By ELSIE EYAKUZE

More by this Author

I wasn’t enthusiastic when I first heard about the Barbie movie. So much of my childhood is being re-interpreted by Hollywood for the current crop of adults - namely my generation. We’re sharing Lego, comic book stories and Disney classics with our progeny and it was just a matter of time before someone thought to do a feature film starring Barbara Millicent Roberts. As a practicing feminist I was dreading it, and sure enough it came to be.

The nuclear lining in this cloudy situation was its pairing with Oppenheimer.

Since the two movies premiered at the same time, a phenomenon was born where people would dedicate a weekend to watching them both. And so Barbenheimer came to be: A double feature with a vibrantly rendered plastic world in one and a grim neutral colour palette of war science in the other. I think the idea was to experience the Yin and Yang in the contrast between the two stories.

As someone who finds dark themes therapeutic, the Barbie movie presented a challenge that the Oppenheimer movie doesn’t. I was afraid that it would demand good cheer.

As the weeks went by, it was pleasant to hear that the film was getting good reviews. I read personal (no spoiler!) accounts of reactions in social media and I read critics opinions and I was reassured.

There would be ‘something for everyone’ in the movie and the writer/director Greta Gerwig was getting praise for a strong piece of work. I still decided to put Barbie first in case I would need my brain scoured and scuffed again by Oppenheimer if the whole premise was too bright.

Read: Handy lessons for scientists in three-hour film

I couldn’t have been more wrong in my apprehension. With Gerwig, a moviegoer is already in good hands, but what she did with Barbie and Mattel is unprecedented. It wasn’t just a movie, it was an experience that varied in intensity depending on the viewer.

On the absolute surface it was a nice caper full of eye candy and jokes and a happy resolved ending for everyone. But if you brought your social consciousness with you, it got pretty serious in the first minute with a glorious opening scene that spoke directly to anyone who was given dolls to play with as a child. From there, it just keeps going.

This is the biggest drawback. Barbie is hard to watch in a theatre. It needs a nice afternoon with snacks and Wikipedia on hand and the ability to pause-rewind as well. If you try to keep up with every quip, visual element and musical note you will be overwhelmed. And that’s in addition to incredible performances by the actors. I occasionally lost track of the dialogue during loving shots of the actors’ faces.

Listening to what Ken was saying when Ryan Gosling was shirtless, for example, became a bit of a game and I love that the director poked at the audience with that. Do not worry, there was fan service for every part of the sexuality spectrum.

And that is what the movie does all throughout. It entertains and distracts while it pokes fun at society, at capitalism. It lobs major bombs at the patriarchy and somehow manages to remain kind. In the end there is a palpable love and deep belief in people, in the human experience, and in healing through naming whatever it is one has to work through.

I recommend it highly with a few caveats: Barbie is an uber modern movie.

You have to be plugged-in to popular culture and conversations happening mostly in the West, so to speak, to get even half of what the movie is talking about. While of course you can enjoy it without the meta commentary, why bother? To love movies is to know at least something about Hollywood. So, if you take someone older with you, be prepared to explain a lot.

Read: Poor casting, bad dialogue kills Marvel film

And if you take someone younger with you, be prepared to explain a lot too. Take a social conservative with you at your own peril.

Like so many works that I love that are written and directed by women, about women and primarily for women, this one is a Therapy Movie. It is to be consulted at times when I feel a bit lost, or unheard, or just need a tune-up. For a feminism retreat I would pair this film with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande rather than Oppenheimer. But that’s an article for another day.

With Oppenheimer the preparation has been virtually nil, outside of opening Wikipedia and looking at Oppenheimer’s picture to compare his features to that of Cillian Murphy.

Like Barbie, the subject of the movie is highly documented and has been examined numerous times for public knowledge and commentary. And like Barbie, the entire film was carried by How It Happened and Who was involved.

The writer/director Chris Nolan has a well-known body of work and I imagine he was chosen, just like Gerwig was, to give this story his particular treatment.

Note: this is one of the ultimate goals of any creative, I think, to ascend to becoming an Auteur whose work is so distinct, whose art is so strong that you get commissioned to render a communal story in your specific voice. Peak performance! This is what lasting success looks like, far beyond Box Office revenue figures. It is the stuff of dreams, and legacy.

Legacy is something that Robert Oppenheimer has in spades. With heavy reference to the Greek myth of Prometheus bringing fire to humans and suffering an eternal damnation for it, Christopher Nolan has crafted a surprising and intimate movie about the Director of the Manhattan Project.

Well, the movie is about Oppenheimer, but really it is a study of power both nuclear and personal, well actually it is a modern day fable about hubris, wait no- it is a fascinating experiment in examining a central historical figure… um.

It is an indescribable film. As with Barbie, you know what kind of ride you are on within the first minute. Flashing, confusing lights introduce you to the abstraction of the human visual inner dialogue as experienced by the main character. His mind does not give up its secrets and Oppenheimer is a tight-lipped dude who is somehow charismatic.

Read: Indiana Jones de-aged by AI

He starts out a confused and confusing youth with an element of danger to him and throughout the film he remains a fascinating guy who is impossible to fully grasp even as we look inside his head. At one point, another character is asked to describe Oppenheimer and they do with a lavish list of qualities and faults that still ends up feeling inadequate to the task.

While the film has to have superb effects because it is about the atomic bomb, everything is absolutely in service of the story.

And the story is firmly character-driven, which means that here too the director uses long, tight shots of actors faces and bodies to mesmerise the audience.

The actors must have had such a blast doing this work: the costumes, the settings, their roles. The camera work was up to par as well, it is easy enough to sink into the story so smoothly that you don’t notice how far out the visual choices are bouncing between styles and inserting some rather intense sound and visual effects. It is a trip.

I was not expecting this half of the Barbenheimer experience to be the ‘sexy’ one. In fact, I am still mulling over Nolan’s decisions when it came to nudity and sex scenes. I like how this challenges our buttoned-up portrayals of The past and historical figures.

Even though he cast gorgeous people he manages, quite hilariously, to strip the performances of titillation. If you are already confused about why you find Cillian Murphy attractive, this movie will not help you. There is little in the way of glorious seduction once the clothing is off, it is all done with looks and smiles.

The real gift of Oppenheimer is the way the story is told.

At one point I realised that even though the cameos are superb, there is a point at which Einstein, Godel, Heisenberg, Nils Bohr are just pieces in a very big story that intersects with the McCarthy witch hunting era and America’s psychotic paranoia about Communism.

What this movie takes away in terms of the fun and sexy actors, it gives back in a lush political story with delightful Easter eggs for the science nerds in the audience. It strips us all of the comfortable delusion that science and scientists aren’t political. They are, and very human at that. It leaves the viewer bereft, considering the world that these men ushered in and that we live in.

Oppenheimer put me in mind of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be The Verse.’ “They f**k you up, your mom and dad, they may not mean to but they do. They give you all the faults they had and then some extra, just for you.”

Read: OBBO: Get ready for great escapes that will erase bad memories of 2021

Where Barbie heals the viewer by giving you a well-earned optimism about humanity, Oppenheimer reminds you that you live in the real world that Barbie is just discovering. You are an old hand at it, amused by Barbie’s cartoonish and cutting portrayal of masculinity and oppressed by its real manifestation in the phallic nuclear bombs whose shadow we live in today.

Going into Oppenheimer, a friend at the theater quipped to me: “why?” and why indeed. Why go to movies, what is interesting about this art form anyways? Barbenheimer is a movie-going experience that people give themselves for a variety of reasons. Entertainment is a broad term, and I was just as bemused that they had “wasted” money and time watching a movie about a pre-historic shark. Where is the social commentary in that? See how judgemental we are. So human, neh?

If you are a lover of movies, of feminism, if you like science and strong storytelling and experiencing a cultural phenomenon while it happens, consider doing a Barbenheimer yourself. If you don’t, your life will in no way be diminished, but if you do, you might have fun and learn something too.