First Published via HUB Magazine when I was Editor-in-Chief.

Date Published: 20th October 2023.

The cinema industry has always been a rather fragile income, the boom of the industry came back during the Marvel releases taking the world by storm, however, this came crashing down as quickly as it began. COVID-19 meant the shutdown of cinemas everywhere, the closure of film sets, the holdings of productions and scripts. The question lingered if cinema could ever return to the state, it was before, income Barbenheimer. 

Whether it stems from the day of two brilliant directors, Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig, or the memes surrounding the day. Barbie grossed over one billion pounds with Oppenheimer slowly behind with nine hundred million pounds. Cinemas were packed with people going to see both films in the space of one weekend or even one day. Personally, I saw Barbie on Friday morning with a quick lunch break before watching Oppenheimer. While some may say this was a bizarre ordering, I respond with a question of I knew the likelihood of enjoying a Greta Gerwig film was much higher for me than Christopher Nolan. This does not discredit Nolan, moreover, I believe I need more time to process and think of Nolan’s film. I can openly admit that I am not quite sure what happened in Tenet. In comparison, I watched Oppenheimer three times during its cinema release and Barbie twice. 

Barbie by Greta Gerwig 

A beautiful story about motherhood, young girls growing up in a harsh world full of criticism, and what it truly means to be human.  

Compared to Oppenheimer I avoided Barbie trailers as much as possible, I wanted to fully experience the film for the first time in cinema. Barbie defined part of my childhood whether that was the animated Barbie films or playing with dolls. Whenever I felt sad, Barbie was something I could lean on even in private. There came a moment during my GCSEs when I and a friend needed something to lean on, the nostalgia of playing with Barbie dolls helped us whilst we studied for our exams. There is an interesting aspect of the film that girls grow up much quicker than boys, in this society we are expected to be more mature and take the high ground more often than boys. For a brief moment when I was in the cinema, I could finally relive a part of my girlhood that I had forgotten about and avoided. 

The protagonists exemplify that femininity is not a weakness and it encapsulates the beautiful nature of women’s friendships. 

Like Oppenheimer, Barbie separates worlds by cinematography techniques. In Barbieland, the lightning is always behind the Barbies and the Kens who are always centred shot. Whereas, in the real world, there is a range of shots and Barbie is no longer centred. This indicates the beauty of the Barbies and the harsh world that Barbie is adventuring into. 

Barbie is presented as a comedy, on average about fifty per cent of the jokes land, however, I can understand that not all the jokes are for my demographic but for the little girls that have the privilege to grow up in a world that has Barbie. While it is easier to praise Ryan Gosling for his role in Barbie as he plays a comedic relief, one must not overlook the acting skills demonstrated by Margo Robbie and America Ferrera.  

Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan 

I would label Oppenheimer as my favourite Christopher Nolan film, yes above The Dark Knight. Oppenheimer is a story about the struggle of furthering science and winning the war while addressing and evaluating the consequences of the atomic bomb. ‘They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it’ which perfectly encapsulates the reasoning behind dropping the atomic bomb. 

I knew this would become one of my all-time favourite films when the soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson ‘Can you hear the music’ started while Oppenheimer was studying at Cambridge. This is during the first act, the colour grading for this part of the film is very interesting with the enhanced blue cold tones which highly contrasted to the browns and red tones in the final act. I cannot discuss the colour grading without mentioning the use of black and white during Robert Downey Jr parts. This is not the first time Nolan has used this technique to divide the narrative, he used this in Memento (2000) to show two sequences. One sequence follows Downey Jr closely in the cabinet, however, not used during the investigation of Oppenheimer. The black and white sequence shows the narrative the public had during the time of the nuclear bomb, while the colour sequence is Oppenheimer’s narrative and therefore has extreme bias. 

Cillian Murphy plays the role of Oppenheimer so extremely well that I can read every single microexpression and all the words that are left unsaid. Every single actor in this film brought everything they could into this.  

The film also holds my favourite cinematography sequence, the trial scene of dropping the atomic bomb, I felt my entire body and mind torn in half. The deafening silence during the sequence met with a loud explosion left goosebumps covering my body. 

Bibliography- 

Gerwig, Greta. Barbie. Heyday Films, 2023. 

Hughes, Mark. ‘Can ‘Oppenheimer’ Top $1 Billion Box Office? The Clock Is Ticking.’ Forbes, 2023. 

Murray, Tom. ‘Mattel’s earnings from Barbie movie revealed to be ‘more than double’ Margot Robbie’s’. The Independent, 2023. 

Nolan, Christopher. Memento. Summit Entertainment, 2000. 

Nolan, Christopher. Oppenheimer. Universal Pictures, 2023. 

Nolan, Christopher. Tenet. Warner Bros Pictures, 2020. 

Nolan, Christopher. The Dark Knight. Warner Bros Pictures, 2008.