Barbenheimer: The Cinematic Phenomenon

Barbenheimer: The Cinematic Phenomenon

 

One of my best friends texted me the other day and asked when we were going to see Barbenheimer. I knew exactly what they meant, and not just because our group chat is called movie bubs. Barbenheimer is not just Barbie, the new fantasy comedy from director Greta Gerwig based on the best-selling toy by Mattell, and not just Oppenheimer, the new biographical drama from director Christopher Nolan about the scientist who played a pivotal role in developing the atomic bomb, but both, in a double feature on the same day.

Normally if I’m talking about a newly released film, it’s in the form of a review, but today I’m talking about not just one but two new movies—two vastly different movies, at that—in a different kind of way than usual. I’ll consider these two mini-reviews, because I will give some of my initial thoughts on them, but I figured I might as well talk about this curious summer movie event that I don’t think anyone could have predicted would take off the way it has.

I am a pretty big Christopher Nolan fan, but not to the same degree I was a decade ago. The Dark Knight and Inception were two defining movie-going experiences for me in my teenage years, and while I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises well enough, Interstellar was a disappointment, and I initially didn’t love Dunkirk, but found I appreciated it more upon subsequent viewings. Tenet also disappointed me, but Oppenheimer intrigued me because it was a departure of sorts from the usual Nolan stories. This was a story based on a nonfiction book that covered the true history of a man involved in the Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. I was pretty much anticipating the film from its announcement, but when I discovered just how stacked the cast was, my anticipation grew exponentially.

Honestly, I wasn’t initially that curious about the Barbie movie beyond the idea that a movie was being made based on a toy that has been heavily criticized in more recent years for giving young girls unattainable beauty standards, but the fact that it was being helmed by Academy Award nominees was quite surprising. Margot Robbie was cast as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, which gave the film the right kind of star power. I avoided the trailers because I didn’t really feel the need to know exactly what a movie based on the famous doll would be about, but I had heard enough internet buzz to know it would be in the realm of absurdist comedy, and as the hype for it built, I warmed up to the idea of going to see it, even though it still didn’t really seem like something designed with audience members like myself in mind (if you know my movie interests at all, I don’t need to elaborate further, and if you don’t know, I mean, take a look back at Gamera-thon just for starters, that’ll be enough of a hint).

At first I thought this idea of seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer back-to-back was something only huge movie fans like my friends and I were planning to do, or just a funny proposal a few other people had shared online—we have jokingly been referring to it as Barbenheimer for a few months, or, alternately, as Oppenbarbie, depending on the order they were being seen in. Some proposed seeing Barbie first because it was the lighter, fluffier film, then to end with the epic, serious tale of the father of the atomic bomb. Others, like myself, felt it was more appropriate to see the longer and more depressing film first, then cheer up with Barbie second and give our minds and spirits a break. But then, as the opening weekend neared, I discovered the internet really had taken the idea of Barbenheimer/Oppenbarbie to heart. It started as a meme, but when I started seeing things like sold-out IMAX showings for Oppenheimer at 10:00 PM and lines of people waiting outside the theater all dressed in pink clothing, I realized these movies really were going to do considerable business. 

This phenomenon or trend or fad or whatever you want to call it is a big deal for a few reasons, but mainly because neither of these films are sequels, nor are they part of a Disney-owned franchise. People are excited for both for very different reasons, but the contrast between the content and tone of the films was part of the catalyst for the phenomenon. Once the actors started talking about it leading up to the premieres and fan posters combining the two movies started popping up, it became clear this was not just a joke—people were actually booking their tickets for both on opening weekend. Barbie is a Warner Brothers production, and Oppenheimer is from Universal, which is the first Christopher Nolan film not distributed by Warner Brothers in over two decades (I won’t get into the nitty gritty of why but it’s related to streaming), so this is a win-win for both studios, and for Hollywood in general, because it’s showing that audiences are interested in films from respected directors that aren’t just about superheroes and spectacle.

My girlfriend and I went to both over the weekend, and we even went to two different movie theaters just to have the Barbenheimer experience. I don’t really know how this whole thing came to be so widely embraced (I don’t get the impression it was ever intentional on the studio’s part) and I don’t know if we’ll see more unofficial theatrical events like this in the future, but I’m all for it. Here are my mini-reviews of the actual movies, in the order we saw them.

 

Oppenheimer Mini-Review

 

I loved it. I haven’t been that immersed in a Christopher Nolan movie from beginning to end since Inception. Emily Blunt was quoted as saying it was a biopic disguised as a thriller or vice versa, and she is right. It is shot, scored, and told (in a non-linear way) just like some of Nolan’s other best films, but it is an intimate character study, and the acting across the board was solid, but Cillian Murphy was excellent as Oppenheimer. My biggest qualm is how the story moves at a frantic pace to begin with, then settles into the primary narrative, but it builds to a climax too early, and while I was still engaged and enjoying it for the last half hour or so, it felt like too much of a denouement. Another small thing I didn’t like was the way a particularly famous line spoken by Oppenheimer was used—it came out in an odd way at an odd moment, and while there were a couple other lines that felt purposefully inserted just for audiences to raise their eyebrows, I didn’t have many other issues with it. It is definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year, with incredible sound design, music, and cinematography, all in addition to the acting and dialogue.

 

Barbie Mini-Review

 

I thought it was OK. I wasn’t too surprised to find it wasn’t really aiming for my demographic, but I was a little surprised with how it tried to play to viewers who were older and remembered Barbie dolls fondly, and to those who were in their twenties or thirties, with well-aimed jokes (one of which my girlfriend felt personally attacked by), and to teenagers, and to very young kids, all at once! I don’t know if they’ll hit every target they were aiming for, but I did find it pretty funny at times, and like everyone else is raving about, I agree that Ryan Gosling as Ken kind of stole the show. I’d forgotten how funny he’s able to be, and was reminded fondly of his surprising comedic turn in The Nice Guys, though he’s funny in a different kind of way as Ken. Margot Robbie was good, too, especially given the way her character (credited as Stereotypical Barbie) was written. My favourite aspect to the film was the visual design. I didn’t expect to be more curious about the making of the Barbie movie than the making of Oppenheimer. The sets, props, and costumes were all impeccably done, and clearly having Greta Gerwig behind the camera made this movie more than it could have been—visually, at least. The plot reminded me of Elf and The LEGO Movie, many jokes fell flat, and what I liked the least was how meta it became. It was almost too self-aware at times, to the point of making me feel alienated instead of laughing.

 

Final Thoughts

If you have considered going for the Barbenheimer experience at the movie theater this summer, I would recommend it! I enjoyed both, I would endorse them as a double feature, and I could probably keep saying more good things about both, but you should just go join in on the fun yourself. I definitely liked Oppenheimer more, which didn’t surprise me and probably won’t surprise anyone else, and if you only want to see one of the two films, that’s the one I would recommend for the cinematic experience. As for which one will have more staying power ten years from now, I’m not sure what the answer will be…

…but obviously it will be Oppenheimer.

SKULL ISLAND: Season 1 Review

Skull Island (2023): Season 1 Review

 

In 2021 I watched my first complete season of an anime TV show, and this marks another minorly historic moment, because I’ve just finished only my second-ever complete season of an anime. A couple years ago I reviewed the Godzilla anime from Toho, Godzilla Singular Point, and now it’s time for me to talk about Skull Island: the first TV series set in the MonsterVerse (Legendary Pictures’ shared universe of Godzilla and Kong movies, which continues next year with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire). This was almost the third kaiju-centric anime show I watched. I tried watching the Pacific Rim anime on Netflix, Pacific Rim: The Black, but I just couldn’t get into it and never finished the first season. Like that show, Skull Island is an American-produced animated series in the style of traditional anime, and all episodes were dropped at once on Netflix just a couple weeks ago. To refresh, I didn’t really enjoy Godzilla Singular Point. It was full of bland talking scenes, mostly about made-up science, and skimped out on monster battles—most egregiously of all side-lining Big G himself. Skull Island is a totally different beast of a show, but this one I actually quite enjoyed.

This is not the first time King Kong has been on television. Though most famous for the original 1933 film, two remakes, and a Japanese version that fought Godzilla and Mechani-Kong (a robot version of Kong), the Kong TV programming includes The King Kong Show from the 1960’s, which was a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for three seasons, then much later there was Kong: The Animated Series from the early 2000’s, which was made to compete with Godzilla: The Animated Series and lasted a couple seasons, and finally Kong: King of the Apes, which had two seasons on Netflix and is still the only 3D-animated Kong show. I’ve never seen the one from the 60’s, but recently I watched half of Kong: The Animated Series season one for the first time since I was a kid, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s still pretty entertaining, if a bit dated, goofy, and cheap at times. The Kong: King of the Apes premise and style didn’t work for me, and it was too focused on being child-friendly. Skull Island is the first Kong series not to be aimed at children. I think kids will still enjoy it, but it’s definitely more mature and more overtly violent, which helps make it fit in with the overall MonsterVerse.

One of the only things that stuck with me about Godzilla Singular Point was the opening credit intro and theme music. Skull Island has a different approach: it doesn’t have an intro. Each episode has an image related to the episode that the title fades in around, and it zooms into the image, immersing viewers back into the show. There are eight episodes in this first season, almost all of which are about 20 minutes long—a much tighter runtime than Singular Point’s overinflated 13 episodes. Looking back on it, Skull Island season one kind of plays like an extended movie broken up into pieces, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. I won’t compare Skull Island to Singular Point any further, simply because they really aren’t that comparable, and Skull Island is telling a completely different kind of story set in an already-established universe that began Kong’s story in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. I didn’t love that movie, either. I will be comparing this show to that movie, though, because Skull Island does several things much better than the first film in the MonsterVerse to star the Eighth Wonder of the World.

First of all, as the title alludes to, this isn’t really a show about King Kong. Yes, he’s in it, and he plays an important role later in the story, but we already know who Kong is, we know what he’s all about, and so the show cleverly focuses on his home, the infamous Skull Island, and a group of characters who become stranded there. We have Charlie and Mike, two teenage boys whose fathers work together on a ship in search of strange lands and unknown creatures. Mike spots a teenage girl named Annie adrift at sea, who is shown escaping from her captors on another ship at the start of the series. Not long after Charlie rescues Annie, the ship is attacked by a giant Kraken-like monster, and Charlie and Mike find themselves on an island overrun with dangerous monsters. They have to figure out how to reunite with the other survivors, as well as solve the mystery of Annie, who knows a lot about Skull Island and has a pet dog, which isn’t a regular dog, it’s a mix of a bulldog and a lion with spikes and giant claws…but its name is just Dog. It’s not very creative, but it’s OK, they make a joke about her lack of creativity. Even with the joke, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still unoriginal. I’ll discuss the show’s use of humour in a bit, but let me continue with the plot and characters first.

I had to look up when this show was set, because it’s clearly quite a while after the 1970’s setting of Kong: Skull Island, but not that close to when Godzilla vs. Kong is set, because the island was in a very different condition by that film. It takes place in the 1990’s, but you can’t tell when it’s supposed to be taking place, and I think this is to the show’s credit, not discredit. There’s something kind of timeless about the way this story is told—the characters look, act, and sound modern enough, but are not distinctly part of 90’s culture. Having it set almost exclusively on the island helps with this, too, because aside from guns and a bit of tech, they don’t really have much with them, and have to rely on their wits and cooperation to survive.

Without spoiling too much, two characters who seem like they’re going to be pretty important get killed before the end of the first episode. There are a couple more surprising deaths throughout the season, but none that live up to the ones in the premiere. This episode is just about establishing the characters and getting them to Skull Island, and it works quite well to get the story underway and establish the stakes early on. The characters continue to get development in episode two, as they begin to figure out where they’ve become shipwrecked, and the main duo of Charlie and Mike are quite funny, with jokes and quips and humourous jabs. I found them quite likable protagonists, but the character of Annie takes a bit longer to warm up to. I won’t spoil too much about the mystery surrounding her character, but she becomes more likable later in the season once you have a bit more context as to why she’s fighting against seemingly everyone and where she came from.

Episode three is when we get King Kong for the first time, and pacing-wise, it’s perfect—not too late into the series and not too early either—but the way he’s introduced unfortunately reminds me of Kong: Skull Island in an unfavourable way. He acts as a deus ex machina and saves Charlie and Mike from certain death, then just walks away, and isn’t seen again for a while. The characters are not particularly awe-struck by him, either, they make a joke about “the big monkey” and this is when the humour started to wear a little thin. There are quite a few jokes from multiple characters in the first few episodes, and the tension in certain situations is relieved by the funny moments. These moments are intentional, but I did find the humour less forced and less abundant in the later episodes, which was appreciated. It’s not that I disliked the show for trying to be funny—in fact, I think a lot of the humour works—but there could have been a better balance, and not every character has to be a master at quips.

By the halfway point of the season, I found another issue with the show. I feel like Skull Island isn’t actually that dangerous in the first few episodes, despite what the characters keep saying about it. In the original movie (and the 2005 remake) setting foot on Skull Island is like playing with fire—just sticking your hand right into the burning flames—but in this show it’s like playing with a smoldering stick. Sure, the threats are present, but the majority of characters are able to avoid them without too much trouble. I found this issue went away though in the second half of the season. There are some brutal moments with people getting killed or eaten and with the monsters fighting, which I found were great reminders that this isn’t a show just for kids.

It’s around the midway point of the season where the story takes a slight turn and splits some of the characters up and brings some others together, which rejigs the dynamics (in a good way) and brings Kong into the story in a bigger way. Episode six is where we start to see more of Dog’s back story (which, I must admit, did make me like him more), but this episode is a bit lighter on action—though I can’t cite that as a complaint, given the episode that immediately follows. Episode seven is the Kong episode, flashing back to many years before the current storyline for nearly the entire runtime. It’s perhaps my favourite episode from the whole season. It characterizes Kong quite well and delivers some great monster action. The season finale gives us the Kong action that was teased at the end of the previous episode, and it’s a thrilling finale, with the owner of those big tentacles from episode one finally revealed in full for a titanic battle (pun intended).

Overall, I think Skull Island works quite well as an animated MonsterVerse series. Having Kong come in later in the story in a meaningful way is exactly what Kong: Skull Island should have done, but instead that movie had nothing for the giant ape to do. The characters are not generic action heroes, and while I wouldn’t say they’re particularly great characters, the voice actors do a good job and the dialogue isn’t too annoying (aside from some of those jokes). On the surface, it’s pretty comparable to the traditional King Kong story, and at times it plays out like a typical Hollywood action movie. It definitely hits some familiar beats, and some of the action has a been-there-done-that quality, but I found there was just enough ingenuity for the characters and monsters to make it feel enough like its own thing. The whole show was written and developed by Brian Duffield, who has written screenplays and directed films before this, and I think it shows (in good and not so good ways) but I think it’s cool to see a whole eight episodes of a season of a show written by the same guy. I think it’s a big part of the reason for much of the season’s consistency.

The two last things I have to comment on are Kong himself and the other inhabitants of Skull Island. While I still prefer pre-MonsterVerse versions of Skull Island with primarily prehistoric inhabitants, this show features many more interesting examples of monsters and creepy crawlies than what was seen in Kong: Skull Island. It would be neat to see some of them in a live-action film in the future. As for Kong, it’s kind of curious seeing this previously live-action-only-version of him represented in this animation style. I like the show's animation and art style for the most part, but Kong looks a little funky (a funky monkey?) and it’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly why. One part of the issue is the lack of scale. I know intrinsically that he’s huge, but the way the characters are framed makes it difficult to tell just how big or small things are sometimes. These are minor technical criticisms, though. Overall, the visual style is good, and the rest of the designs are fitting.

Skull Island is what I wished Kong: Skull Island had been in the first place: a story set on the island with interesting characters that doesn’t rely on King Kong to anchor it. I’ll definitely be watching season two (the story is not resolved at the end) and recommend it to anyone who has been a fan of the MonsterVerse films thus far.