Barbenheimer: does the highly-anticipated double feature live up to the hype?

24:59I am become Barbenheimer, double-feature of the decade

Come on Barbie, let's go become death, destroyer of worlds!

That's the sort of cognitive dissonance moviegoers are dealing with this weekend as Greta Gerwig's film Barbie and Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer respectively hit theatres.

The highly-anticipated release date from two of today's most respected directors has lovingly been dubbed "Barbenheimer" ever since fans realized that the two diametrically-opposed films would launch on the same day.

Culture writers Chandler Levack, Jason P. Frank and Kristy Puchko join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to review the most unlikely double feature of the decade.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, where the panel discuss Christopher Nolan's latest film Oppenheimer, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Kristy, at this point it seems kind of impossible to talk about Barbie without also talking about Oppenheimer. These two films have just been so intertwined in the discourse. What do you think it is that makes Barbie and Oppenheimer together such ripe meme fodder?

Kristy: Partially it's on the aesthetic level, they're so different. So it's kind of fun to throw them together. They're doing different summer things where one is being like, "Everybody come and party!" and the other one is being like, "Let's talk about death and mortality." … What's so funny is that, I feel like people are not prepared for how much these movies actually have in common.

WATCH | Official trailer for Oppenheimer:

Elamin: Jason, you were on the show just a few weeks ago talking about the extremely long marketing campaign that this movie has had. It's finally here. Did it live up to the hype for you?

Jason: I don't think anything could fully live up to the hype, I'll be honest.

Elamin: Especially that hype.

Jason: That was a lot of hype. I thought it was a really, really good movie. It had an exceptional amount of ideas…. Did all of those concepts land for me? No. But I'd much rather have a critique of a movie that it has way too many ideas than too few. It's a much more interesting experience. I was constantly on my toes. I was constantly laughing. I was smiling, and sometimes I was going, "Oh, I don't know if that one's for me," but I was still interested the whole time…. It's well written within the press that Barbie goes to the real world in this movie. I think Barbie in the real world was immediately great — her dealing with realizing that there was patriarchy in entering the real world. I thought that was all fantastic.

Elamin: Perfectly executed, yes.

Jason: And also very real…. Generally, the Mattel stuff didn't quite land for me. You could say that it was because they couldn't bite as hard as they might want to because it is a Mattel movie, but it felt a little toothless in comparison to the other critiques that the movie had for the patriarchy and the way that Barbie was operating in the real world. So that didn't really land for me.

WATCH | Official trailer for Barbie:

Elamin: Chandler, Barbie sort of escalates to this climax where we arrive at this idea that acknowledging all of the complex and contradictory ideas of womanhood within the framework of the patriarchy robs the patriarchy of its power. That's sort of the place it's trying to land.

Chandler: Yeah, your classic summer blockbuster movie.

Elamin: But it's also trying to make all those critiques within the framework of the fact that this is a movie made by Mattel Productions. It is also made by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is kind of considered to be this visionary auteur, and she is still developing her voice. But you get to this moment and you go: did she have to compromise her voice and her vision in order to make a movie that also has the Mattel stamp on it, do you think?

Chandler: That's what makes this movie both one of the most interesting movies of the summer and also a terrifying forebearer of cinema to come. Can a female director still get a $100-million-greenlit movie if it's not a meta-pseudo-feminist unpacking of IP as financed by Mattel? I don't know. I think within the constructs of the assignment she's been tasked with, which is a very weird assignment, she delivered one of the most subversive and weirdest movies I've ever seen. It's both a Dove Body ad and a Tim and Eric sketch. Barbie contains multitudes.

Kristy: It reminds me of [the Black Mirror episode] Joan Is Awful where there's a really solid criticism built in…. It's a weird, uncomfortable place to be in a corporate IP that is touting rebellious ideas because of course they're tamped down, but I mean how many people are going to see Barbie this weekend? How many people are going to have the opportunity to have a conversation about this? I feel like that's kind of a win. And I think what's interesting about the film is it is about that conflict — is Barbie good? Is Barbie bad? And I think by the same contrast you can look at the film as an argument both for and against IP.

WATCH | Just Ken from Gerwig's Barbie:

Elamin: Chandler, what did you make of Greta Gerwig's treatment of masculinity through Ken's perspective?

Chandler: Ken was the character I related to the most in the movie! I was completely enamored with the emotional arc of Ken. I did not expect that…. [Ryan Gosling] was unbelievably committed in a way that I feel like his soul was Ken. It harkened back to his Mickey Mouse Club days in a really beautiful, unabashed way. We've seen Ryan Gosling have this affect of the fake Brooklyn accent and this old persona that he's putting on everything, and it just feels like a shtick. But this actually feels closer to Ryan Gosling's soul than we've ever seen before. If he doesn't get an Oscar, there's a true injustice going on because it's such a fun, wry, winking performance — but then there's this kind of friction of total vulnerability and pain behind those dead eyes and his silken abs that I love.

Elamin: I am already the president of the Ryan Gosling Oscar For Your Consideration campaign. I'm ready to lead that charge.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show, where the panel discuss Christopher Nolan's latest film Oppenheimer, on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.