Movie: Black Panther
Black Panther! Wow. Where to begin.
Many things have been said about the cultural impact of this movie — in terms of the box office records its broken, its afro-futurism, feminism, political commentary, and so many more. There’s little doubt that more than being a great superhero movie, this is very much on its way to becoming a cult classic.
So, for this review (which I’ve postponed long enough!), I’m going to talk about something else: the structure of the Black Panther and the movie’s impact on the MCU. I’mma go small here, because everyone else has gone big.
General review
Black Panther was incredibly different from any other MCU movie to date. It was so different that when I first watched it, I was confused about what was happening half the time (but I knew I was enjoying it!). There were a lot of layers to the storytelling, and you could really feel that it was a movie that worked that well because the universe has been so well-established at this point. I really appreciated that there weren’t any explicit shoutouts to the larger MCU — those kind of contrived shoutouts have always served to make me feel simultaneously hyped and kind of taken out of the movie (aka it ruins the flow for me, but I’m still hyped about it). But here, you could appreciate the movie’s impact on the MCU without having it spoonfed to you.
I also loved that the movie was character-propelled as much as it was plot-propelled, which is not something that’s easy to achieve while making the characters, even (or especially) the villain, hella loveable and fleshed out. The motivations were clear, the conflict was complex, and the characters were distinct from one another and were all treated by the narrative as distinctly human despite their superpowered backgrounds.
There were times when the CGI was obvious, and the Lion King undertones distracted me, but other than that, this was a solid, well-crafted movie, with a good plot and even better characters.
What worked
- World-building. Odes can be (and probably have been) written about how visually stunning Wakanda is, but more than how it looked, what made Black Panther work was how it seemed to function. You could look at the screen and believe that that civilization is a living, breathing one. Its culture, its people, how the people within it could react to and interact with the world — from Nakia wanting to open Wakanda’s borders and help the world to Shuri knowing memes being and dumb about it.
Indeed, the world-building in Black Panther is what made its social commentary so much more poignant. Wakanda is a society untouched by colonization, financially stable, and with gender equality. Having a big-picture conflict rooted in the whole tradition versus globalization issue was ambitious but ultimately credible. It allowed the movie to be fearlessly political (even more so than Winter Soldier, which I didn’t think was possible) and ultimately be bigger than itself. - Well-rounded “side” characters. It’s been a while since a solo superhero movie introduced such lovable “side” characters (literally, who even remembers Rachel McAdams in Doctor Strange?). Here, we have a whole slew of new complex, multi-faceted characters that the movie is able to endear to us pretty quickly. Also, I’m putting “side” in quotes because we all know that they outshone T’Challa at one point or another, lol. Okoye is a badass and a dork, but she also has misgivings about where her loyalities lie; Nakia’s strength is in her conviction, and she influences T’Chall self-perception as much as she does his foreign policy.
I also want to take a moment to talk about Wakanda’s most valuable resource: Shuri ♥
Shuri is equal parts tech and medical genius, and you can imagine her building world-changing machines in her spare time as much as you can imagine she’s looking up memes and listening to Smashmouth on her breaks. She grounds T’Challa and saves him 90% of the time through her tech. Seriously, forget the heart-shaped herb: if T’Challa didn’t have his kinetic energy-absorbing suit and that Shuri-driven car among countless others, he would’ve died a hundred times over (in Civil War alone!). Shuri also adds a layer of joy to the movie that no other character could have achieved in the same way. Everyone's new fave ♥ - The Villain. Michael B. Jordan plays Eric Killmonger (aka N’Jadaka), probably one of the best and most complex villains of the MCU to date. More than the clichéd World Domination thing, he has a more nuanced (and therefore more realistic and impactful) goal: to liberate black people everywhere by dispensing Vibranium weaponry to marginalized groups around the globe.
He is a Wakandan born in America, exposed to discrimination and looked down on all his life — as the movie puts it, “radicalized” like his father. His disconnection with his Wakandan roots is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that he’s referred to as Erik or Killmonger more than his Wakandan name (which is only used once or twice) in the movie. His struggle is one almost all people of color experience, and one which makes him hard to hate or write-off as a one-dimensional villain. Indeed, Chadwick Boseman has said that he sees T’Challa as the villain, and many black audiences agree with how Killmonger wants to go about liberation.
As someone who hasn’t been through what the black community has been through, it’s not my place to judge the morality of his actions. It's that exact complexity of his conflict that makes him such a great villain. However, as a person who lives on the backs on revolutionaries who won this level of freedom for me and my generation both through a bloody revolution (against multiple foreign colonizers) and a peaceful one (against a Filipino dictator), I think I can understand the need and appeal of either kind of revolution.
- The Hero. It’s been said that Black Panther is the ideal mix of the Big Three of the MCU: he has the tech and money of Iron Man, the strength and shield (well, Vibranium) of Captain America, and the regality and political power of Thor. In that sense, I wasn’t looking for much in Black Panther in terms of T’Challa’s character growth. I was ready for him to be reactive, to be another Steve Rogers (yeah, I went there).
HOWEVER. The movie really exceeded my expectations. First of all, when did we last see an MCU hero in a healthy sibling relationship?! What, Thor and Loki? Pietro and Wanda? Gamora and Nebula? ("Clint and Barney?" asked no one ever lol). It was so refreshing to me and I loved that way of humanizing him. Also, SHURI.
THIS 2-SECOND MOMENT IS BETTER THAN LITERALLY... ok let's say A HANDFUL OF MARVEL MOVIES OKAY
I also loved seeing T’Challa be vulnerable and deal with the consequences of his ancestors’ mistakes. His main struggle was trying to reconcile his moral compass with his actions as the King of Wakanda — it sounds lofty in theory, but the movie really grounded it well. The scenes where he confronts Zuri, where he tells Nakia about his uncertainty, where he’s crying in front of his ancestors are all scenes that show how much he grows. He goes from shooting down Nakia’s ideas about global aid to legitimately coming back from the dead so he can right the wrongs.
During my first watch, I was largely unimpressed with how he went down in the challenge against Killmonger. But I realized later on that this wasn’t symbolic of how weak T’Challa was, but was indicative of how much guilt was on his shoulders, how his father’s lies had really shaken his whole worldview. In that sense, the story really did need T’Challa to lose, just so he could solidify his resolve and make sure he was gonna come back to life still fighting. - The Villain-Hero Parallel.
It took me a few watches to fully grasp what Killmonger meant when he and his father are in the Lion King-themed ancestral land. There, all the parallels between him and T’Challa are most stark:
>> How they saw their father. Where T’Challa is weak-kneed as he confesses to T’Chaka that he’s not ready to be without him, Killmonger’s father greets him with a quiet, “No tears for me?”
>> How they see the world. Following that dialogue, Killmonger responds that, “Everybody dies. That's just life around here.” The apathy at his father’s death highlights how differently he and T’Challa see the world. T’Challa’s idealistic, has never known a world where his loved ones could die so young and so brutally. Killmonger’s jaded, having grown up in an urban-poor area where people who look like him are Target Number One, thinking his life doesn't matter (you see what I did there?), and hearing stories of a fabled place he probably didn’t believe in anymore in the end. Where T’Challa has empathy and is open to feeling his emotions, something brought about by relative privilege, Killmonger is closed off, hardened by hardship, and is the perfect example of the saying “hate begets hate.”
>> Methods. This difference stemming from their respective relationships with their fathers and environments results in stark differences in their methods for liberation. T’Challa wants to give aid, wants to open Wakanda’s borders, where Killmonger wants to release weapons and "kill everyone who stands in our way."
It’s important to note here that while there is a clash of methods, the fact that T’Challa acknowledges that closed borders is a problem at all is a win for Killmonger’s side and is already more than what any other previous monarch has done.
What I realized in the end is that all these issues, while superficially rooted in their relationships with their fathers, is even more deeply rooted in their connectedness to Wakanda. The struggle within them for identity and belongingness is rooted in how they see their homeland.
T’Challa’s love of Wakanda most concisely captured when he descends into the hidden city and says, “This never gets old.” His love for Wakanda is true and built upon years of living there and being raised by it as much as he was raised in it. Even something that should be commonplace and trivial still makes him feel like a kid in a fantasy world.
In contrast, Killmonger’s feelings are best captured when he’s in the ancestral plane and he says to his father, “Maybe your home is the one that’s lost. That’s why they can’t find us.” He places the blame in Wakanda for not being there when they needed it, for not finding them and closing its borders. Where T'Challa gets to talk to his ancestors freely, Killmonger, even in what is literally a different plane of existence, is still separated from them by a wall, only able to look through a window at what he's missing. - Not doing the shotout thing except for Bucky in the end. At the end of the day, each of these movies a step toward the bigger MCU, but Black Panther did a good job in being its own movie. They moved independently in their own universe but reminded us that it’s part of the bigger picture (aka the MCU) through the post-credits scene. Even when Shuri referred to Ross as “another” white guy for her to fix, I already thought it was Bucky, so I wasn’t too surprised with the post-credits. Still, it was a good way to tie things up and make us hyped for Infinity War.
What didn’t work
- Some CGI. Most of it the CGI was good, but there was a particular scene I can’t get over, when T’Challa brings up Killmonger to look at the sunset. Their surroundings are pretty badly rendered, and the yellow lighting on their faces definitely do not match the scenery. It’s sad because that’s one of the more heart-wrenching moments of the movie, but I can’t focus on it because the lighting’s so jarring.
- Repetitive double ending of T’Challa smiling knowingly. At the end of the movie, does he tell the kid who he is? Does he say he’s Iron Man just to reference RDJ? Does he just walk away or does he disappear in a cloud of smoke?? At the post-credits scene in the UN, does he take out a wagon of Vibranium in front of them? Do they break out in dance?? Why does he keep smiling so knowingly???
- Plot Hole-y: What was Killmonger's long-term plan with Klaue? How did he know Kalue was wanted in Wakanda (I assume his plan was to get into Klaue's good graces, murder him, and offer him as a sign of friendship to Wakanda...? Maybe?)? What was the plan for Bucky when T'Challa "died" and they all evacuated? How did T'Chaka brother even break out all that Vibranium? Also, how did Howard Stark get the Vibranium from to make Cap's shield? T'Challa says Kalue has evaded their capture for 30 years, which a far cry from the 70 years Cap spent in the ice. Dun dun dun!
- Can (Probably) Be Answered By Extrapolation: What happened to the Queen Mother? (She's probably okay.) What happened to W'Kabi? (Probably in jail.) Is T'Challa going to live off-Wakanda to join Nakia/Shuri? (Probably not.) Are the whole of W'kabi's tribe in jail? (Probably not since they're in the trailer for Infinity War.)
- Things to Look Forward To: P L E A S E can Shuri meet up with Bruce and Tony and Doctor Strange and Peter (wow, the MCU needs less geniuses [or more female geniuses]) and school them or something? What will happen to Wakanda in Infinity War and why are they fighting there? Will W'Kabi tribe be "manning the boarders" like T'Challa says in the movie? WHO KNOWS!
Post a Comment