Barbenheimer Review
The most anticipated cinematic weekend of our generation leads to a record-breaking box office that will hopefully inspire more originals and less sequels at studios
The problem is finding the optimal order—three hours of drama and explosions before or after the campy pink romp? (I did both, it doesn’t matter.) In this once-in-a-generation cinematic event, Warner Bros. is finally getting its revenge on Christopher Nolan leaving them by programming its introductory IP popfemfest on the same weekend Nolan has used every release, while at WB, since The Dark Knight. But rather than becoming the mutually exclusive, atom-splitting fission event that WB wanted, and Universal (Oppenheimer’s studio) feared, the two became an infinitely expanding fusion event, now called Barbenheimer, which the exposure for each, and, therefore, box office receipts. (Barbenheimer weekend set impressive box office records considering neither are sequels nor under the Disney umbrella.) The diplomatic Nolan knew the dual-programming was a boon: “I think for those of us who care about movies, we’ve been really waiting to have a crowded marketplace again, and now it’s here and that’s terrific.”
The national theater chain association, horribly acronymed NATO, reported that two hundred thousand Barbenheimer tickets will be purchased over its opening weekend. AMC reported that forty thousand people, a week before the release, had already bought double-feature tickets for July 20th, their official released day (but Barbie cheated by having July 19 evening showings). Critics and fans flooded social media in the weeks leading up to the weekend, which took a lot of Cruise’s word-of-mouth thunder from his seventh Mission: Impossible release, which is the real loser in this theatrical, one-off phenomenon. At first glance, it’s unclear why the two films become so entwined; after all, this didn’t happen when The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia came out the same day in 2008, but that was also pre-social media virality.
The relationship between Barbie and Oppenheimer is one of opposites attracting: indie female director of female-driven stories and pastel color palettes up against mainstream male director of male-driven stories and gritty color palettes; one gets most of their tickets from women and the other from men; one is pink and other is black. But their biggest similarity, and selling point, is being an auteur-driven project made for under 200 million USD, in an era, and calendar year specifically, when the over 250 million USD IP sequels and spinoffs and remakes are flopping. Call it superhero fatigue, or (more accurately) lazy studio filmmaking, the interest in watching summer blockbusters created by filmmakers rather than studio executives—we all know the difference—is high. Gerwig, though only on her third feature, and Nolan are similar counterpoints to today’s crowded studio landscape. The two even have extremely similar early career progressions: their first films, Following and Nights and Weekends, were no-budget proof of concepts; their second films, Memento and Lady Bird, budgets: 9 million and 10 million USD, were early career hits that immediately established their unique filmmaking identity; their third films, Insomnia and Little Women: 46 million and 40 million USD, are remakes of previous films; and their fourth films, Batman Begins and Barbie: 150 million and 145 million USD, are gigantic studio blockbusters that initiated a particular brand franchise for Warner Bros.
In some regards, Gerwig is becoming the new Nolan at the studio level. Both allow nerds and cinephiles alike to indulge in cinematic pleasures, as opposed to the guilty pleasures of something like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Fast X, or The Flash. Barbie allows women the opportunity to visit the theater in groups as fangirls (ironically aestheticized or otherwise) in the same way men go to Oppenheimer, and other Nolan films, to nerd out on mid-century scientists. Aside from the superhero exceptions to the rule, like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, as well as Disney films targeting girls under thirteen, the summer blockbuster has been in the theatrical domain of fanboys.
Nolan and Gerwig are auteurs first and studio directors second. Batman Begins certainly boosted Nolan’s cinematic prestige to higher levels, but his theatrical releases since, and between, the Batman trilogy have been Christopher Nolan events—an IP unto himself, rather than big-budget blockbusters. The same will happen with Gerwig, who will, as she herself stated, become a studio director; predominantly-female fans will go to her future releases because it’s a Greta Gerwig film, not because it’s the latest big-budget studio film that happened to be directed by Gerwig.
From anecdotal proof alone, it’s apparent that Barbie is the priority event of Barbenheimer. Groups will determine, time permitting, if they have an extra three hours to spare (not including transit times and previews) to see Oppenheimer. Barbie is an event people want to meet in groups and dress up for, it’s a comedy, it’s starring the bankable and beautiful Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, it’s an intriguing film idea—adaptation of childhood fantasy play object—that Marvel perfected in one go with Iron Man. Ask anyone why they want to see Barbie: “I don’t know, it looks interesting” will be the most common answer. Without Robbie and Gosling, Barbie wouldn’t have looked as appealing, but Gerwig will be the clear winner if it performs well critically and financially, which would advance her career as a reliable director of studio films.
Now with the reviews.
Ladies First: The Good, the Bad, and the Pink Plastic Ideology
It’s hard to believe Mattel, the company that created Barbie, allowed Barbie to happen; imagine if in Iron Man, the bigbad terrorist enemy was literally Marvel. The original script that Gerwig and partner, father to their children, director of her in many films, and co-writer Noah Baumbach turned in was R-rated, which seeps through in areas. (It’s the classic Lubitsch & Co., Golden Age of Hollywood formula of including more obscene jokes, which will get slashed, leaving the less obscene jokes you really wanted in.) This is the type of script many screenwriters deliver to companies for a franchise idea and gets tossed out immediately. But with Margot Robbie backing the idea with her production company, and with the hand-picking of indie-auteur Gerwig, and with Mattel interested in making a cinematic franchise-inducing splash, they green(-pink)lit the nine-figure budget. But still, what’s their angle?
Margot Robbie, a human seemingly manufactured by Mattel to one day play Barbie, stars as og Stereotypical Barbie. Her boyfriend, Ken, just Ken, is Ryan Gosling, the best casting of the film due to his underutilized comedic ability, which perfectly suits the film world’s superficiality. They live in Barbieland, a fantasy island somewhere off the coast of Venice Beach, California, USA, which used so much hot pink that it created a global shortage for that paint color. The Barbies, matriarchs of Barbieland, live in open-house plans featured in over six decades of Barbie products. They wake up in great moods, smiling and waving to each other, take showers without water, drink without liquid, eat without food, hang out at the beach all day, have a nightly dance blow-out, and sleep after a slumber party, every day. Gosling’s Ken pines after Robbie’s Barbie, who doesn’t return the favor, but he continues, day after day. But one day, Barbie’s world is disrupted when she wakes up groggy after thinking aloud about death the previous nightly bash and continues to malfunction throughout the day: now the water’s uncomfortable, the milk is expired, the food is burnt, and, needle-drop, her heels touch the ground. Most of the humor in this first act comes from “well, what would happen if Barbie’s fantasy world was anthropomorphized?” After consulting with the Weird Barbie (that one Barbie which was overplayed with, played by SNL’s Kate McKinnon), she goes to the real world, with Ken unknowingly stowed, to find her human.
Once they arrive irl, they find reality—a world hostile to women—which causes Barbie to have an existential crisis but then red-pills Ken into learning the benefits of a patriarchy. While trying to contact her human, Barbie is picked up by Mattel, led by CEO Will Ferrell, and taken back to their HQ while Ken returns to Barbieland to spread the values of Manhood. Mattel fumbles and Barbie escapes with the middle-schooler (Ariana Greenblatt), who previously called her a bimbo and fascist, and her mother (America Ferrera), a secretary for Mattel, who was the actual human Barbie connected to via thoughts of death and cellulite growth. The trio goes back to Barbieland, finds Kendomland instead (like a preppy version of Biff’s fiefdom in Back to the Future Part II), and go about de-programming the Barbies turned into service slaves. The rest you can watch in theaters.
The film has masterful direction. Gerwig had a vision and fully executed it without reservations and with full cognizance—rare for a high budget IP studio film. Specifically the humor, which could swerve into the cringe cliff at any moment. Jokes dealing with feminism and patriarchy so often miss the mark in blockbusters that most filmmakers would rather not go there. It’s a hard balance between making jokes at the expense of, versus along with, which, with Gerwig’s direction and writing, arrives at the latter. Whether that humor advances a feminist reading of the film or not, which I’m not able to provide, is another matter. Nevertheless, the film is a comedic triumph aided greatly through Gerwig’s direction, which was crucial for the fantasy world to exist—making a film that stands out in today’s fantasy-adventure wasteland requires nothing less. The film begins with a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody, as seen in the first teaser trailer, along with a narration by Helen Mirren that sets up the utopia by explaining that Barbies were conceived for women to accomplish anything and everything in their life, which worked in Barbieland but fell short in reality. Therein lies the narrative rift that Gerwig and Baumbach were able to explore.
Gosling as Ken is the best performance in the film; he was better suited for the Ken in this film than Robbie as Barbie. That’s partly a function of the script giving Gosling the funny bits without the emotional substance. He plays the artificiality of the world well, which is fitting since he’s almost two decades older than the other Kens but has bleach blond hair and (digitally-enhanced?) toned abs. The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto and production design by Sarah Greenwood capture such a unique vision in Barbieland that when they get to Venice Beach, a place known for its colorful quirkiness, it feels drab and miserable. The sets are so stylized and loaded with detail that it makes Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City look minimal and on a budget.
Margot Robbie isn’t bad as Barbie, she rarely misses even in recent year misfires for her, but the character is loaded with too much to do, as if embodying the Ferrera ‘cool girl’ monologue that women need to always balance two mutually exclusive things for societal acceptance. They split the emotional core in two between Robbie and Ferrera, which leaves neither climax fully satisfying; the latter because her daughter changes her mind about Barbie rather quickly, then…? With Barbie, she’s figuring out her place in the universe now that the doll’s out of the package. What does it mean for Barbie, a toy symbol for womanhood since 1959, to exist today, and for what purpose? The film draws the conclusion that Barbies were never meant to be symbols of unattainable qualities, but instead the object that women can use to reflect their own uniqueness, imperfections, quirks onto. Barbies are meant to make meaning, not being made; they’re ideas, not humans, that will live forever; they’re things that humans come up with, like patriarchy, to deal with the uncomfortable nature of life; that Barbie, unlike a human, doesn’t have an ending—a slick postmodern touch.
But I’m not sure that blends well into the hyper-comedic structure of the film, especially coming after Ken’s outrageous climax. To compare this with another corporate product, also with a tyrannical Ferrell, The Lego Movie is a comedy adventure about toys that packs a climactic gut punch when the real world is revealed in its specific relation to the fantasy Lego world. The existence of the toy world allowed the subconscious structures of the real world to play out—key word play—and enhance the underlying emotions of the young boy’s relationship with his father. Barbie, to its credit but also burden, is trying to achieve a highly ambitious fantasy-irl synthesis that few at the studio level have tried. As Slavoj Žižek in The New Statesman pointed out, Barbie, along with the new Indian Jones, and to a lesser extend with Oppenheimer, reveals a highly mature aspect of fantasy:
After being expelled from the utopian Barbie Land for being less-than-perfect dolls, Barbie and Ken embark on a journey of self-discovery to the real world. But what they find there is not some deep revelation of the self but the realisation that actual life is even more riddled with suffocating clichés than their own fantasy world. The doll couple are forced to confront the fact that there isn’t just a brutal reality beyond Barbie Land, but that utopia is part of that brutal reality: without fantasies like Barbie Land, individuals would simply not be able to endure the real world.
Also:
And therein resides the final lesson of the stories about venturing from fantasy into reality: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting reality, we also escape into reality to avoid the devastating truth about the futility of our fantasies.
Gerwig and Baumbach quickly picked up on this aspect and created a set of jokes centered on this realization of fantasy. But in terms of the dramatic aspects, parts feel rushed, the comedy takes over too often, and the toy-comedy-adventure, in the end, can only go so far.
Mattel pulled a fancy corporate PR trick with Barbie. They got ahead of the bad press by being as self-deprecating as possible, and ensured they were backed by legitimate filmmakers—this stunt would’ve never worked with a less critically respected studio journey(wo)man. Barbie is the most effective possible corporate propaganda done right. Mattel knows the iconographic Barbie history is in open warfare with younger generations and newer waves of feminism. The way to get their IP feat in the cinematic door was through adopting their ideological enemies’ arguments—corporatized feminism, girl-boss branding without substance, patriarchy—and filtering them through a Gen Z middle-schooler. On the side of good is Barbie, all the Barbies, and Allan (played wonderfully by Michael Cera); one the side of evil is red-pilled Ken, Mattel, cellulite, and thoughts of suicide (and pregnancy). A divide and conquer thematic strategy that forces viewers to side with Barbie against Mattel, which, after all, still benefits Mattel in the end.
Alison Willmore of Vulture states this better:
There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness. To be a film fan these days is to be aware that franchises and cinematic universes and remakes and other adaptations of old IP have become black holes that swallow artists, leaving you to desperately hope they might emerge with the rare project that, even though it comes from constrictive confines, still feels like it was made by a person. Barbie definitely was. But the trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.
The feminism of the film, if it exists, should it need to exist at all, is more performative than ideological, practical rather than theoretical. Barbie becomes highly muddled once you get into the sexual politics of a Barbie doll becoming a woman, and the dynamics involved with asexual toys without genitals, etc. Fellow Substacker Mary Harrington asks the question, where do Barbie babies comes from? Much of feminist politics is attached to the question of human reproduction. But when that doesn’t exist, where does that leave feminism? I’m not equipped to make the argument either way, but, nonetheless, it enhances the ability of the film to focus on certain aspects of feminism in a vacuum; meaning, the question of children, when removed, allows for the exploration of Barbieland as a matriarchy that treats Kens like pets rather than sexual partners. It’s a curious aspect of the film that Gerwig and Baumbach nail, in terms of having the ability to make arguments detached from the constraints of reality that tend to trouble, and overwhelm, similar themes in other films.
Now I Am Become Review, the Explainer of Film
First with the nerdy technical details: Oppenheimer’s IMAX 70mm print is eleven miles (17.7 km) long and weighs 600 pounds (272.155 kg), the IMAX laser projection digital file size is 485 gigabytes, there are zero cgi shots (though plenty of digital compositing), Kodak developed the first ever black and white film stock for IMAX cameras, and only thirty theaters in the world can actually project the IMAX 70mm print.
Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This dense stone of a biography explains J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life from student to discredited public scientist. In that time, he brought quantum physics to the USA and fathered the atomic bomb while leading the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. During the McCarthy era, his financial support of the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, friends who were part of leftist and Communist campus groups, and public antagonism to nuclear proliferation ensured his public denunciation. He lost his security clearance, failed to appeal it in 1954, then died a decade later without the same public influence he had enjoyed. That was in part due to Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss’s maneuvers to appoint a kangaroo court to quietly discredit Oppenheimer, who he thought had turned other scientists against him during his political ladder-climbing.
The film is divided into two parts: fission (color, Oppenheimer’s perspective) and fusion (black and white, Strauss’s perspective). Oppenheimer, played by six-time Nolan favorite Cillian Murphy, is a starved physicist unable to make sense of his own life and his social relations with others while at the same time struggling with mathematical problems of spacetime; in other words, the ideal protagonist Nolan. The chameleonesque Murphy, aided greatly by Luisa Abel’s hair and makeup cartel and Hoyte Van Hoytema’s full-screen IMAX cinematography, plays four decades of Oppenheimer’s life with the appropriate gravity of an individual who invented a civilization-ending device. His cheekbones alone give the impression of mushroom clouds. His enemy is Strauss, played by post-Marvel—hopefully for good!—Robert Downey Jr., who’s prickly, grizzled, and nakedly political in comparison. Most of Strauss’s appearances are in his black and white scenes, which transports his aged features back to a CRT-era aesthetic. Like The Prestige, the battle between the two men are unequal, where Oppenheimer held the intangible gift of scientific brilliance, which made up for his many social failures, while Strauss had the support of Cold War hawks and freshly built military-industrial complex.
In Nolan fashion, the screenplay (which is the cousin or nerdy brother of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network) he wrote is divided into two parts that crisscrosses between timelines to end in a thrilling climax of spacetime cinematic synthesis. Fission, Oppenheimer’s story, is the dominant timeline and highly subjective towards portraying Oppenheimer in a favorable light, whereas in fusion, neither side is entirely sympathetic. Fission is based around Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing in 1954 and fusion on Strauss’s Senate confirmation hearing for Commerce Secretary in 1959. While cutting between them, Nolan also loops around Oppenheimer’s life like footnotes explaining the topics being discussed. Similar to Memento, the plot functions as a circle without much importance to linear direction, only the multiple moments that made the greatest impacts on their lives all climaxing together, like a nuclear reaction, or a wormhole, or a paradox of time.
The point of the story, which is derived from the book, is to set the Oppenheimer record straight. His work led to the successful creation of the atom bomb, which created a great deal of public influence, like his buddy Albert Einstein, played at the appropriate level of kooky by Tom Conti. He had a fellow-traveler past while teaching at Berkeley, which Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the person who recruited Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, may or may not have used to his advantage. One of, if not the sorest subject in Oppenheimer’s past, is Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, an actor who swore off doing sex scenes unless she could straddle Murphy while he reads the Bhagavad Gita), the woman he was in love with but couldn’t be with for political, psychological, social, etc. reasons. He was then taken by Kitty (Emily Blunt), who mothered two of his children. By every account, Oppie and Kitty were horrible parents, which is prominently displayed in the film through the infrequent appearance of their children. Both Kitty and Jean slightly suffer from Nolan’s dead wife syndrome, which is more consequential than intentional when adapting a six-hundred page biography and having to places the emphases in places.
We take an extended break in the second act of the fusion-fission storylines to watch the building and detonation of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, codenamed Trinity. Ludwig Göransson’s score, a synthetic non-drum blend of strings and horns, and the sound team carry most of the action forward while scientists are squabbling in hastily built lab rooms—shoutout to Benny Safdie’s greasiest performance of all time, who must have bathed in pig fat every morning during production. The detonation itself is a beautiful mixture of special and visual effects that, along with much of the film’s particle cutaways, resembles The Tree of Life’s birth of the universe scene, until that delayed explosive BOOM slaps you back into consciousness. Many of the scientist in the film—who are named-dropped and make cameos as if they were A-listers in a Wes Anderson film—are American actors who were more famous in the late nineteen-nineties and early aughts: Josh Hartnett, David Krumholtz, Michael Angarano, and Josh Peck. Not that they weren’t chosen to fit the vibe of the film’s reputation-of-past-figures theme, but they weren’t not explicitly chosen in this regard, if you know what I mean.
The quiddity of the film is its morality, science, history, politics, and how they all fit together in the Rubik’s cube of Oppenheimer’s legacy. What to do with the guy who designed the Bomb and then immediately tried stopping its worldwide production? What to do with the man who was a serial cheater who slept with the Bay Area female roster of Communist Party members? What to do with a mind that brilliant used by his government for wartime duties? What to do with a man who knew, and seemingly embraced, becoming a martyr?
In one sense, and without trying to dismiss the subject, the morality of dropping the bomb is irrelevant to this film and his story in general. Although the film touches on the morality of nuclear weapons a lot after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there’s not much discussion with the scientists’ decisions regarding the point of their research. The explanation given over and over at Los Alamos of “if we don’t, Hitler will,” is fine narrative shorthand for a film that could somehow still be an hour longer than its already long three-hour runtime, but it leaves a lot of interesting discussions out. Leaving them in would’ve slowed the pace of the film down too much, because, after all, the film is about the two hearings and their context, neither of which being about the morality of dropping the bombs on Japan.
Where the story’s atoms are split is when Oppenheimer, after leaving the Manhattan Project, uses his public influence to persuade the National Security Act era U.S. government against the development of the hydrogen bomb and come to an international nuclear weapon containment agreement with the new enemies: the Soviets. That dealt Strauss a humiliating blow while he was working at the Atomic Energy Commission, who secured Oppenheimer a prestigious position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Strauss wanted a greater nuclear buildup after the Soviets successfully tested their own atomic bomb in 1949. Convinced that Oppenheimer was influencing other scientists against him, Strauss sought to publicly discredit the formerly “suspected Communist” father of the atomic bomb through shady (aka illegal) political means. For the last hour after the Trinity test, the two hearings collide at increasingly contested intervals of narrative montage, which would have greatly pleased Sergei Eisenstein. Oppenheimer knew the fight was rigged, so he played helpless martyr, even ignoring an increasingly hostile Kitty, who wanted him to be a fighter. Meek-mannered Oppenheimer, though creator of a humanity-ending weapon, played the long game as if knowing Nolan would one day direct the real story of his illegal—current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm formally nullified the 1954 decision to revoke his security clearance last December—and politically-charged discrediting.
The film begins and ends with a fantastically haunting yet beautiful metaphor about the possibility of igniting the entire atmosphere on fire from the Trinity test, which was a very slim theoretical chance. Oppenheimer brings the math to Einstein, who later brings this back up and lends him valuable advice about legacy. We first watch this interaction from afar in the first act, during Strauss’s black and white perspective, who approaches the pair but then Einstein walks away without acknowledging him. Strauss assumes Oppenheimer was turning Einstein against him, which goes into his narrow-minded calculus of political maneuvering. It’s not until the very last scene in the film, in Oppenheimer’s color perspective, that we watch the conversation, which has nothing to do with Strauss. Einstein talks about legacy, who, like Oppenheimer, was once a publicly celebrated figure, but at a certain point, his life and work turned into something for others to define and judge. That, like a nuclear bomb exploding, one’s legacy in their position is a chain-reaction of historical judgments out of their control. Oppenheimer, though creator of the bomb and instigator of his legacy, had both taken away and manipulated for the political machinations of others. And in the end, when you’re receiving end-of-career medals and congratulations, that’s for others to make amends and clear their consciences, not for you. Oppenheimer knew that his opposition to nuclear weapon proliferation wasn’t anti-American or pro-Communist. He knew the moral distinction, which, after seeing its destructive force abused by others, caused him to courageously risk his public credibility. He knew that history would vindicate him. He was too brilliant not to know.
From Christopher Rhine comes a thorough, thoughtful and accurate description of "Oppenheimer", with lots of flavor, that still leaves the reader to make up his or her own mind. Informed, carefully rendered, insightful opinion that's not argumentative and doesn't dismiss out of hand other points of view. A neat balance. We need much more of this kind of movie reviewing.