Short version: two good flicks that are going to do monster business, and you should probably avoid dismissing BARBIE’s cultural impact out of hand, or mischaracterizing it. That movie is ultimately for moms. Also: OPPENHEIMER did the right thing, but he shouldn’t have trusted any of those damn Commies.
Slightly longer version: there’s one hell of a horror movie inside BARBIE, but the director decided instead to make a movie that was aimed at, and relevant to, women aged 28 and above. That was probably the wiser decision. I liked it (the film’s good, and more complex than online enthusiasts of various stripes suggest that it is), but it was not made for me. It was made for the theater of moms (plus daughters, granddaughters, and/or nieces) watching the film with me. And, judging from the spontaneous applause coming from the audience at one point, its message resonates.
As for OPPENHEIMER: like BARBIE, it’s a good film. Oppenheimer was right about needing to stick to the ‘how’ and not the ‘why’ of the bomb, but the parts of the movie that were about the Red Scare were weakened somewhat by the fact that the anti-communists had excellent reasons to mistrust Oppenheimer. Also: I’m very sorry that it was necessary to drop two atom bombs to get the Japanese to surrender, but it was still necessary. I also have no urge to wish that Americans should have died by the hundreds of thousands and/or millions, simply to keep us from quickly winning a war we did not in fact start.
Anyway. BARBIEHEIMER was a fun experience. I might not do it again in a hurry, though. Those chairs start getting less comfortable after the fourth hour.
On the one hand, a city being nuked is pretty horrible. On the other hand, my grandfather was training for amphibious assault when the bombs fell. On the gripping hand, there was at least one person who was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the respective days the bombs fell.
If those bombs had not been dropped, my father would have been in the first wave of airborne troops to hit Kyushu and I most likely would never have been born. It was horrible that those cities were destroyed; war is horrible and especially so if you were occupied by the Japanese military.
There were a great many people in places like China and the Phillipines who had the darkest of grudges against Japan in 1945. That war was horrible for Japan but it could have been worse.