Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
Wow.
Wow wow wow.
Black Panther knocks it out of the park. There isn’t a lot to criticize about this one- it has the best villain, the best action, a really solid representation of women, minorities, and people in poverty. Since the MCU has been so very lacking in all of that, it’s a nice change of pace.
It’s hard to think sometimes that this all happens in the same world as The Incredible Hulk. It’s just so different- the sets, costume design, camerawork all look like they’re from another place entirely. Credit, obviously, goes to the different creative teams who put all that together. And it looks phenomenal.
Except for the fuckin Rhinos. Yiiiiikes. Actually, much of the CGI in Black Panther is total trash. Fortunately, we know exactly who to blame for that: Disney!
See, here’s the thing: There is a whole industry around visual effects, and companies compete against each other to offer the best price to the client, in this case Disney, the lowest price. Disney hires the lowest bidder, and in so doing, has driven down the cost industry-wide.
VFX companies desperately want to work on high-profile projects like Black Panther, so they take these crappy, cheap contracts, and since they don’t have the money to do the project well, we receive a crappy, cheap product at the end. A lot of MCU movies have glaring VFX issues, but Black Panther is the most egregious of them all. Here’s a little more detail on the subject.
Other than that, though, killer movie. Really rich characters and compelling drama. Love it. T’Challa might not be my favorite Marvel hero, but he is almost definitely the richest and most complex. He and Killmonger make perfect foes: Killmonger is toxic masculinity personified, and T’Challa is regular-ass masculinity personified. And while Killmonger had a point, he was dead wrong about his end goal and he got what was coming to him in the end.
BUT Killmonger’s actions woke up T’Challa to the global issues he and his predecessors had been ignoring. So to everyone saying “Killmonger was right,” I offer a substitute: Nakia was right. Killmonger was, y’know. A killmonger.
There was this one weird thing about the characters though that, like… made sense? But didn’t get enough screen time for the audience to be emotionally invested. Okoye and W’Kabi were in a relationship. So when he approached her in the final battle and said “Would you kill me, my love?” I was like, “wait, your love? Whose love? What?” One more scene mid-movie of the two of them interacting would have made that moment a little more compelling.
Speaking of W’Kabi, Killmonger had no trouble radicalizing him. His relationship with T’Challa went from friendly, to kind-of contentious, to murder-y way way too fast.
And that’s it. 3 complaints, and 2 of them were pretty minor. That’s every bad thing I have to say about Black Panther. This movie fucking nailed it.
Would I be remiss not to delve deeper into the issues of representation and stuff and how Black Panther addresses much of it? I feel like that’s been adequately discussed. The one comment I haven’t seen before is that Wakanda appears not to have feminism because it doesn’t need it. There was like, no sexism. Mild gender disparity issues, but we saw women in positions of leadership, including Queens of Wakanda, and at every level of infrastructure. They made up about half the cast, as they should for any story. Oh! Also, everyone’s black. Marvel is a very very white universe, so that’s important and necessary.
I should add that Spider-Man: Homecoming did a great job at representing women and minorities, too, but I wrote that review at like 3am the night before publishing and definitely skipped some stuff I meant to write down. This time I’m writing it at 9pm the night before publication, so. Winning.