In the Barbenheimer battle, which movie got better reviews?

In the battle of 2023's biggest movies, has Barbie or Oppenheimer reigned supreme?

As it stands, Barbie has an impressive 90 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, while Oppenheimer has a stunning 94 per cent on the review aggregator website. 

The two movies have almost merged into one, due to their release dates being set at the same time, along with their promo schedules, but the films themselves couldn't be more different.

Greta Gerwig's Barbie is a colourful, hilarious, irreverent, and meta film that dives headfirst into Barbie Land, with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling giving career-defining performances. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, as played by an Oscar-worthy Cillian Murphy.

Watch our interview with Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. Post continues after video. 

So which one is better? Or should you see both? On the same day perhaps, Barbenheimer-style? Check out our roundup of both of the movies' reviews. 

The best reviews.

Barbie has received a bunch of glowing reviews: 

"Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory," wrote a five-star review in The Independent. 

"While it's impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, especially when consumer culture has caught on to the idea that self-awareness is good for business, Barbie gets away with far more than you'd think was possible."

"Barbie is an impressive achievement as a film and far, far funnier than any studio comedy I can remember in recent history," wrote Alissa Wilkinson for Vox. "There are perfect jokes about everything from stilettos to boy bands to fascism and Matchbox Twenty; I’m still giggling at some of the gags." 

"The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry, even if you're made of plastic," wrote Devan Coggan in Entertainment Weekly. 

“An earnest feminist manifesto inside a barbed social satire inside an effervescent musical comedy," wrote Slate.

Oppenheimer has also copped an overwhelmingly positive response:

"Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s best and most revealing work. It’s a profoundly unnerving story told with a traditionalist’s eye towards craftsmanship and muscular, cinematic imagination," wrote Clarisse Loughrey for The Independent.

In a five-star review from Empire, the reviewer wrote that Oppenheimer was a "masterfully constructed character study from a great director operating on a whole new level. A film that you don’t merely watch, but must reckon with."

"A film depicting mostly quotidian human interaction is somehow paced like a thriller, and the tension never stops mounting, right up to the closing shot," wrote David Klion in The New Republic.

Quick! Listen to this episode of The Spill reviewing Barbie. Post continues after podcast.

The worst reviews.

Barbie is a divisive film, therefore not everyone enjoyed the movie's feminist overtones and woke sensibilities.

"It’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself," wrote Stephanie Zacharek for Time Magazine. "Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute."

In another review, Barbie was described as "an empty movie designed for the vacuous social media age," the New York Post wrote.

Over on the ABC, Michael Sun wrote that "By its own admission, it is a film for everyone – and therefore no-one. For all its confectionary diversions, Barbie is a hardened attempt at wholesale appeal: as plastic as its candy-coloured sets."

It was much harder to find a negative review for Oppenheimer, but Forbes were not fans. 

"It’s slow and often hard to follow... Oppenheimer is much too long and its delivery far too muddled to be considered anything more than a visually provocative biopic that seems less interested in character study than it does in setting a mood," wrote Erik Kain for Forbes.

A couple of pieces have also pointed out how the depiction of women in the biopic was lacklustre. 

"Florence Pugh, as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, gets short shrift," wrote Wendy Ide for The Guardian. "Emily Blunt spends much of the first two hours mutinously clutching a martini on the edge of the frame."

Vogue published a piece simply titled 'Justice for the Women of Oppenheimer' which took aim at Christopher Nolan for his "penchant for populating his films with severely under-developed female characters."  

The verdict.

Both movies are genuinely great! While Barbie has a wider scope of responses, the film has still received mostly positive reviews, albeit slightly less favourable than Oppenheimer. 

This being said, Barbie is a far more divisive film than a historical biopic. A film about Barbie dolls told through a contemporary feminist lens is always going to get certain groups riled up, whereas it's a lot harder to get mad about a historical event that happened 80 years ago. 

But when it comes to the battle of the box offices, there's really no competition: Barbie has squished Oppenheimer with her dainty tippy-toed foot. Barbie is estimated to make $300 million worldwide on its first weekend opening while Oppenheimer is projected to make a $165.9 million worldwide profit. 

Either sum is absolutely huge in terms of box office precedents, as the Barbenheimer buzz has encouraged both movies to be watched in tandem. 

Whether one is getting slightly better reviews than the others, there are no losers in this war.

Feature image: Universal Pictures + Warner Bros. 

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