On Our Barbenheimer Weekend

So we ended up spending the weekend having watched both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Not that we had set out to do so. Sure, I got tickets much earlier for the IMAX screening of Oppenheimer – we wanted to avoid the crowds, and so we secured tickets for the Sunday morning screening. But then we found ourselves in the Pavilion KL mall on Saturday afternoon, with nothing planned for the evening, and we thought: oh, well, why not just see if we can get last minute tickets for Barbie.

And that was how we ended up having our “Barbenheimer” weekend.

Perhaps it is useful to share some observations, about both movies separately, and then the overall “Barbenheimer” experience as a whole.

So, my thoughts on Barbie:

1. Barbie was surprisingly really fun and enjoyable. The opening was suitably full of what you would expect of Barbie: blonde hair, female empowerment, full-on product placements, and lots and lots of pink. As the story progresses, the dilemma of the movie presents itself in terms reminiscent both of the Toy Story series as well as The Matrix, leading to an extended “Barbie in the real world” act that started off with multiple shots of “fish out of water” humour and became increasingly madcap and zany as the story progressed.
2. What I did not expect was that as the story wore on towards the closing act, the story became almost existential. The setpiece of the final act was a moving montage, backed by a melancholic soundtrack featuring Billie Eilish, that moved me almost to tears. This final move was a bit jarring, and I felt slightly rushed – it was only just about believable thanks to Margot Robbie, who combined saccharine beauty and grace with formidable acting chops to make a truly charming and beguiling portrait of Barbie come to life. This movie would have been inconceivable without Margot Robbie in the lead, I think, and her acting more than anything else makes the movie work.
3. The other delicate balance that was difficult to pull off, was a more central challenge for the movie: how to make a story about a plastic doll, born in a different age when it came to norms about female beauty and significance, and how to fit this narrative in the era of the 21st century and the “woke” narratives around the female body and the representation of women in leadership and society? The writer and director decided to attack the problem head-on with a bold send-up of capitalism and corporate America, and… it works. The blow is softened somewhat by the madcap depiction of the suits in charge of Barbie, especially by Will Ferrell who seems to be cornering the market on the depictions of funny madcap capitalist bosses.
4. Another delicate problem which I thought the movie addressed very well, is the Problem of Ken. How to depict a character who is clearly and has always been a sidekick in the mythology of Barbie, and square that with current narratives around female empowerment and rejection of male patriarchy? The movie makes another bold decision by choosing to make the Problem of Ken as the central dilemma that drives the narrative tension of the plot. While there are some detractors who have complained that Ryan Gosling is too old for the role, I think his casting was another masterstroke for the movie: by turns hangdog, airheaded, roused and rabblerousing, Gosling’s Ken was the perfect foil for Margot Robbie’s Barbie. I thought his scenes in “the real world”, discovering the nature and permissiveness of male patriarchy, and his rendition of a Matchbox Twenty rock song to be the one of the comedic heights of this entertaining movie.
5. Maybe the final thing to say about Barbie the movie, before my summary later, is that the music was top notch. Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj, Charli XCX, Sam Smith, and of course, Billie Eilish – this was a cracking soundtrack that was truly worthy of Barbie.

As can be expected, Oppenheimer was a very different beast altogether. (Kat and I both agree that “Barbenheimer” was probably concocted by whichever PR agency that Warner Bros. had hired to push Barbie amidst a competitive opening weekend, having to go up head-to-head against a Christopher Nolan movie.) Here are my own observations on Oppenheimer:

1. In the run up to the opening weekend, the hype for Oppenheimer was relentless. The new movie from Christopher Nolan, the very same director that brought us The Dark Knight and Inception and Interstellar! (The less said about Tenet, the better.) It was shot purely on IMAX! It stars Cillian Murphy, the Peaky Blinders dude! It’s about the atomic bomb! What could be more explosive than that?
2. The problem, of course, is that when expectations are raised through the stratosphere, the risk of disappointment grows in tandem. Unfortunately, I found that while the movie itself was certainly a work of art, and a strong story in its own right, it ultimately fell short of the (very very high) expectations set for the viewer. I felt that even in the realm of the Nolan canon, this movie was probably a below-average performance for Christopher Nolan.
3. The main problem with this movie is the narrative structure chosen by the director. The central narrative of the story of Robert J. Oppenheimer is the problem of Guilt: what does it do to a man, knowing that he was primarily responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, deaths which were later shown to be unnecessary in the context of a world war that was already in its final conclusive months. Nolan chooses to showcase this by homing in on a private hearing involving Oppenheimer as the subject, and juxtaposes this against another, more public hearing in order to set up another character as the primary “villain” of the story. This choice, however, sets up a “Twelve Angry Men” setting as the primary narrative drive for the movie, playing out across two different parallel timelines, while also fitting in a chronological story of Oppenheimer’s youth and career, and culminating in his time at Los Alamos. This triple narrative structure made the movie too dense, and left little time for the characters to be fully fleshed out.
4. As a result of the demands of balancing this triple narrative structure, the main character of Oppenheimer feels impressionistic in his characterisation, and other characters get only a few flecks of narrative paint alongside Oppenheimer. And so, unlike in Interstellar or Inception, the viewer is not given time to truly know and understand Oppenheimer and the other main characters, with the ironic result that the viewer walks out after three hours not really getting a deep sense of who Oppenheimer was as a person, and what drove his strengths as well as his own self-destructive tendencies. Characters like Kitty Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock and Leslie Groves become somewhat caricaturish in their depictions, as more and more screen time gets diffused across the many characters that populate the three different narratives all happening interchangeable across the course of the movie.
5. Despite the narrative mishmash, what truly saves the movie is the strong ensemble cast. Cillian Murphy kills it (geddit?) as the lead character. His portrayal of Oppenheimer – by turns charming, arrogant, driven and guilt-wracked – is the true centre of gravity for the movie, and he succeeds in making Oppenheimer feel real, despite the rather impressionistic way in which the plot drives the introduction of Oppenheimer to the viewer. The real crime of this movie is that the likes of Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt and Matt Damon and Jack Quaid get too little screen time to truly flesh out their characters, even as the likes of Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh make the most of the precious few minutes that they get onscreen.
6. The other problem with the movie, to me, was that Christopher Nolan had clearly made the choice to showcase the initial Trinity bomb test in New Mexico as the central spectacle of the movie. A lot of ink and Youtube video time has been spent on foreshadowing this supposedly-seminal moment in cinematic history: the depiction of an atomic bomb explosion in an IMAX cinema setting. In the end, and perhaps because of the high expectations raised from the outset, the actual execution of the Trinity explosion felt, to these eyes and ears at least, to be somewhat short of what was promised.

So, with all that said, I thought that both movies were solid four-star performances, although I think it is important to note that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was a surprise on the upside, while Oppenheimer sagged, to me, under the weight of all the expectations heaped on this latest Christopher Nolan venture.

For those of you who have seen either or both movies – what do you think? Do you agree, or disagree, with my thoughts above? Happy to hear your thoughts!