After months of anticipation - of memes, think pieces, hype and a marketing deluge that turned London pink - the summer blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer finally arrived in cinemas on Friday.
Ever since it was announced these two polar opposite films would open on the same day, the online discourse about ‘Barbenheimer’ has been frenzied, with the questions - will you see them both, which order should you see them in and could you do it on the same day?
One is a three-hour long courtroom drama about the dawn of the nuclear age (focusing on J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb). The other is a sugar-sweet meta comedy about the iconic 20th century children’s doll, that is happy to poke fun at its own ludicrousness. So how to go about it?
After some umming and ahhing, I settled on an Oppenheimer main course (a sold out 8.15am screening at the BFI IMAX) , followed by a Barbie dessert (12.45pm at Curzon Victoria). This was largely the accepted order for those on the internet determined to experience both in the span of 24 hours.
My personal Barbenheimer experience began with a 6am alarm (thank you, RMT strike) and a bus to the UK’s largest cinema screen at Waterloo, to take in the story of J Robert Oppenheimer.
The film’s subject matter meant the atmosphere in the cinema lobby wasn’t quite as excitable as Avatar 2 (which I also took in at an unsociable hour). But there was still a low hum of expectation and the concessions were enjoying a roaring trade, with an extraordinary amount of nachos and hot dogs snapped up considering it was 8am. I even spotted a few Barbie t-shirts among the crowd – I tipped my metaphorical Barbie pink visor to these few fellow Barbenheimers.
My girlfriend and I eschewed breakfast or a drink (do these people know this movie is 180 minutes long, I wondered. Some did, the toilet queue was extensive). Shortly after 8.15am we settled into our seats and braced ourselves. Three hours later, the end of the film was a polite, muted ripple of applause (nothing like the hooting and hollering that welcomed Avatar 2). Few were in celebratory mood.
As an experience, Oppenheimer will be hard to forget, particularly having seen it in the Christopher Nolan-recommended format of 70mm on IMAX.
It will certainly leave you curious about its subject, and some will depart the cinema questioning the destructive power our species possesses, the vaingloriousness of mankind and the fact that we still haven’t really reckoned with the power that was unleashed in 1945.
Pretty heavy stuff for a Saturday morning. Mercifully, I had scheduled in a 90-minute break before Barbie to decompress.
Time for a katsu curry, a brief debrief and a walk through Westminster before we stocked up on a few tins of pink gin and mojitos and tried to make ourselves mentally ready to go from the existential nuclear threat to humanity, to Mattel’s Barbieworld (the gloomy London weather did not help in this regard).
Fed and watered we sat down in front of a much, much smaller screen for Barbie. We had gone from 500 seats to roughly 70, but it was close to a sell-out and with a much broader audience diaspora.
The cinema decorum was entirely different from Oppenheimer, my own included. I went from nil-by-mouth there to cracking open the cocktails... at Oppenheimer the mobile phone discipline was perfect – not so at Barbie, and someone even had a pizza delivered to their seat.
At the end of Barbie my head was swimming a bit, especially as the coup de grace joke fell thuddeningly flat. But it’s still good fun (Ryan Gosling a particular highlight) and I was happy to have experienced Barbenheimer and lived to tell the tale (thanks to my self-inflicted dehydration meant I did so without a single toilet break).
The break was wise and I would recommend to all those brave enough to attempt this somewhat ludicrous exercise.
Do not try to double-bill these films in close proximity. Not only will your bladder hate you for it and will you risk deep vein thrombosis but the sheer whiplash of going from Nolan’s austere nuclear reckoning to the saccharine sweetness of Barbie will leave your mind a mess - and perhaps ruin your memory of both films.
Thankfully I was able to dissociate my mind from the trials of Oppenheimer enough to enjoy Barbie (I do wish the latter had had a few more laughs, although perhaps the former had simply left me in sore need of them).
The Barbenheimer double bill is more of a vanity pursuit for those terminally online than a genuine filmgoing endeavour. This double bill would never exist on any cinema planning agenda. It’s only for the brave.
Still, I’m glad I did it - if mostly for the memes.
