It is very rare to get a week like this in cinema. With 52 weeks in a year, it shouldn’t really be necessary for a film with a $100+ million budget to open against another $100+ million budget film in its opening week. This week though we’ve had Oppenheimer going up against Barbie in one of the weirdest cinema events I can imagine.
And if the evidence of my two trips to the cinema are anything to go by, it is proving to be a highly lucrative cinema event for everyone involved. Barbie was clearly drawing the bigger crowd but both of the mid-afternoon midweek screenings I went to were sold out, and I suspect the novelty factor of watching such vastly different films convinced a lot of people to watch both who perhaps would only have watched one of them had they been released a month apart. But which is better?
Obviously this is like comparing apples and oranges, or perhaps that should be pink grapefruits in the case of Barbie. Despite being released in the same week, it is more relevant to compare them to other films in the same genre rather than each other. That being said, both films boast an absolute abundance of acting talent in their respective casts, particularly Oppenheimer where you’ll find Academy Award nominees and winners who only appear in one scene in the entire film. Both look and sound fantastic too, albeit in very different ways.
I’ll start with Oppenheimer since I saw it first, and in terms of genre, it is tempting to put Christopher Nolan films in their own genre. And yes, there is non-linear storytelling here, albeit for the most part that is very easy to follow. In terms of a broader genre, this is a biopic, and a very good example of that genre too. The challenge for any biopic is how to build tension if it is a story the audience is familiar with, and with this story, even if you had never heard the name of Oppenheimer before going into the cinema, you most likely still know what the outcome of World War II was. I knew rather more of the political and scientific story than that going in, yet was still gripped for the first 2 hours or so at least. The final 40 minutes or so does drag a bit, albeit I was still interested as it covered parts of the story I was less familiar with. I could very much see myself watching this film again, which often isn’t the case when the subject matter of the film is so heavy and bleak, which I think speaks to the fine balance which is struck between a personal story and how that played into incredibly significant world events.
Barbie is a slightly harder film to define in terms of genre. At times it is a comedy. I did find myself laughing at most of the jokes, and there are so many references scattered throughout that I’m sure I missedsome of them. However, definitely don’t go into this thinking there will be jokes every minute, because they certainly aren’t that frequent. This isn’t a musical either, even though there are a few song and dance numbers which I enjoyed a lot. It’s not a kids’ film, and is probably aimed slightly more towards adults than kids than would be the case with something like Toy Story, with which there are obvious similarities.
I think this touches on what I liked most about the film. It would have been so easy to do something obvious and by the numbers, like so many other films which trade heavily off their IP have done in recent years. But this definitely isn’t obvious, and many of the choices the film makes are quite weird. Weird in a good way though. It doesn’t feel like it was put together in a boardroom, even though the reality is that it would have gone through as many boardroom meetings as any other big budget Hollywood film.
Which is better? Who cares. Go see both.