Film Talk: The double bill of the year with Barbie and Oppenheimer
The wait is finally over for the unlikely movie event of the year that has taken the web by storm.
‘Barbenheimer’ – the long-awaited simultaneous release of two summer big-hitters that couldn’t be more polarised – has been a hot topic in the film community for months. The trend is set to be for cinema fans to get their teeth into this double bill with a difference.
Until Batman Begins hit the flicks in 2005, I was – like many – unaware of the genius that was Christopher Nolan. My screen hadn’t yet been graced by the incredible piece of filmmaking that was Memento (2000), yet watching what this brilliant Brit had done with the legendary DC Comics anti-hero made me sit up and take notice.No disrespect to Tim Burton, but this was the Batman flick the world had always needed – gritty, grim and psychologically cutting.
With The Prestige – Nolan’s dark tale of two rival Victorian stage magicians – he knocked it out of the park once more, again bringing the full talent of leading man Christian Bale out to play. With both of his Batman follow-ups – The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises – Nolan sealed the deal on a perfect saga for the caped crusader that, despite efforts since from other directors, remains unmatched.
And then, of course, there was Inception – nothing less than an absolute dream of a flick that is one of the closest things to a perfect movie ever to have been made. With 2017’s Dunkirk, Nolan succeeded in making the highest-grossing World War II film of all time, and what many critics have described as his finest flick to date. Now he is making a return to mid-20th century history with Oppenheimer – a biographical thriller that tells the tale of the theoretical physicist who became the ‘father of the atomic bomb’.
Yet, if you have more of a penchant for the fantastic plastic things in life, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is here to give cinema goers a fun slice of toy town nostalgia that also makes a few political and societal comments of its own.
But which of 2023’s biggest flicks so far is set to come out on top? Let’s take a look...
OPPENHEIMER (15, 180 mins)
Released: July 21 (UK & Ireland)
Inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, writer-director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping biographical drama commemorates the complex and brilliant mind credited with nurturing mankind’s relationship with atomic weaponry.
An ambitious but dramatically necessary three-hour running time, which dwarfs The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, feels considerably shorter in the mesmerised moment and shouldn’t dissuade audiences from luxuriating in Nolan’s grandiose vision, anchored by a showstopping lead performance from Cillian Murphy.
Oppenheimer continues Nolan’s love affair with the immersive IMAX format and his barnstorming picture makes history as the first film with sequences shot on black and white IMAX film.
Different palettes elegantly navigate two timelines and juxtapose the theorical physicist’s rise and fall during the dark days of the McCarthy witch-hunts.
Lustrous colour sequences captured by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, dubbed Fission, concentrate on Oppenheimer’s journey from the hallowed halls of Cambridge University in 1924 to the politically motivated humiliation of a secret 1954 hearing to determine his security clearance via a 1947 appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey under director Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr).
Black and white vignettes, dubbed Fusion, fixate on Strauss’s appearance before combative members of the Senate to secure the votes to confirm his nomination as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce following a divisive tenure as chair of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
The connective tissue between colour and monochrome is the Manhattan Project led by General Leslie Groves Jr (Matt Damon) to research and develop a devastating weapon capable of ending the Second World War.
Groves appoints Oppenheimer as scientific director despite his personal ties to Communist Party members including younger brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) and American physicist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
Oppenheimer coolly rationalises his involvement – “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon but I know the Nazis can’t” – and dedicates every waking hour to perfecting an atomic device at a secret site south of Los Alamos.
His biologist wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) joins other families in New Mexico to witness the dawn of a new age of self-destruction, culminating in the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oppenheimer is a directorial tour-de-force matched by Murphy’s exquisitely layered portrayal of the son of German Jewish immigrants, who feels personally compelled to act (“It’s not your people they’re herding into camps, it’s mine”).
Blunt and Downey Jr catalyse strong support and Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, who worked on Nolan’s last picture Tenet, complements dazzling visuals with a bombastic score that seems to rattle every fixture and fitting of the cinema. The fuse of Nolan’s picture may be three hours long and winding but when the beautifully arranged atoms of Oppenheimer collide, tension builds and ultimately detonates with meticulously engineered and unstoppable force.
BARBIE (12A, 114 mins)
Released: July 21 (UK & Ireland)
Margot Robbie is in the pink in Oscar-nominated writer-director Greta Gerwig’s uneven satire of modern gender roles based on the enduringly popular fashion dolls.
Moments of comic brilliance punctuate a script co-written by Gerwig and real-life partner Noah Baumbach, such as when the narrator (Helen Mirren) offers pithy commentary about one Barbie’s empowering outburst, Ryan Gosling’s Ken earnestly croons an emasculation anthem composed by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, and the neglected companion doll enthusiastically embraces “the patriarchy”.
However, the screenwriting by two of contemporary cinema’s sharpest wits is infuriatingly inconsistent.
Jokes that miss intended targets outweigh the zingers and amusing cameos such as Rob Brydon’s Sugar Daddy Ken (a bona fide figure with a West Highland Terrier named Sugar) are largely afforded single lines of forgettable dialogue.
Gerwig’s picture glides through decades of toy history dating back to the late 1950s and affectionately pokes fun at commercial misfires such as the Growing Up Skipper doll, whose breasts enlarged when you rotated her arms.
Using Robbie’s conflicted heroine as a twinkly-eyed mouthpiece, Gerwig and Baumbach enforce timely messaging about sisterly solidarity and independence, openly challenge chauvinistic behaviour and rebuke outdated attitudes about women’s roles in society.
No-one is going to put this opinionated, trailblazing Barbie in a box… except for the purposes of merchandising.
Life in Barbie Land is perfect for one stereotypical Barbie (Robbie), exchanging cheery affirmations with neighbours and acknowledging her dreamily chiselled beau, Ken (Gosling).
The titular blonde suffers an existential crisis that includes nagging thoughts of death and an opportunity to ditch her high heels for – gasp – sensible flat-soled footwear.
Faced with expulsion from pink-saturated utopia, Barbie visits her socially ostracised sister, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who identifies a fissure in the thin membrane separating Barbie Land from our reality.
“Go to the real world and find the girl who’s playing with you,” advises Weird Barbie, prompting stereotypical Barbie to embark on an odyssey of self-discovery.
Ken gatecrashes the road trip with his trusty pair of yellow rollerblades.
The anatomically restricted duo are gobsmacked by rampant inequality in present-day California as they cross paths with a despairing mother (America Ferrera) and cynical daughter (Ariana Greenblatt), and an insensitive Mattel chief executive (Will Ferrell).
Barbie astutely taps into decades of childhood nostalgia, anchored by an effervescent performance from Robbie as the self-doubting embodiment of so-called physical perfection.
THE SECRET KINGDOM (PG, 98 mins)
Released: July 21 (UK & Ireland, selected cinemas)
Plucky siblings venture underground in a family-oriented Australian fantasy adventure written and directed by Matt Drummond.
Peter (Sam Everingham) and his younger sister Verity (Ayla Brown) move into a new house and struggle to acclimatise to their surroundings in an emotionally unsettling period for their family.
The children tumble into a cavernous space beneath their bedroom and are greeted by an army of pangolins, who decree Peter their king from prophecy, who is destined to banish a dark force known as The Shroud and restore peace to the subterranean realm.
MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK (15, 120 mins)
Released: July 21 (UK & Ireland, selected cinemas)
Born in Coventry and raised in Northern Ireland, film critic turned film-maker Mark Cousins has shared his love of the moving image in a series of documentaries dedicated to the history of cinema and some of its most distinctive voices.
In My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, Cousins embarks on a two-hour journey through the work of the celebrated London-born film director and producer, who left an indelible mark on the medium and famously never won a competitive Academy Award despite five nominations as Best Director for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho.
