The rosé blockbusters

It is a feat to take ownership of a colour. Prince owned purple, but then he was Prince. Giving the legend that colour, in exchange for us mortals to bask in his divine alien splendour, was an easy trade.

- RAJA SEN

For a movie, a Barbie movie, to co-opt the colour pink is a triumph of marketing that should be taught in business schools. Hell, they even painted a nuclear scientist. Oppenheimer, an epic about the father of the atom bomb, could not be less like Barbie, but, releasing on the same day, the two films became a portmanteau, like a celebrity couple: Barbenheimer. The rosé blockbusters.

Both films are made by directors invoking Stanley Kubrick. Greta Gerwig starts Barbie by riffing on the iconic monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and inserts a The Shining joke later, while Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan frequently talks of his love for Kubrick. I daresay the man who directed Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb would not have been impressed either by a biopic that lionises a misguided scientist, or a film intended to sell plastic toys.

Not that Gerwig would be out to impress Kubrick. Barbie has a disdain for canonised male authority figures, taking digs at fans of Zack Snyder, as well as those of The Godfather Part II. The film calls out the patriarchy, weaponises the colour pink and feels like a statement-while not really making one. This is a strawberry milkshake of a film, well acted and occasionally funny. Sometimes, as Cyndi Lauper sang, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.