics even before it premiered. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz began calling the movie “Chinese communist propaganda” several weeks before it was in theaters.
The Republican began his criticisms after the film came under fire for its pro-China, on-screen representation of islands in the South China Sea that are disputed — and have been the subject of two separate military campaigns in 1974 and 1988 — between both Vietnam and China.
The film follows “Stereotypical Barbie” (Robbie) as she tries to make sense of feminism and patriarchy after leaving plastic Barbie Land and venturing into the real world to resolve her unexpected existential crisis.
Despite the hate, the opening weekend smashed records, raking in a whopping $155 million in the first three days of domestic ticket sales, according to the data aggregator ComScore. It was also the biggest domestic opening for a non-superhero film or sequel and it was the biggest North American debut for a female director.