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mermaidsirennikita · 1 year ago

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Barbenheimer review!!

Haha well

First off, I loved the *experience*. I love going to the movies, but I don't know that I've ever done a double feature in a theater before--there just haven't been many movies that would motivate me to do so, and my money is usually kinda tight, and my parents certainly never did that when we were kids because money was DEF tight and I'm one of four children. I suspect studios will attempt to replicate this shit, but it's not going to work (at least, not as well). The Oppenheimer theater I was in (saw that first, thank God) was about 80% full. The Barbie theater was completely packed. I went with a couple of female friends, neither of whom would normally see Oppenheimer, lol.

I should add--I'm not a big Nolan fan. I have seen, SOMEHOW, all but like, three of his movies, so I actually know what I'm talking about with him--and I think I can say I legitimately like Memento, I like things about The Dark Night and hate other things about The Dark Knight, I appreciate Dunkirk as a spectacle but don't think I would have liked it if I hadn't seen it in a theater, I ironically enjoy parts of Tenet (I think it's like... bad, but I really love the dynamic JDW and RPattz created), and the ONLY movie of his that I love is The Prestige. To me, everything else he's done since is chasing the greatness of The Prestige, you will never convince me that isn't his best work. And EVEN THEN. I think The Prestige, like many movies of its ilk including the Good Plot of Oppenheimer, is chasing Amadeus (1984).

I don't think Oppenheimer is bad. I think that Oppenheimer would absolutely be getting shit on for certain things if anyone other than Christopher Nolan did them, as is often the case with Nolan movies because filmbros give Nolan a pass so often; and I think it is grounded and maybe saved by a very good performance from Cillian Murphy (and I gotta say, it's a testament both to issues in the script and the power of the Murphy filmography that this is not Cillian's best work ever, it's still very good and he's set for a nom for sure) and... as much as I loathe to say this... the best work RDJ, a dude I can't stand, has done in years. I think the movie does a solid job of simplifying what is a very complex story and history (.... sometimes too much) and I think it does a decent job of portraying someone who did something really bad and then regretted it in a fairly gray manner. The movie sympathizes with Oppenheimer, but I don't necessarily think it like... lionizes him. It shows that he's a genius, but like, he was; it shows that he realized that he Fucked Up and tried to advocate for a safer usage of nuclear weapons; but he did.

Here's where we run into issues. This movie absolutely did not fucking need to be 3 hours long. There is NO. WAY. This shit needed to be as long as it was. We didn't need that much backstory of Oppenheimer in school, and Oppenheimer becoming a professor, and the bones of the Manhattan Project. The really interesting shit in this movie, I've gotta be real with you, is not the bomb. The really interesting shit in this movie is the aftermath of the bomb, the realization of Huge Mistakes, and the subsequent "betrayal" by a government that never gave a fuck about human beings, including Oppenheimer. The Red Scare of it all, and the creeping resentment Lewis Strauss felt towards Oppenheimer and the scientific community at large, which I gotta say, Nolan could've leaned into even more considering how that thread connects to the resentment right wing politicians especially feel towards not only the scientific community but academic at large to this. There's where the story felt alive--the Mozart and Salieri of it all, the PRESTIGE of it all. What is compelling is not a big bomb or tons of scientists repeatedly going "you're brilliant, Oppy, but you gotta figure out whether or not you're a Commie and plan accordingly", it is THAT. That tension. One of the best parts of the movie was Chekhov's Rami Malek, because it was the culmination of that tension, you know? Also, the FIVE BILLION TIMES we had Strauss flash back to Albert Einstein giving him a bitchy look. That kind of character tension is where it's at.

But Christopher Nolan is perhaps the most aggressively WHITE MALE filmmakers of all time, so it's really not surprising to me that he thought that The Bomb was equally interesting, and that we needed six billion shots of marbles representing uranium, or whatever.

And the thing is, for all that the movie is way too long, it also skips over shit that is incredibly important. I don't necessarily think the movie needed to delve into Hiroshima and Nagasaki on an "on the ground" level, frankly because I don't think Nolan has the range and I also think that the way it affected Oppenheimer was both direct and indirect, and the film communicated that fairly well. But as much time as the movie spent in Los Alamos, as much time as we saw beautiful shots of the area, and Oppenheimer riding horses around there with his wife, we had maaaaybe five throwaway lines about indigenous people? And like, no acknowledgment of the long term physical, financial, and emotional effects the project had on the community there. That is DIRECT. They were literally right there. And again, I don't think Nolan has the range, but when so much of your behemoth of a film takes place. Right there. It just seems insane to ignore it.

Additionally, Christopher Nolan remains incapable of writing women and convincing romantic relationships, even when he's going off of a biography of a guy whose romantic relationships were quite interesting. Florence Pugh is in like, less than 10 minutes of this movie despite having done so much promo. Jean Tatlock is given so little characterization that if you didn't understand what was happening with her before the movie, I don't know that you would fully get that she was severely depressed and not just Kind of a Bitch until she kills herself. And of course, there is like, a vague allusion to her struggle with her sexuality, which contributed to that depression, but it's not explicit. The scene where she makes him read The Line to her while he's inside her is... I wanna know.... is that like something Nolan read as a rumor to have happened or did he just make it up? Lotta questions there on a lotta levels.

I don't mind the nudity in Florence's scenes, obviously; I don't mind the sex scenes, though the second one was SUPER WEIRD (and by the second one I mean the time Oppenheimer and his wife imagined him naked with Jean riding him during his 1954 questioning). But I found the positioning of Jean as the angry whore figure to Kitty's Corrupted Madonna as super odd. Like, why is Jean shown naked so often, whereas Kitty, Oppenheimer's wife with whom he had a colorful sexual history, who in general was known to be kind of a voracious woman... Never depicted in a sexual light? Why is Jean just Kind of a Sad Bitch until she dies, and Kitty is another sad bitch who is drunk in BASICALLY. EVERY. SCENE and like, hating being a mom and little else? And like, Kitty was a known alcoholic who struggled with motherhood and had a volatile relationship with her husband. But lol, with all the fucking run time this movie had, you could've given more time to making Jean and Kitty seem like people versus thorns in his side, while keeping them flawed. Just like you could've mentioned more about the OTHER dark side of Los Alamos.

Also, one of the best scenes of the movie was in fact Oppenheimer crying in a forest over his dead mistress while his drunk wife rides up on a horse (I assume they don't let her drive a car because she literally can't drop her purse without a flask falling out of it) and is like "PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER MAN". It would've been even better if these emotional bonds had been better cemented. Same with the scene where Kitty stepped up during the interrogation and went "THAT'S MY MAN RIGHT OR WRONG. AND MAYBE I WAS A COMMUNIST IDK I WAS DRUNK."

And let's be fucking real, there are so many things about this movie that filmbros would nitpick if it wasn't Nolan. Einstein appearing out of the shadows randomly in the middle of the night in his cozy sweater to be like "shit bro, sucks that they're Red Scare-ing you". The moment in the end where they were like "and a junior senator from MASSACHUSETS didn't like what you did to Oppy" and I held my breath and went "oh my God" and they went "... and that senator? JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY". The "read The Line You'll Say Later When the Bomb Blows Up Right Now When You're About the Blow Up Inside Me" moment. That shit is so cliche, and I don't mind (most of) it in theory, but if ANYONE ELSE did it, they would be getting dragged, and if this movie was made for people other than white guys, it would be getting dragged, but because it's Nolan, it's fine.

So those are my Oppenheimer thoughts.

My thoughts on Barbie are less complex. I think it was a better movie; I think Ryan Gosling absolutely deserves an Oscar nom; I laughed a LOT. It didn't change my life or tell me things I didn't already know, but I didn't need it to. I think the visuals were great, the costume/set/production designers really came the fuck through.

I will say lol.... I do think you can see where Greta was toned down, because Greta is a very white feminist filmmaker. And honestly, she needs a tempering hand. I think this is probably my favorite work of hers aside from Little Women, which also had a tempering hand. Like, in this case, I think that having a surface level understanding of feminism and patriarchy works for a movie like this. Because while the movie is satire, it's also extreme capitalism, and it kind of goes without saying that it can't go beyond surface level.

I think there is something to be said about like... the reality of Barbie versus what this movie was selling as Barbie, and there is something so interesting about the movie both acknowledging that and totally sidestepping it. Like, that's some fascinating shit, when you really think about it.

I would've preferred a movie where Ken and Barbie fell in love, but I guess I'm just a bad feminist (lol and I had no expectation that the movie would have them fall in love walking in--I'd pretty much figured out the plot before I began the film). I also think that the movie didn't fully make me understand why Barbie wanted to be a human, at all. Like, the human world honestly sucks balls (not in a fun way), and it felt like Barbieland was more actualized and real at the end, so. Why leave. Why would ANYONE leave. If I was America Ferrera, I would pack up my dorky husband and daughter and stay there.

I did love the mother/daughter themes; I loved the "you're so beautiful" moment. I loved the Ken War. I was surprised by how it was acknowledged that women being expected to be everything was Bad, Actually and maybe we do just wanna fucking chill the fuck out and some of us want to do nothing and be moms.

So like, I have Intellectual Critiques of Barbie, but to be clear, I did have a great time and I did laugh throughout and the theater was really fun and I want to see it again. It was a totally enjoyable experience, and I think that movie is going to stay in minds and stand the test of time and be something people watch with the future generations.

But. Lol. They Cloned Tyrone was better than either of them.

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