BARBENHEIMER REVIEW [SPOILER-FREE]
BARBIE. OPPENHEIMER. CINEMA.
Spent the vast majority of my Thursday, July 20th at the theater and here’s everything I have to say about it!
BARBIE REVIEW
Maybe it’s easier to talk about this movie with regards to the biggest fears I had going into it. Above all, this will make an obscene amount of money for Mattel and Warner Bros. I think it’ll easily break a billion at the box office, and I can’t even fathom how much Mattel will make from toys and merch sales. And their knowledge of that (this movie has been in development since 2010) was cause for fear. I worried this corporate edge would mean a tendency towards a plastic sense of humor, lifeless and devoid of risk. A movie made by focus groups and marketing execs.
And there are times where BARBIE brushes with that. The sort of meta, online culture-conscious, self-critical sense of humor that defines how brands present themselves these days, how they market themselves to our newer class of consumer. Like Deadpool-esque humor. Like moments engineered for Twitter virality. Essentially, how corporate was this going to be? How self-indulgent?
But after watching, I’m thoroughly surprised at how genuine, funny, sincere, and heartfelt this movie is. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are maybe the most inspired casting choices of the year, it’s hard to overstate how hard this would’ve failed without either of them and the sincerity with which they embraced their roles. Robbie is show-stopping, and I think Ryan Gosling’s Ken is one of the funniest characters I’ve seen in a movie. I don’t think there was a single joke/delivery of his that didn’t land for me.
Director Greta Gerwig, with her first big-budget ‘sell out’ production, really did her thing here. There’s touching commentary throughout about womanhood and femininity, about what it means to be a woman in the modern-day. Obviously I can’t speak to how well this was done (I personally thought so!) but what touched me the most was Gerwig’s question of what makes us human, and why that experience is so uncomfortable yet profound. There’s a montage at the end where she goes full Gerwig-mode and it really had me crushed me. Tons of tender, human moments that keep the glitzy world of Barbieland feeling tangible.
At the end of the day, though, this is a Barbie movie, and it’s one that clearly sets up a “Mattel Cinematic Universe” to roll out their other toys (read here). Gerwig is a talented director and the fingerprints of her talent are all over this movie, but unfortunately so-too are corporate fingerprints pointing astray.
Rating: 7.5/10
OPPENHEIMER REVIEW
I’ll get the preliminary stuff out of the way. Cillian Murphy and RDJ are revelations, show-stopping on the screen, easy top contenders for the big awards this year. Ludwig Göransson with maybe my second favorite score of his (never topping Tenet). Cinematography is incredible, I watched this on 70mm film and WOW. I was skeptical that the film format would make much of a difference but there’s a richness to film that truly does translate to the screen. A liveliness and vitality and grit that I haven’t ever experienced with digital. Onto the big stuff:
This is a dense movie, but it’s also surprisingly Nolan’s most straightforward. He commits first and foremost to the integrity of the events he’s putting forward. Rarely is anything romanticized or heightened, even the bomb itself plays a shockingly small role in the movie (I will say the Los Alamos test is up there as one of the most transfixed I’ve ever been in a movie theater. There were nail imprints in my palms from clenched fists).
In fact, it’s remarkable to me that this is becoming a summer blockbuster, and I’m even worried that many’s expectations will be dashed given the whole Barbeheimer meme. This movie is 99% men in suits talking to each other. There is no spectacle here. Nor should there be!
I think what Nolan is dissecting more-so than anything else is the banality of evil (and let me be clear – this movie is unequivocally anti-nuke). The momentousness of the acts he depicts in the movie are not encapsulated in a single explosion; they are parsed out over three hours of arcane discussion, petty bureaucracy, hearings and trials and drawings on blackboards, conversations so convoluted you yourself are inundated with details. Nolan holds none of it back. He indulges in how fully-fleshed this world is, in how unremarkable the vastness of human history is even at its most transformative moments.
Without getting into spoilers (can you really spoil something like this?), I think what Nolan is arguing that our moral convictions are all we have in this world, and without them we are nothing but tools and fodder for those around us. What are J. Robert Oppenheimer’s convictions? That’s the central thesis of the movie, and the answer is about as gray as it can get.
This is certainly Nolan’s most mature work and I think the clearest he’s ever articulated his own viewpoint on the world around us. It holds back no punches, but the punches are not delivered in any way you might expect. The world ends not with a bang but with a whimper. Death by a thousand paper-cuts far more than any single explosion.
Rating: 9/10
How can there be a weekend streaming rec with so much greatness to watch at your local theater! For what it's worth, I watched Barbie and then Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer is so dense idk if I could make it back into a movie theater after it). Both were with almost completely filled theaters, with people dressed up for the occasion (pink and all-black abound) and seriously excited. We’re in the middle of a movie moment unlike anything since Avengers: Endgame and it’s really magical. Don’t miss out!
See you all again next week. Until then, please get in touch if you have any thoughts or suggestions you’d like to share. If you want to keep up with what I’m watching, follow me on Letterboxd @atharv_gupta.
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Concise & made for an interesting read, thanks for no spoilers! Will be interesting watching a Nolan film that doesn't toy with the concept of time. Honestly can't trust what the average person has to say about Barbie but this makes me cautiously optimistic
This article was the bomb!