Mattel devoted the best part of a decade to distancing itself from the playful parodic pop of “Barbie Girl,” the 1997 über-hit by Scandi dance group Aqua. A lawsuit, in fact. Why so? Simply because the song’s plastic fantastic lyrics named Barbie a bimbo. How times have changed. Unto a world in which self-awareness is now corporate currency arrives the Greta Gerwig directed Barbie. A film in which Mattel’s blonde bombshell is not merely labelled a bimbo but accused of setting back feminism a half century. Don’t be fooled. As business is business, the film serves to reframe the narrative. That was yesterday, today’s Barbie is a paragon of inclusivity. And yet, there’s still the odd dig here that rings contemporaneous truth. It’s a peculiar beast, this; hybrid in intent and far from the film you might be expecting.
For a film four years in the making, Dead Reckoning doesn’t half land with peculiar resonance. This is the seventh in the Mission: Impossible film saga and first of a two-part extravaganza. It’s a blockbuster concerned with the perils of artificial intelligence, released in sync with the launch of Hollywood’s biggest strike in sixty years. A strike pitted against exactly that threat. Moreover, here is a feature driven, in part, by the hunt for a mysteriously missing submarine. This mere weeks after the Titan’s disappearance gripped the globe. It’s enough to make even Tom Cruise wrinkle an eyebrow, were he not behind a picket line somewhere, of course. And yet, for all this talk of contemporaneous thematic severity, where Dead Reckoning really proves itself in step with audiences of the here and now is in its recognising today’s want for escapist spectacle. That it delivers in spades.
Looking back – almost three decades back – virtually nothing in the latest feature from Pixar could have been achieved at the dawn of computer animation. Certainly not with any credibility. In Elemental, the studio’s first all out cinema original since 2020’s Onward, flames lick the air with every smoking flicker. People made entirely of water osmose seamlessly in and out of photo real canals, while folk of bark and foliage sprout bright and casually stunning floristry from their branch pits. It’s as though one could reach forth and pluck petals from the screen itself. These days, Toy Story’s groundbreaking animation looks little more than child’s play in comparison. Elemental hasn’t the emotional gut-wrenchary of that original masterpiece but proves, twenty-seven films on, that Pixar still rides a wave of its innovative own even now.
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