Barbie will make money. I went to the theaters to see Mission Impossible and the parking lot is swamped. All the high school and college aged girls have been filling th theater for days to see Barbie. Dressed in pink, all dressed up. Dragging their boyfriends, with super betas showing up to watch it on their own. I have ladies on Facebook who are posting all about it, mothers with daughters, random gals. They are showing up like it is Twilight.
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That's what I got from all the guys I know who went see it as well.
Its a full Starship Troopers and Mad Max Fury Road situation. Where the thing they are trying to say is bad they make look awesome and every guy walks away fucking loving it.
They didn't just fail to be propaganda, they had the opposite effect so hard they are unironically making people talk about the good things Patriarchy has done in those terms. Something unthinkable beforehand.
I have an issue with Starship Troopers being compared to fucking Barbie.
Starship Troopers saying 'war is bad' is only half the context.
Starship Troopers was both an anti-war film and a pro-war film at the same time. It was intentionally built that way which is part of what makes it so damn enjoyable, because it both stays true to the source material and expands it to ensure a complete film gets told.
That's why both the 'anti-war' crowd and the 'pro war' crowd can appreciate it at the same time, because it gives them both exactly what they want without sacrificing content or quality for the other.
It's an incredible screenplay based off an exceptional book and achieves on purpose what you are attributing to Barbie doing incidentally. Barbie only does one half, it is incredibly difficult to do both.
I don't know where you got this from. The director has openly stated his intentions many times, including openly hating the source material and considering literally everyone who doesn't share his delicate liberal sensibilities fascist Nazis. Verhoeven isn't known for being subtle or having "both sides" nuances. Its also a terrible adaptation by any metric, even ignoring the thematic one as he literally said it was too boring and "right-wing" before settling on lampooning it entirely because "Muh Nazis."
I've in fact, never seen a single person but him consider it remotely competent anti-war other than "it tried to be." That's why they had to invent the "asteroid was a false flag attack" theory. Because its the only way to make the film remotely start to work as one.
Heck even the original writer, who was trying to do a fair adaptation and grapple with the thoughts the book is meant to provide admitted the entire center third of the book was useless fluff meant to preach and cut it out, instead replacing it with his own experiences of women having no interest in him (how this is relevant to the rest of the story is a mystery). Which is why we have the god awful romance triangle to begin with, it was shoehorned in to reduce the politics and after many rewrites functioned as well as everything else they are trying to satirize.
It is incredibly difficult to do both, which is why a zealot like Verhoeven didn't even come close. All he did, much like he did with Robocop, was create a cartoonish evil so ridiculous that people skipped all his "deep" thoughts about America being Nazis and instead were awed by the cool shit.
That's why the Barbie comparison is apt. Because it so desperately wants to be one side of an argument, and in doing so becomes such a parody of itself that its opponents love it instead. All its missing is a good source material being ruined by shoving that message in.
The entire theory is based on the idea of:
Which is logical, but has literally zero basis or evidence to it other than applying real world logic to a scifi movie at only one specific element.
You clearly haven't read the book. The movie is a parody. Sure, it's funny and a good movie, but it certainly tries to mock a decent book and its ideas. Not that the book's author had that much wisdom, but still.