Barbie vs. Oppenheimer: Margot Robbie (left) and Cillian Murphy (right). finally hit theaters. The two blockbusters share a release date, but the pair's drastic differences — Margot Robbie plays the iconic Mattel doll in Barbie, and Cillian Murphy — the dazzling father of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer — have raised fan excitement to new levels.
The resulting social media phenomenon dubbed “Barbenheimer” has its own Wikipedia page and appears to have boosted the box office, with Odeon reportedly selling 200,000 advance tickets on a double receipt.
With Barbie set to make $110 million and Oppenheimer projected to make $50 million this weekend, chief film critic Robbie Collin delivers his verdict on film rivalry of the year.
Barbie review: Ryan Goh sling steals the show in most incredible triumph of the year ★★★★☆
Anthropologists believe there may be tribes living in the far reaches of the Amazon Basin who have yet to see the promotional campaign for the new Barbie movie, but for the rest of us, this damn thing has been hiding our eyes for weeks. So it's an unexpected pleasure to report that the Greta Gerwig film, while still at its core a summer comedy about the Barbie toy line, is far from the crude money grab that many of us feared. It's actually very bizarre, conceptually slippery, and often eerily funny.
A core of young Barbie fans will enjoy the silliness, the dance numbers and above all the bright colors – after two hours I walked out of the theater barely seeing. But the film was written for an older audience, and its pleasures are often quoted. Most of the time, you simply enjoy the metaspectacle in which Gerwig, whose latest film was a masterful 2019 adaptation of Little Women, frees herself and her stars from what initially looks like an inevitable corporate trap.
It opens with Helen Mirren's captivating narration, in which Mattel's official line (you can imagine being dictated to by Gerwig and her collaborator and partner Noah Baumbach in the boardroom) is taken to an obviously absurd degree. We are told that the very existence of this stylish toy that inspires women has solved all the problems that women face: thanks to Barbie, little girls in the real world now know what they can do and be anything, and Barbie Earth itself is a fragrant, female-oriented Eden, where every day is spent in a rictus of bliss.
The daily activities here look like they are dictated from behind the camera by a six-year-old child: that is, in the context of Barbie, they are amazingly realistic. Ken (Ryan Gosling), working on the beach, bounces off a wave while surfing and ends up in the hospital. But that night, in the middle of Dua Lipa's dance routine, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) asks her fellow Barbies, “Have you guys ever thought about dying?” – and it becomes clear that things are going dangerously wrong in the outer, human world where Barbies and Kens are (somehow) controlled.
Instead of contemplating metaphysics, the script simply sends Robbie and Gosling to Los Angeles, where Robbie's Barbie finds her dejected owners, Ariana Greenblatt's Sasha and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera). Meanwhile, Gosling's Ken, intoxicated by the pleasures of a society designed to satisfy the needs and desires of men, decides to bring back some patriarchy to Barbie Country, causing the whole place to quickly fall into disrepair.
This satirical aspect, which is more likely to resonate with older viewers than teenagers, is milked with enthusiasm and mischief. (There are jokes here that gleefully poke at a few male online hives.) Ken's vision of an ideal, male-centric society is rapturously nonsensical—think of Casio keyboards, Mortal Kombat arcade machines, and big plastic barrels of food additives with names like “Girth Juice.” not in the best possible way, Mirren cheers the filmmakers up by reminding them that the Wolf of Wall Street star is probably not the best choice if they want to get the message across. The compromise is accepted and you start laughing again: this is a movie that manages to eat strawberry blancmange and make fun of it spoon by spoon.Flat Feet: Margot Robbie with Other Barbie Girls Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Oppenheimer, review: Cillian Murphy dazzles as destroyer of mb worlds. But what you also realize, within seconds, is that it wouldn't have been possible without Cillian Murphy's eyes either.
Starring J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Murphy's distant gaze not only convinces you that he can indeed see the invisible force that crackles between subatomic particles, but also the most serious, most unforgivable consequences of his collapse on the world. During his quiet contemplation, his attention seemed to be attracted by a black hole at the far end of the galaxy; in moments of anger or tension, his irises could be crowns of two tiny cobalt mushroom clouds.
Those eyes may be the best way to sum up what Nolan, his cast and crew have achieved here: Oppenheimer is a film that works on the most intimate and cosmic scales at the same time. It is both a roller coaster and a chilling spiritual portrait; often a contemporary classic that only Nolan could have done, and only now, after a quarter of a century of overclocking.
Set simultaneously in two time periods – “Fission” in the struggle for the fateful Trinity weapon test of 1945, and “The Confluence” in its rumbling aftermath – the structure oscillates between Oppenheimer's lust to crack the known surface of reality and his horror at what he finds beneath it.
Early scenes of his student life show him devouring the works of Stravinsky, Picasso, T. S. Eliot: music, art and poetry divided into parts, releasing indescribable energy as visionaries emerge in these fields. In the Nolan Maximum movement, Oppenheimer positions his leading role as his logical heir, and his bombshell as the highest modernist work.
Playing Oppenheimer from age 20 to 50, the 47-year-old Murphy gives a glimpse of his life, imbuing Oppenheimer's body with gripping, nervous eroticism and his voice with a noir musicality that reminds you of Bogart. The film manages to make subatomic theory cold-bloodedly sexy – frankly, five stars for that alone – and infuse Nolan's characteristic ringing existential angst into its sex scenes.
Meanwhile, both in and out of the bedroom, the director's dialogue is strikingly elegant and crisp, giving us the measure of the characters within a single line.
Interview with Christopher Nolan
“Are you married to Dr. Harrison?” Oppenheimer asks his future wife, Kitty, played superbly by Emily Blunt, at a party. “Not really,” she replies casually.
On the waves and pulsations of Ludwig Göransson's glorious, remorseless music, the screenplay's sheer effectiveness allows ensemble members such as Benny Safdie as the constantly harassing physicist Edward Teller and Tom Conti as the likable but perceptive Albert Einstein to play luscious supporting roles in just a few scenes. But it also furnishes major second-tier players with material for indelible supporting roles: Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's lover Jean Tatlock and, most notably, Robert Downey Jr., who is at the height of his career as Lewis Strauss, the hawkish chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who increasingly objects to Oppenheimer's (belated) remorse.
Downey's character becomes increasingly important in the film's third act, Hitch. A Kokian hunt disguised as a trial that ruthlessly tests Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States. But by this point, the two moments that most viewers had been waiting for had already arrived – Trinity's test explosion and the famous line from the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds”).
Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Credit: Universal Pictures
The exact context in which the latter appears is too inspired to be spoiled. As for the first, by far the most popular explosion in movie history, Nolan finds a way to rearrange it so that its magnificence and significance feel terrifyingly fresh.
“Try not to set the sky on fire,” Matt Damon's Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves grimly jokes before flipping the red switch, “knowing that an explosion, once erupted, may not burn out until the entire Earth's atmosphere is consumed by all the Earth's atmospheres oh. Nolan's film also makes you feel the seismic significance of pressing one button with no way back: it's like witnessing history itself shatter.
Barbie + Oppenheimer Are you going to the cinema this weekend to watch one of the two blockbusters? Tell us which one you decide to go and see in the comments section below.
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