With Margot Robbie in place of the Monolith, Greta Gerwig manages to surprise the public!
On July 21, two competing Hollywood films will be released face to face: Barbiea very colorful transposition of the world of the famous Mattel dolls on the big screen, signed Greta Gerwig and worn by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and Oppenheimerthe biopic of the father of the atomic bomb, directed by Christopher Nolan and led by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. At first glance, these two projects have nothing in common, except that on closer inspection , these are two big-budget films: Universal notably paid 100 million to acquire the latter, following Nolan’s departure from Warner Bros., for whom he had been shooting all his films for 20 years… and who precisely produced Barbie. They also both bring together a large cast, dozens of popular actors having been chosen drop by drop to join them, just before they are shot during the summer, at the same time logically since they will be released on the same date.
If we come back to this funny competition, it’s because the first Barbie teaser has just dropped, and it’s a huge surprise: the concept of this video parodies the opening of 2001 a space odyssey, a work that deeply inspired… Christopher Nolan. When going out Interstellar in the cinema, he had spoken a lot about the influence of this masterpiece of SF, and of the work of Stanley Kubrick more generally, on his filmography.
Christopher Nolan: “It would be crazy to compare me to Kubrick!”
Obviously, Greta Gerwig also knows her classics, since here she takes up the opening of the film recounting the dawn of humanity, or how a monkey began to take power over its fellow creatures after touching a mysterious monolith, the symbol of the knowledge. By discovering the tool, he also becomes the first assassin in history, and the classical music of Richard Strauss, “Thus spake Zarathustra”, sounds. Here, replace the bipedal hominids with little girls, the weapon with ceramic dolls, and the monolith with Barbie, and you get a feminist parody of this cult movie scene, as brilliant as it is unexpected. Margot Robbie immediately established herself as THE doll, the must-have toy for all little girls (and has been since the dawn of time!), representing a woman with the perfect silhouette. A few shots of the rest of the film follow, including Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu as Ken, and a glimpse of Barbie Kingdom, and the video stops, giving way to the pink glitter logo.
Impossible to know for the moment if this sequence will really be in the final assembly, but it does not really matter: if the director of lady bird and Daughters of Dr. March wanted to surprise the public, it is successful!
Everything we know about Barbie, the film by Greta Gerwig with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling
Barbie: a first genius teaser, which parodies 2001 a space odyssey