Is the Barbenheimer Experience Worth the Brain Cell Tax?

(SPOT.ph) Opposites attract. It’s an unofficial tenet of how we make sense of the world and what we use to justify why we tend to be so drawn towards things so unlike ourselves. However, going into 2023, we would never have imagined that the year’s best exemplification of “yin and yang” or how “inside you, there are two wolves” would come in the pairing between a Barbie girl in a Barbie world and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who infamously became “Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” (as one does).

Barbenheimer: What even?

You’ve probably already noticed it at your local cinema or on your social media timelines; audiences coming out in droves, all dressed up in pinks or baby blues, not merely to watch Margot Robbie’s Barbie dance the night away but to also see director Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic on the—*checks notes*—science, politics, and boardroom bureaucracy behind the creation of the Atomic Bomb. From the perspective of the uninitiated, these two are completely different pictures and couldn’t be related at all.

However, the two have always been cosmically linked. In 2022, Warner Bros. Pictures set the release date of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to be the exact same day as the next film of Nolan, who was their Golden Goose auteur filmmaker of The Dark Knight and Inception fame but had recently left them for Universal Pictures after they released his previous film Tenet simultaneously theatrically and on streaming during the pandemic. (Insider) The salty provocation was clearly there and all signs pointed to a battle at the box office on the weekend of July 21, 2023. But the general public saw it differently.

As the respective films concurrently filled out their enormous ensemble casts with high-caliber actors from the drama and comedic fields, and as the trailers rolled out, the tide quickly turned from “Which movie will you see?” to “Both these very different movies look amazing, so we should make a fun day out of watching them both.” And thus, “Barbenheimer” was born, in large parts thanks to Margot Robbie’s and Cillian Murphy’s screen-dominating cheekbones, Barbie’s and Oppenheimer’s very distinctly opposite wardrobe, and some talented Photoshop artists on the Internet.

Also read:
MOVIE REVIEW: Oppenheimer Is a Combination of Genius and Madness
I am Ken-ough + More Truths I Learned From the Barbie Movie

Barbenheimer: What Order to Watch In

The appeal of the “Barbeheimer” movement is that they both genuinely feel like cinematic events born out of a hyper-specific vision. Oppenheimer is three hours of Dudes Talking but told with as much intensity as the last hour of Inception and even more fragmented memory abstraction than Interstellar or Memento. While Barbie, a literal blank canvas of a children’s doll, feels like it could’ve only come from the coming-of-age urgency and the tactile fantasy world Gerwig manifested in her two previous films Lady Bird and Little Women.

Also read: Beyond Barbie: Why Greta Gerwig Is So Much More Than Her Pink Movie

One is a meta musical-comedy about a doll, while the other is an epic tragedy of a historical figure and real-world events. Both are cathartic in their different ways, so the question becomes: how do you structure your “Barbenheimer” double feature?

Cinema showtimes notwithstanding, the answer would simply depend on how much you’d want to linger on your despair. Oppenheimer’s first two hours break down the life of Oppenheimer leading up to his creation of the Atomic Bomb for the United States government “to end all wars,” while also deconstructing how his ego and fundamental contradictions as a person all shaped the world we live in today (whether we know it or not).

The last hour teeter-tots between excruciating and defeating, as we witness the existential guilt the “American Prometheus” is burdened with after giving the world fire and what the powers at be do with the most catastrophic weapon in the world (also where Robert Downey, Jr. gets to appear in his most reptilian role in decades). All of this culminating in a final shot that’ll compel you to either want to hold your loved ones or not want to even look at them in the face.

It’s at this point, we’d argue you watch Barbie as your chaser! The film’s first act surprisingly helps you digest the heavy emotions of Oppenheimer more smoothly. The film throws you into the perfect Barbieland where no problems exist, where you can wonder at the pink whimsy of their everyday life and laugh at Ryan Gosling’s baby-brained Ken, all before it hits you with the record-scratch, freeze-frame moment of Robbie’s Barbie asking, “Do you ever think about dying?” 

From there, you can watch the movie and relate with Robbie’s Barbie as she learns that it’s okay not to be a Barbie girl in a Barbie world and that the real world is scary but beautiful at the same time. In a way, we could see how watching Oppenheimer immediately before Barbie would make its cathartic climax even more impactful.

It would be a stretch to say that the films complement each other thematically, but watching it in the Oppenheimer-Barbie order does make the experience more fulfilling, like how a main course would go with dessert. 

Going the other way around also wouldn’t be wrong, but it’d simply be watching an uplifting movie right before a melancholic movie. It’d also definitely be strange to go from a movie that argues that there is both beauty and pain in the mere act of living to a movie that shows “how the creators of the atomic bomb were completely and remotely disconnected from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Though, if you do watch Barbie prior to Oppenheimer, there is a comedic bit where Oppenheimer’s wife mockingly asks him to explain physics to her when they first meet, which will unintentionally (and hilariously) feel like a callback to a similar extended comedic sequence towards the end of Barbie.

There are definitely merits on both sides but put simply, the world feels forever changed after “Barbenheimer” weekend. In the United States, the two films’ opening weekend was the fourth biggest box office weekend of all time, just behind the releases of Avengers movies Endgame and Infinity War, as well as Star Wars revival The Force Awakens. It feels like any film could become a cinematic event now and not just action-adventure blockbusters and vehicles for cinematic universes. Only time will tell, but for now, movies have never been so back.

Also read: "Father of the Atomic Bomb": Here's the Real Story Behind Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

Barbie and Oppenheimer are now showing in cinemas.