For what fortunes that no doubt came Oppenheimer‘s way on account of sharing a release date with Barbie, it’s hard to deny that the coincidence wasn’t totally void of drawbacks, either. The Barbenheimer meme is all good and fun, but with so many of Oppenheimer‘s viewers no doubt turning up solely for being in on the joke, it’s disheartening to think that Christopher Nolan‘s breathtaking gut-punch of a biopic was viewed with not-infrequent insincerity.
But, it’s never too late to adjust one’s relationship to something, and Oppenheimer has all the tools it needs — namely; its many fantastic brothers and sisters among Nolan’s filmography — to develop a more holistic bond with the notion of double features.
And the man behind the eponymous physicist himself was all too happy to offer his thoughts on the matter. When asked in a recent interview with The Independent which of Nolan’s films he would pair with Oppenheimer, star Cillian Murphy managed to narrow it down to two:
You could go Interstellar, which is very… explores similar scientific, physic themes. Or you could watch Dunkirk, which is also set in World War II. Dunkirk is shorter, so that might be a good match ‘cause it’s like an hour-and-a-half, and then you can go into [Oppenheimer].
Indeed, beyond sharing Oppenheimer‘s heavy focus on science, Interstellar would prove quite effective in balancing out the former’s devastating overtones with its more touching lens of love and humanity. Dunkirk, meanwhile, is a nice 90-minute morsel compared to the three hours packed into Oppenheimer‘s runtime, and they would further combine nicely for a World War II movie night.
As for Murphy, it sounds like Interstellar would be his pick, seeing as it’s one of the few Nolan films that he hasn’t appeared in, meaning he could kick back and enjoy it fully instead of “freak out about the size of your ears, or whatever.”
Oppenheimer is currently playing in theaters.
