Black Panther (2018)
Rated PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action violence, and a brief rude gesture
Score: 5 out of 5
Up on the board goes another home run for the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- and this time, people would've demanded the head of Marvel boss Kevin Feige if it had been anything less. This was a make-or-break moment for the superhero movie genre as much as Wonder Woman was last year; much as that film was the first serious, big-budget superhero movie led by a woman since the failures of Catwoman and Elektra back in the 2000s, this would've been the first superhero movie to be led by a black man since the Blade films, which went out of their way to avoid looking like superhero movies. (The X-Men films are iffy; they have their fair share of female and non-white heroes, but given their ensemble casts, I can't say that they're really "led" by any one character in particular.) If Disney/Marvel screwed this up, or even made one of their decent-yet-flawed films like Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World, or Doctor Strange, there would've been hell to pay in Burbank as the company felt the full firestorm of critics and fans alike. Fortunately, much like the makers of Wonder Woman, they realized that this especially was a movie that they could not afford to drop the ball on. In the hands of writer/director Ryan Coogler, who is now three-for-three after Fruitvale Station and Creed, Black Panther is an exciting, action-packed, surprisingly deep, and damn near revolutionary film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe canon, less a superhero movie and more a superhero epic that calls to mind Star Wars in Africa. Yeah, it's a blast.
The backstory here is that, thousands of years ago, an asteroid made of a wonder-metal called vibranium came down in the heart of Africa. The tribes in the area around the impact site made use of this metal, and the plants that it had mutated, to create technologies far in advance of the rest of the world, such that, by the present day, their nation, Wakanda, is the site of an advanced metropolis bristling with technologies straight out of science fiction. Thing is, the people of Wakanda, witnessing the clashes of the rest of the world, have kept themselves firmly isolated, putting on an image of a Third World country with little economic activity beyond subsistence farming and ranching while hiding all the cool stuff in their capital behind an energy shield that makes that area look like empty jungle. Currently, Wakanda is witnessing the ascent of a new king, T'Challa, following the death of his father T'Chaka in the events of Captain America: Civil War. T'Challa's rise to the throne has not gone unchallenged, not least of all by T'Challa himself, who must face the legacy of the decisions that his father, and those kings before him, had made. He is pushed in no small part by one Erik Stevens, an American mercenary who has his own ideas on how Wakanda should be run.
The moment I saw what Wakanda looked like on screen, my first thought was that this was unlike any vision of "the future" that I'd seen before. This was Afrofuturism brought to life with a $200 million budget and a ton of artistic vision, a fusion of high technology with traditional African design elements to create a world where men wear flashy lip plates as fashion accessories and modern homes are styled like huts. My second thought, however, was that there was precedent for how this aesthetic was handled on screen: specifically, Japan. The fusion of the hyper-modern with the traditional reminded me of any number of films and video games set in either a futuristic Japan or in a sci-fi/fantasy world clearly inspired by such, the use of spears as ceremonial weapons calling to mind the similar reverence offered to swords in those works, and the translation of African tribal politics to the modern day reminiscent of how the interaction between old Japanese tradition and modern technology is often portrayed. The comparisons became crystal-clear when the film had T'Challa and his allies pay a visit to the city of Busan in Japan's next-door neighbor South Korea, a country that demonstrates a similar (and real-life) interplay between Western technology and non-Western culture. If that were the extent of it, I probably wouldn't be talking about this, but the comparisons go much deeper than just how the culture and aesthetic are presented. Wakanda's backstory immediately calls to mind a sci-fi version of real-life Japanese history: here we have an advanced nation that retreated into isolation for centuries in order to keep from getting colonized, observing the outside world from a distance but otherwise remaining a "hermit kingdom". Like Japan, it managed to escape imperialism and modernize on its own terms, avoiding the fate of its neighbors and becoming one of the most powerful nations on Earth. I would not at all be surprised to find that Ryan Coogler, and the writers of the comics that this film was based on, had Japan on their mind when they were envisioning what Wakanda would look like.
And I was thinking about all of this even before the villain showed up and made the comparisons that much more explicit. Erik Stevens, also known by his Wakandan name of N'Jadaka and by the nickname Killmonger, is the son of a Wakandan spy and an African-American woman who grew up obsessed with the stories his late father told him of a faraway African nation where black people were able to live as kings, especially when he compared it to his rough upbringing on the streets of Oakland, California in the '90s. Growing up to become a US Special Forces operative and later a mercenary, Stevens has a very good question to ask about Wakanda's leadership over the years: why did they, with all of their advanced weapons and technology, sit back and do nothing as the rest of Africa was colonized and its people oppressed? Again, I come back to Japan, whose leadership in the early 20th century, after the explosive industrialization of the Meiji era, decided that they needed to become an empire not just to secure their own future, but to free the people of Asia from Western imperialism -- all under "benevolent" Japanese guidance, of course. And if what we see of Stevens is any indication, his motivations too are a lot less pure than merely liberating the oppressed peoples of the world from the rich fat cats. He outright evokes the memory of the British and Japanese empires when he says that the sun will never set on Wakanda. Stevens is essentially the character that one might have feared that this movie would portray the protagonist as: a man left bitter by a lifetime of oppression who has turned into the mirror image of everything he hates, a Black Power version of the blue-collar supervillain Adrian Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming. And like Toomes, whose turn to villainy came as a result of Tony Stark's crooked machinations ruining his business, it's hard to deny that Stevens has a point. If a nation like Wakanda really existed, it's not hard to imagine that the reaction of black people elsewhere would go from "cool, an African nation that's truly powerful!" to "wait a minute, where were they when we were being sold into slavery?" once they thought about the implications. It's a point that T'Challa is forced to consider over the course of the film, realizing that the good intentions of Wakanda's leaders, including his father, may have caused more harm than good in the long run -- not just to other people, but even, potentially, to Wakanda itself in a world that is quickly catching up to its technological advances.
Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan make for perfect foils for one another as T'Challa and Stevens. Boseman's T'Challa is classy and regal, yet no less intimidating for it. Whether he's in his Black Panther costume, looking like... well, like a big, angry cat as he mauls and tosses his foes, or in traditional clothes as he sits on his throne and debates his various advisers, Boseman carries the presence of a man who would call himself king. If T'Challa is the gentleman warrior, then Jordan's Stevens is the barbarian. His nickname "Killmonger" says it all: he sees Wakanda less as a nation and more as a tool for his revenge fantasy, caring little for its traditions and more for its advanced weaponry. He, too, is a very proud and intelligent man, but whereas T'Challa must grapple with the moral complications of his pride and his power, Stevens' obsession with being nobody's fool leads him down a path to darkness. As if to drive the point home, while T'Challa's leitmotif is based on traditional African music, Stevens' theme music adds 808 drums to the mix for a sound more akin to a supervillain trap banger. Surrounding the two is a mammoth ensemble cast that takes Wakanda and makes it feel like a true world, not just the backdrop for superhero action. Leading them are Danai Gurira as Okoye, the leader of T'Challa's all-female bodyguard force, and Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia, a Wakandan spy and T'Challa's former lover, with other standouts including Martin Freeman as Everett Ross, the CIA agent outsider to Wakanda, and Letitia Wright as Shuri, T'Challa's scientist sister who serves as the Q to his James Bond and provides much of the comic relief in the film. But even the smaller parts, played by a mix of veteran character actors like Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, and Andy Serkis and talented up-and-comers like Daniel Kaluuya and Winston Duke, feel lived-in and flesh out the setting, making it feel like a truly epic world with centuries of history behind it. Without even getting into the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (outside an obligatory post-credits scene, this is a completely standalone film), Coogler seamlessly packed enough world-building into this movie to sustain its own franchise on the level of Star Wars. We get to see the various tribes of Wakanda, the nation's elite soldiers and spies, and a long history of power politics that collectively make Wakanda feel like a real place, not just a series of movie sets in Hollywood and Atlanta, taking the premise of traditional African social and political structures brought into the mid-21st century and making it come to life.
Any problems? Well, some of the action could get a bit dodgy during the third act. Coogler shoots the action fairly well, admittedly, but doing so only made me realize why so many directors take the lazy route of quick cuts and shaky-cam: to cover up technical deficiencies in other areas. And while the stuntwork here is as to be expected from a $200 million Disney/Marvel blockbuster, some of the special effects were fairly questionable, especially during the big third-act battle sequence. It wasn't as downright ugly as Justice League, certainly, and the wide shots of Wakanda's capital and other exotic environments look incredible, but when the film has to unleash CGI beasts on camera, you can spot the seams in their skin and in the fluidity of their movement. They didn't look awful, but they felt like they came out of a film with a third the budget. Also, the Jake Paul joke was just unforgivable. In an otherwise excellent film, it stood out like a sore thumb, and immediately dates the scene it's in to a very, very unfortunate time in the history of the internet. I'm sorry, but I wasn't laughing during that scene so much as I was cringing.
The backstory here is that, thousands of years ago, an asteroid made of a wonder-metal called vibranium came down in the heart of Africa. The tribes in the area around the impact site made use of this metal, and the plants that it had mutated, to create technologies far in advance of the rest of the world, such that, by the present day, their nation, Wakanda, is the site of an advanced metropolis bristling with technologies straight out of science fiction. Thing is, the people of Wakanda, witnessing the clashes of the rest of the world, have kept themselves firmly isolated, putting on an image of a Third World country with little economic activity beyond subsistence farming and ranching while hiding all the cool stuff in their capital behind an energy shield that makes that area look like empty jungle. Currently, Wakanda is witnessing the ascent of a new king, T'Challa, following the death of his father T'Chaka in the events of Captain America: Civil War. T'Challa's rise to the throne has not gone unchallenged, not least of all by T'Challa himself, who must face the legacy of the decisions that his father, and those kings before him, had made. He is pushed in no small part by one Erik Stevens, an American mercenary who has his own ideas on how Wakanda should be run.
The moment I saw what Wakanda looked like on screen, my first thought was that this was unlike any vision of "the future" that I'd seen before. This was Afrofuturism brought to life with a $200 million budget and a ton of artistic vision, a fusion of high technology with traditional African design elements to create a world where men wear flashy lip plates as fashion accessories and modern homes are styled like huts. My second thought, however, was that there was precedent for how this aesthetic was handled on screen: specifically, Japan. The fusion of the hyper-modern with the traditional reminded me of any number of films and video games set in either a futuristic Japan or in a sci-fi/fantasy world clearly inspired by such, the use of spears as ceremonial weapons calling to mind the similar reverence offered to swords in those works, and the translation of African tribal politics to the modern day reminiscent of how the interaction between old Japanese tradition and modern technology is often portrayed. The comparisons became crystal-clear when the film had T'Challa and his allies pay a visit to the city of Busan in Japan's next-door neighbor South Korea, a country that demonstrates a similar (and real-life) interplay between Western technology and non-Western culture. If that were the extent of it, I probably wouldn't be talking about this, but the comparisons go much deeper than just how the culture and aesthetic are presented. Wakanda's backstory immediately calls to mind a sci-fi version of real-life Japanese history: here we have an advanced nation that retreated into isolation for centuries in order to keep from getting colonized, observing the outside world from a distance but otherwise remaining a "hermit kingdom". Like Japan, it managed to escape imperialism and modernize on its own terms, avoiding the fate of its neighbors and becoming one of the most powerful nations on Earth. I would not at all be surprised to find that Ryan Coogler, and the writers of the comics that this film was based on, had Japan on their mind when they were envisioning what Wakanda would look like.
And I was thinking about all of this even before the villain showed up and made the comparisons that much more explicit. Erik Stevens, also known by his Wakandan name of N'Jadaka and by the nickname Killmonger, is the son of a Wakandan spy and an African-American woman who grew up obsessed with the stories his late father told him of a faraway African nation where black people were able to live as kings, especially when he compared it to his rough upbringing on the streets of Oakland, California in the '90s. Growing up to become a US Special Forces operative and later a mercenary, Stevens has a very good question to ask about Wakanda's leadership over the years: why did they, with all of their advanced weapons and technology, sit back and do nothing as the rest of Africa was colonized and its people oppressed? Again, I come back to Japan, whose leadership in the early 20th century, after the explosive industrialization of the Meiji era, decided that they needed to become an empire not just to secure their own future, but to free the people of Asia from Western imperialism -- all under "benevolent" Japanese guidance, of course. And if what we see of Stevens is any indication, his motivations too are a lot less pure than merely liberating the oppressed peoples of the world from the rich fat cats. He outright evokes the memory of the British and Japanese empires when he says that the sun will never set on Wakanda. Stevens is essentially the character that one might have feared that this movie would portray the protagonist as: a man left bitter by a lifetime of oppression who has turned into the mirror image of everything he hates, a Black Power version of the blue-collar supervillain Adrian Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming. And like Toomes, whose turn to villainy came as a result of Tony Stark's crooked machinations ruining his business, it's hard to deny that Stevens has a point. If a nation like Wakanda really existed, it's not hard to imagine that the reaction of black people elsewhere would go from "cool, an African nation that's truly powerful!" to "wait a minute, where were they when we were being sold into slavery?" once they thought about the implications. It's a point that T'Challa is forced to consider over the course of the film, realizing that the good intentions of Wakanda's leaders, including his father, may have caused more harm than good in the long run -- not just to other people, but even, potentially, to Wakanda itself in a world that is quickly catching up to its technological advances.
Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan make for perfect foils for one another as T'Challa and Stevens. Boseman's T'Challa is classy and regal, yet no less intimidating for it. Whether he's in his Black Panther costume, looking like... well, like a big, angry cat as he mauls and tosses his foes, or in traditional clothes as he sits on his throne and debates his various advisers, Boseman carries the presence of a man who would call himself king. If T'Challa is the gentleman warrior, then Jordan's Stevens is the barbarian. His nickname "Killmonger" says it all: he sees Wakanda less as a nation and more as a tool for his revenge fantasy, caring little for its traditions and more for its advanced weaponry. He, too, is a very proud and intelligent man, but whereas T'Challa must grapple with the moral complications of his pride and his power, Stevens' obsession with being nobody's fool leads him down a path to darkness. As if to drive the point home, while T'Challa's leitmotif is based on traditional African music, Stevens' theme music adds 808 drums to the mix for a sound more akin to a supervillain trap banger. Surrounding the two is a mammoth ensemble cast that takes Wakanda and makes it feel like a true world, not just the backdrop for superhero action. Leading them are Danai Gurira as Okoye, the leader of T'Challa's all-female bodyguard force, and Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia, a Wakandan spy and T'Challa's former lover, with other standouts including Martin Freeman as Everett Ross, the CIA agent outsider to Wakanda, and Letitia Wright as Shuri, T'Challa's scientist sister who serves as the Q to his James Bond and provides much of the comic relief in the film. But even the smaller parts, played by a mix of veteran character actors like Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, and Andy Serkis and talented up-and-comers like Daniel Kaluuya and Winston Duke, feel lived-in and flesh out the setting, making it feel like a truly epic world with centuries of history behind it. Without even getting into the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (outside an obligatory post-credits scene, this is a completely standalone film), Coogler seamlessly packed enough world-building into this movie to sustain its own franchise on the level of Star Wars. We get to see the various tribes of Wakanda, the nation's elite soldiers and spies, and a long history of power politics that collectively make Wakanda feel like a real place, not just a series of movie sets in Hollywood and Atlanta, taking the premise of traditional African social and political structures brought into the mid-21st century and making it come to life.
Any problems? Well, some of the action could get a bit dodgy during the third act. Coogler shoots the action fairly well, admittedly, but doing so only made me realize why so many directors take the lazy route of quick cuts and shaky-cam: to cover up technical deficiencies in other areas. And while the stuntwork here is as to be expected from a $200 million Disney/Marvel blockbuster, some of the special effects were fairly questionable, especially during the big third-act battle sequence. It wasn't as downright ugly as Justice League, certainly, and the wide shots of Wakanda's capital and other exotic environments look incredible, but when the film has to unleash CGI beasts on camera, you can spot the seams in their skin and in the fluidity of their movement. They didn't look awful, but they felt like they came out of a film with a third the budget. Also, the Jake Paul joke was just unforgivable. In an otherwise excellent film, it stood out like a sore thumb, and immediately dates the scene it's in to a very, very unfortunate time in the history of the internet. I'm sorry, but I wasn't laughing during that scene so much as I was cringing.
The Bottom Line
The fact that I had to point to the merely mediocre special effects in order to find something real to criticize here speaks volumes. Black Panther is the real deal, and while I can't possibly imagine the excitement that black audiences felt at finally, after so long, getting to see a black guy put on a super-suit in his own movie for once, I can definitely get excited about going back to this film's creative and visually stunning world and cast of characters. This one is a knockout.
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