Over-hyped and transactional: I've got Barbie fatigue

Greta Gerwig's film has a toothless self-awareness, all arched eyebrow and no bite, says Megan Nolan. And she is already over it

- Megan Nolan

I HAVE a childish reactionary habit of finding it impossible to engage with items of cultural mass popularity after they reach a certain point of total market saturation; when they have become as much about the surrounding discourse as about themselves. I've never seen Avatar or Inception, for instance, because in both cases I had absorbed enough opinions and aggressive hype that I was preemptively exhausted by the thought of actually watching them.

I can feel the same thing taking hold with the Barbie film. For months, every leaked photo or casting tidbit has sent the internet into overdrive. Then there's the day-glo visual opulence of the trailers and the positioning of Barbie in friendly competition with Christopher Nolan's new film, Oppenheimer. It seems I am not totally alone in this Succession's J Cameron Smith tweeted: "Is anyone else feeling bullied into being excited about the Barbie movie?"

Part of my inability to join the excitement is to do with an element of its appeal for many others: the ludicrously starry and packed cast, many of them actors I love. And yet something about the sheer volume of them feels oppressive, bringing to mind the strange transactional stunt casting of those awful anthology films like Valentine's Day or New Year's Eve, whose appeal lies solely in the number of A-listers willing to put in their 10 minutes.