Film picks: Barbie, Oppenheimer, Bird Box Barcelona

Barbie (PG13)

114 minutes, now showing, 3 stars

Let us get this out of the way first: This is not a movie for children, despite what one thinks of the way this movie is marketed.

There are jokes about doll genitals, along with other double entendres, capped off by references to how this is a toy movie with double entendres. Characters actually say “entendre”.

It should be obvious by now that this is a movie that knows its central character is a doll which comes with cultural baggage.

Self-awareness is the thing the studio wanted when it hired Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, 2017; Little Women, 2019) to write and direct. She made this movie for adults who look back with fondness, mixed with embarrassment, at the time they played with Barbie dolls.

The film opens with Barbie (Australian actress Margot Robbie) living her best life in the female-run Barbie Land, a paradise of fun and colour where all the Supreme Court justices are women.

Ken (Ryan Gosling) and his brothers exist mainly as background extras.

One day, the routine of tea and beach parties is interrupted by a strange new phenomenon and Barbie must leave to find a cure in the real world, namely California. Interacting with real humans produces unexpected results, and soon, Barbie Land becomes infected with dangerous ideas.

Conceptually, the set-up of Barbie as a naive tourist from a perfect feminist society wandering the misogynistic hellscape of Los Angeles is brilliant.

The jokes are good, including the one about doll anatomy, which feels like a throwaway line but gets a poignant callback at the end.

Tightly choreographed and packing a glorious sugar rush, the musical set pieces contain the film’s finest moments. They offer a hint of the fever-dream potential Gerwig’s movie holds, but lacks the courage to embrace.

Instead, Gerwig dissipates her energies on Lady Bird-lite, feel-good bits about mother-daughter relationships, with everything drenched in therapy-speak.

Robbie, Gosling and supporting Ken actor Simu Liu deserve better. They are so good that one desperately wants to see them go bigger, bolder and pinker.

Oppenheimer (M18)

180 minutes, now showing, 3 stars

The film puts a spotlight on the father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Irish actor Cillian Murphy) time as the World War II director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, heading a scientific team trying to build the weapon ahead of the Germans.

His relationships with psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and  biologist Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt) are shown, along with his interactions with friends and colleagues in science and government, such as businessman and bureaucrat Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr).

Christopher Nolan’s films have always featured heroes whose neurons fire faster than everyone else’s, but pay a price because of it.

In Interstellar (2014), Jessica Chastain’s Murphy Cooper has to solve a mathematics equation to take humanity off a doomed Earth. The responsibility nearly destroys her.

Nolan’s portrait of Oppenheimer puts his admiration for science, and scientists, on full display. The British film-maker succeeds in making atomic physics sexy, but has less success with the other areas of his life.

Scenes detailing Oppenheimer’s turbulent romantic liaisons and his post-war battles with the right wing of the United States government feel unnecessarily drawn out. The sections capturing the race to build the bomb feel the most urgent.

Bird Box Barcelona (M18)

111 minutes, available on Netflix, 3 stars

The European spin-off Bird Box Barcelona will never equal the sensational meme-trending success of Bird Box, which is the fourth most-watched film on Netflix.

It does not have Sandra Bullock’s Hollywood star presence, for one thing.

Making their way across the ruins of Barcelona in Spain in search of shelter and safety are engineer Sebastian (Mario Casas) and his young daughter, Anna (Alejandra Howard).

But Sebastian, unlike Bullock’s heroine, is an unreliable protagonist who does not have good intentions. Why does he tell everyone he encounters he is alone when Anna is standing right beside him?

This is the intriguing reversal in the expanded mythology written and directed by Spanish brothers David and Alex Pastor.