The supporting cast includes John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O'Shea, Marcel Marceau, Claude Dauphin, David Hemmings and Ugo Tognazzi.

Having bought the film rights to Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella comics, producer Dino De Laurentiis secured a distribution deal in the United States between France's Marianne Productions and Paramount Pictures.

"[4] After Terry Southern finished writing Peter Sellers' dialogue for Casino Royale, he flew to Paris to meet Vadim and Fonda.

Southern enjoyed working with Vadim and Fonda, but he felt that De Laurentiis was intent only on making a cheap film that was not necessarily good.

According to Griffith, he "rewrote about a quarter of the film that was shot, then re-shot, and I added the concept that there had been thousands of years since violence existed so that Barbarella was very clumsy all through the picture.

[24] In a 1985 interview, he said that during production, he did not care about his original comic strip and was more interested in the film industry: "The Italian artists were incredible; they could build anything in an extremely short time.

[28] Other scenes involved hanging Fonda upside down in an enormous vat of oil and dry ice, and her stomach being skinned when being shot through a plastic tube.

For the scenes involving the Excessive Pleasure Machine, Fonda and Milo O'Shea were not told of explosions that would happen on set since the prop was rigged with flares and smoke bombs.

Film critic Roger Ebert, after visiting the set, wrote that the fan led to birds "losing control over natural body functions, so it was all a little messy".

[28] Vadim later stated in his memoir that Fonda "didn't enjoy shooting Barbarella", specifically that she "disliked the central character for her lack of principle, her shameless exploitation of her sexuality and her irrelevance to contemporary social and political realities.

[41] Barbarella received a "condemned" rating from the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which called the film a "sick, heavy-handed fantasy with nudity and graphic representations of sadism" and criticized the Production Code Administration for approving it.

[33] Following the success of Star Wars, Paramount theatrically re-released the film in 1977;[24] for this release, which was referred to in promotional materials as Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, the scenes of nudity were removed.

[49] Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly, Sean Axmaker of Video Librarian and Glenn Erickson of DVD Talk called Barbarella's Blu-ray transfer "breathtaking", "superb-looking" and "really good", respectively.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Unevenly paced and thoroughly cheesy, Barbarella is nonetheless full of humor, entertaining visuals, and Jane Fonda's sex appeal.

[54][55] According to Wendy Michener's review in The Globe and Mail, after the striptease scene "we are plunged back into the mundane, not to say inane world, of the spy thriller with a dreary overlay of futuristic science-fiction" and it "just lies there, with all its psychedelic plastic settings".

[56] Barbarella's script and humor were criticized; a reviewer in Variety described the writing as "flat" with only "a few silly-funny lines of dialog" for a "cast that is not particularly adept at comedy".

[57] Dan Bates wrote in Film Quarterly that "sharp satiric moments ... are welcome and refreshing but are rather infrequent",[58] and Renata Adler of The New York Times noted that "there is the assumption that just mentioning a thing (sex, politics, religion) makes it funny".

Variety's mainly negative review noted "a certain amount of production dash and polish" and, according to Derek Malcolm of The Guardian, "Claude Renoir's limpid colour photography and August Lohman's eye-catching special effects are what save the movie time and again".

[59] A Monthly Film Bulletin reviewer wrote that Barbarella's decor is "remarkably faithful to Jean-Claude Forest's originals", noting a "major contribution of Claude Renoir as director of photography" and "Jacques Fonterary's and Paco Rabanne's fantastic costumes".

Its shaggy gold rugs, impressionist paintings and spaceship were "unquestionably female in design compared with any of today's projectiles"; Barbarella is "no man-challenging superwoman, but a sweet soft creature who's always willing to please a man who's kind to her".

"[60] Bates' review concluded, "In the year that Stanley Kubrick and Franklin Schaffner finally elevated the science-fiction movie beyond the abyss of the kiddie show, Roger Vadim has knocked it right back down.

[49][50][61] While stating that Barbarella "hardly ranks with Blood and Roses or Charlotte as one of Vadim's best", Lucas says that "Whatever charm the film still holds is entirely due to its visual imagination and highly over-done, Felliniesque artifice".

Club's Keith Phipps, "Mario Garbuglia keeps throwing inventive visuals and remarkable sets at the heroine" but "the journey itself is an unrelenting trudge".

[62] About its sexual elements, Brian J. Dillard wrote that the film's gender roles were not "particularly progressive, especially given the running gag about Barbarella getting her first few tastes of physical copulation after a lifetime of 'advanced' virtual sex" in his review on AllMovie.

[64] Newman summarized the film as "cheerful, kitsch and camp", with "a succession of truly amazing fashion creations with all the confidence of a generation that thought sex was, above all, fun".

"[46] Similarly, Lucas declared that "Fonda's performance, which the silly persist in finding controversial or compromising, has dated better than 90% of her 'serious' work; without her centrifugal, wide-eyed presence and suspenseful costume changes, one gets the impression that the whole production might spin madly out of control and off the screen".

[88] Dino and Martha De Laurentiis signed on with writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who had worked on Casino Royale.

[88] Joe Gazzam was then approached to write a screenplay, with Robert Luketic directing and Dino and Martha De Laurentiis still credited as producers.

[94] Refn spoke about the show in 2016 where he discussed about having a greater interest on developing The Neon Demon than Barbarella, concluding that "certain things are better left untouched.

"[95] In 2022, Sony Pictures announced development on a new version of Barbarella, with Sydney Sweeney set to star as the titular character as well as executive produce.