I don't know how contrarian I am but I thought the movie was about an upside-down world where the women held all the power and the men were oppressed, and when the men tried to change things, the women reasserted their oppression as the rightful thing to do. To me, it's quite a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of feminism actually.
I felt they had to dumb down the ending for audiences and gave it an unnecessary homage to the creator.
My read was similar to yours. At least on the film I felt they actually wanted to make and instead only got to hint at. While the primary storyline is there about a woman’s struggle to promote feminism only to be told she’s disparaging the cause of women; I think the second story is more pessimistic. The scene where the men ask for a share of the political power and are explicitly denied is jarring and frankly outrageously unattended to in the end of the film.
The Ken’s are a metaphor for women and the feminist movement. The Barbies are the men. Which kind of fucking brilliant imo. But they decided to water it down and make the ending about Barbie’s individuality and a joke about her vagina.
On the most abstract level, trashing your moment in the sun to ditch your actual plan and instead make a joke about your pussy is pretty meta feminist though. /s?
Everyone who saw it and has basic comprehension abilities can hopefully understand the basic premise which is awkwardly explicitly stated: that bickering around the right and wrong way to do feminism is bullshit, harmful discourse.
Accusing a movie‘s portrayal of women of being sexist, especially a movie written by the person behind a billion dollar film about a woman trying to empower women who gets accused of being an icon of sexism, is well within the current dialogue of feminism.
It is in fact, a humorously ironically relevant argument.
Only if you're in that middle-class, ultra-consumerist "girl-boss" demographic that the movie is marketed/trying to appeal to. That message is largely lost at the margins, as is typical in "pretty, white feminism". You're ignoring the elephant in the room -- any empowerment message takes a back seat to the goals of selling tickets and "buy our shit".
It’s kind of crazy how many cliches you’re spouting that are directly addressed by the movie almost verbatim as if to imply that the movie was trying to pretend didn’t exist
It is incredibly relevant, because the specific criticism you had about the conflict of using Barbie as a consumerist symbol for feminism from a company run by men was a central part of the film.
It's Gerwig who claimed the movie is a feminist film and the critical reactions to the movie with regard to feminism are very mixed.