The road to Armageddon

A friend of mine, I shall not name him, he knows who he is, suggested that the film Barbie was rather good and definitely worth going to see. I decided to do so, and in a fit of patriarchal largesse (I was on holiday with the family) offered to drive my wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law several tens of miles at night to the cinema. I think my reaction afterwards was something like: ‘Well that was two hours of my life I shall never, ever get back...’
 
What is particularly ironic (?) about the film is that it was released on the same day as Oppenheimer to the ‘amusement’ of many. I cannot think of two films more completely different. The one, a farrago of fluffy, candyfloss nonsense written by a giggling, Californian air-head (judging from her performance on Desert Island Discs), allegedly with a ‘serious’ message. The other, a brilliantly compelling, carefully detailed biopic of the man responsible for the development of the most terrible weapon of all time, who was then vilified and persecuted for his socialist outlook.
 
Why am I so exercised about this now when the films came out in the summer? Two things. Firstly, the rhetoric and actions of the megalomaniac in the Kremlin are sounding more and more like Hitler in the late 1930s, with the difference that the former has the ability, on a whim, to use Oppenheimer’s invention to destroy the world. Secondly, I just heard the writer of Barbie, Greta Gerwig, speaking on the radio... 
 
Perhaps I am overreacting, but it seems to me that a viewing public who spend 50% more on candyfloss nonsense than learning about the method by which they might be annihilated (figures from Wikipedia), are quite likely to drift towards Armageddon, while hardly noticing that it is happening.