Barbenheimer

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of participating in the Barbenheimer craze, watching Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. While I don’t visit the movie theater often, I found this double feature to be tons of fun, so I’ve decided to give my reviews of both movies in the order that I saw them.

Barbie

I went into Barbie with the understanding that I was certainly not the movie’s target audience and that a lot of material wouldn’t land with me or any of the other males in the theater. To my surprise, most of the humor resonated well with the entire audience, and the messages it conveyed stuck incredibly well. Margot Robbie is obviously a fantastic choice for Barbie, and I also thought Ryan Gosling does a fantastic job as Ken. I felt his role within the plot is incredibly well developed and helped to openly talk about topics that plenty of people wouldn’t actively discuss. I won’t spoil what happens, but a good portion of the movie centers around the pressures put on women by society, and the portrayal of Ken and other male characters helps in discussing the patriarchy in a more comedic setting. Rich and realistic context aside, Barbie is not afraid of being goofy and making fun of its own franchise. The movie takes full advantage of its PG-13 swear limit and roasts Mattel’s long history of discontinued Barbie dolls, adding to the sense that this is more than just a Mattel product advertisement. Overall, Barbie is a phenomenal comedy, and I greatly recommend it if you’re willing to stare at the color pink for two hours.

Oppenheimer

In a complete change in mood, Oppenheimer is a history movie disguised as a work of art- not just for telling the life of Robert J. Oppenheimer, but for discussing how humanity opened the proverbial “Pandora’s Box” and let loose onto the world a destructive innovation through the atomic bomb. The movie centers around our protagonist, played by Cillian Murphy, where the audience gets to understand how he got to the point of directing the Manhattan Project and the various conflicts he came upon in his life. The mounting tension to create the United States’ first nuclear weapon is well paced and directed, and I felt that the payoff in visual and audio effects was well worth it. However, as many people have already mentioned, I felt that the movie ran a little too long as it delved into the later years of Oppenheimer’s life, but this on its own had its own set of conflicts and payoffs that I’m sure some people enjoyed as well, (personally, I was there for the explosion effects). My one other critique is that the full range of volume throughout the film seemed excessive at times. Plenty of loud moments came out of nowhere and had me covering my ears, and while I understood the effect that Christopher Nolan was going for, I feel like he pushed it a bit too far. Overall, I’m sure most people chose to skip the -heimer part of Barbenheimer for the mature content, long running time, or the fact that it was a World War 2 historical film, but for those who are interested in these types of movies, I really recommend it.