In what is being described as “the movie event of the year”, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer have finally landed in cinemas. The two blockbusters share a theatrical release date but the drastic differences between the pair – Margot Robbie stars as the iconic Mattel doll in Barbie while Cillian Murphy dazzles as the father of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer – have driven excitement among fans to a new level.
The resulting social media phenomenon – dubbed “Barbenheimer” – has its own Wikipedia page and appears to have boosted box office sales, with Odeon reportedly selling 200,000 advance tickets for the double bill.
With Barbie on course to gross $110 million and Oppenheimer projected to take $50 million this weekend, chief film critic Robbie Collin gives his verdict on the film rivalry of the year.
Barbie, review: Ryan Gosling steals the show in the most improbable triumph of the year ★★★★☆
Anthropologists believe there may be tribes living in the farthest reaches of the Amazon basin who have yet to catch sight of the marketing campaign for the new Barbie film, but for the rest of us the damn thing has been melting our eyeballs for weeks. So it’s an unexpected pleasure to report that Greta Gerwig’s film – while still fundamentally being a summer comedy adventure about the Barbie toy line – is far from the blunt-force cash grab many of us feared. In fact it’s deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious.
Barbie’s core young fanbase will enjoy the silliness, the dance numbers, and above all the bright colours – after two hours I left the cinema barely able to see. But the film has been written with older viewers in mind, and its pleasures are often planted between inverted commas. Much of the time you’re just enjoying the meta-spectacle of Gerwig, whose last film was the masterful 2019 adaptation of Little Women, springing herself and her stars from what initially looks like an inescapable corporate trap.
It opens with an arch narration from Helen Mirren, in which the official Mattel line (you can imagine it being dictated to Gerwig and her co-writer and partner Noah Baumbach in a board room) is hammered home to a self-evidently absurd degree. The mere existence of this stylish, aspirational toy, we’re told, has solved every problem women face: thanks to Barbie, little girls in the real world now know they can do and be anything, while Barbie Land itself is a fragrant, female-centred Eden, where each day unfolds in a rictus of bliss.
Daily activities here feel like they’re being dictated from behind the camera by a six-year-old: which is to say in a Barbie context, they’re strikingly realistic. Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach”, bounces off a wave while surfing and is whisked to a fold-out hospital. But that evening, halfway through a Dua Lipa dance number, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) asks her fellow Barbies “Do you guys ever think about dying?” – and it becomes clear that in the outside, human world, from where the Barbies and Kens are (somehow) controlled, things are going dangerously amiss.
