It’s hard to believe that something as timeless as Mean Girls (2004) is already 20 years old this year. Seeing as I was a little girl in 2004, I was years late to the initial cultural phenomenon that is Mean Girls. I first watched the movie in 2015, over ten years after the fact, and loved it. I loved the story, the comedy, and the characters, and I would remain blissfully unaware of its subpar sequel in 2011 until I discovered and no, I didn’t like it.
Despite its age, Mean Girls would go on to become a bigger cultural icon as the years went by. While I didn’t like the sequel and nobody talked about it, time moved on, and it eventually got its own Broadway production in 2017, adapted by Tina Fey, the original screenwriter for Mean Girls. It ran from October 31st until its untimely end on March 11th, 2020, as the pandemic swept the world. It wasn’t until January 7th, 2021 that it was announced to be done permanently after 833 live performances.
Finally, the newest Mean Girls came out this year on January 12th, twenty years after its predecessor. It’s an adaptation of the Mean Girls Broadway musical coming to life on film. It definitely isn’t as beloved as the original, seeing as they’ve received lower scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic than the original, but I’m sure it’s fun and charming in its own right. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the new movie myself.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for twenty years, Mean Girls is about home-schooled high school student, Cady Heron, as she transitions from being home-schooled in Africa to a traditional high school setting. She has to learn the ways of high school life and adjust to this sudden change in her personal life. She first meets and befriends Janis and Damien, two outcasts of the school. However, things get even crazier when Cady is in the orbit of the mean girls, Regina George, the queen bee, with her sidekicks Karen Smith, and Gretchen Wieners.
Cady has a crush on Aaron, who was Regina’s boyfriend until they broke up, but when she catches Regina kissing him, she gets angry. With the help of Janis and Damien, they concocted a plan to get revenge on her and ruin her life, and part of that plan is for Cady to completely infiltrate the mean girls’ group. Cady pins the girls against each other, she gives Regina protein bars that make you gain weight but tells her it helps you lose weight and more devious schemes. This eventually backfires, as Cady becomes a bonafide mean girl herself, something Janis calls her out on. Regina eventually figures out Cady has been plotting against her and prints hundreds of copies of her burn book insulting all the girls in the school and throwing it in the hallways, making the school host an assembly for the girls to talk things out.
By the end of the movie, Cady eventually realizes what she did was wrong and that she didn’t have to be as nasty as Regina becoming herself again and even finds herself in an agreeable stance with Regina as the mean girls dissolve and find their true place in the school.
It’s full of hilarious moments and dramatic scenes and a fun watch for anyone to enjoy. Though there are a couple of jokes that don’t age well, like the line where an Asian student says a slur, the film is truly timeless and it’s become more recognizable than ever with its musical counterpart and the movie adaptation. It’s clear that Mean Girls has left its mark and will continue to for a long time.
