Social media wags have branded as we speak the beginning of “Barbenheimer Week” as two apparently hilariously completely different blockbusters go face to face on the field workplace.

As one is a breezy, ruthlessly marketed household comedy and the opposite a doom-laden, three-hour historic drama, this was by no means going to be a good battle.

But the rivals do have one thing in widespread. Despite large budgets, each have been crafted by filmmakers given loads of wriggle room by their backers.

In an age of check screenings, franchise constructing and screen-writing by committee, this not often occurs.

What every week to be alive!

But it’s not a cheerful time for director Christopher Nolan’s hero J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the person credited with inventing the atom bomb.

For Oppenheimer, a superb Jewish physicist from New York, the Second World War meant mustering each mind cell to attempt to cease Hitler’s genocide.

The motion begins in 1954 as Oppenheimer is grilled by a authorities committee over his alleged communist sympathies.

As the nervous scientist reads a press release, flashbacks present how he got here to be accountable for the The Manhattan Project, America’s secret atom bomb programme.

But Nolan retains reducing to 1958 and one other listening to, this time shot in black and white, the place US nuclear bigwig Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is questioned by the Senate over his involvement with Oppenheimer forward of Strauss’s cupboard appointment.

Nolan switches between the 2 grillings to offer completely different views.

Murphy delivers his best efficiency because the pushed however tortured scientist, Florence Pugh is good as his troubled on-off girlfriend, as is Emily Blunt as his equally difficult spouse. Matt Damon can also be wonderful as a gruff General. But that is very a lot the director’s film.

The movie by no means preaches or simplifies. Eye-popping cinematography conveys the horrible drive of Oppenheimer’s bomb, and good writing invitations us to chew over the morality and penalties of its creation.

Barbie was all the time going to beat Oppenheimer on the field workplace. But, on the massive display screen, Oppenheimer is much extra explosive.

Oppenheimer, Cert 15, In cinemas now