Thought this was slow and not very interesting. Was hoping for more super hero battles against arch villians…guess I’m too spoiled from other Marvel movies. Want some Black Panther with the others for large scale kick ass!
Killmonger is a sympathetic character, and the implied premise is that he was right about pushing Wakanda to intervene outside of its borders. Wakanda’s isolationism, inaction, certainly allowed for imperialism to take its toll.
OTOH, Wakanda’s historical stance was likely a complicated mix of self-preservation, and ignorance as to how to go about fighting the good fight without risking their Vibranium falling into the hands of the enemy.
Killmonger’s method, to send modern Vibranium weapons to implanted wardogs around the globe for violent uprisings was… extreme. A noble intention that would have resulted in a lot of innocent bloodshed. Panther integrates the lessons he learned from Killmonger, and begins to apply them, in a more measured approach, by creating Wakandan centers throughout the world.
@anklebiter, Nesrie is absolutely right. You might not feel the movie made that point clearly enough, or you might even disagree with that point, but that’s the internal fiction Black Panther asks you to accept. Their isolationism was the key to their survival. It is now morally objectionable and the movie is about T’Challa coming to accept that fact.
-Tom
Without seeing it again, I’ll have to concede the point. I do remember the ancient artifact was a weapon made of vibranium. With those, surely they would have a large advantage.
May is only 3 months away. : )
Yeah, if you think too hard, the premise is going to fall apart. Early civilizations are categorized by their best metal for a reason.
-Tom
In that case, Wakanda’s early isolation seems like a blessing, right? With their superior weapons they could have had an advantage and colonized the world.
Though the history nerd in me says that the Steppes people’s horse archer was the best weapon until bullets came along, so maybe even with Vibranium weapons, maybe the Steppes people would still have a big advantage throughout most of ancient history.
I mean how do you even mine or refine Vibranium?
With diamonds? We should ask Stan Lee.
-Tom
We don’t know the properties. Maybe it’s melting point isn’t too extreme, so you could apply heat to the ore. Or maybe it’s not hard as Adamantium alloyed with Iron, who knows.
With Unobtainium, obviously.
-xtien
Yeah a really awesome spear is still just a spear. I suspect being isolated let’s them focus on other things too, not war. You could do all sorts of arguments on whether or not war stimulates advancement… but this comic book, in the same universe as a sentient planet, raccoon and maybe about an 8 foot plant, you got to give a little on realism.
Finally got a chance to see it. I’d place it firmly in the top third of Marvel movies but not in the top slot - Winter Soldier still holds the crown.
BP has some issues, all small ones. The end fight with the bad CG was a letdown, the editing was meh (they probably could have cut five minutes by just tightening scenes up, without losing dialog,) the story took forever to really get going, there were more characters than the movie could handle (Angela Basset had nothing to do, and since the movie’s structure meant Everett Ross no longer was an audience viewpoint character like he was in the comics, Martin Freeman had little to do except embody a joke about the token white character.) The movie also made the classic mistake of using up two (three, if you count “Man-Ape”) major villains when it really only needed one good one. It felt like the only real reason Klaw, er Klaue, was in this at all was because he had been built up in Avengers 2.
But … it did have a good villain, almost all of the many characters were interesting, the cast was great, the action was mostly good, and most importantly it felt like a proper story and wasn’t just ticking off some boxes on a formula checklist … even if maybe it was.
To see the accomplishment, consider that Dr. Strange had a similar plot. A revered leader makes a poor decision; rebellious acolyte calls them on it; the young blood has to clean up the mess and take a new path. But nobody ever gave a crap about Kaecilius or his issues - I bet you don’t even remember who Kaecilius is. Whereas Killmonger stays with you as a compelling character.
The movie version of Wakanda and some of the supporting characters are taken from Christopher Priest’s BP run. But the story of Erik Killmonger and the central conflicts all come from Don McGregor’s early 1970s run, the classic “Panther’s Rage” arc I read as a kid. It was very compelling - but also dense, wordy, and complex, downright daunting for a superhero comic. I would devour other comics right after buying them, but it might take a week or more before I worked up the energy to tackle McGregor’s epic. Combine that with the fact it didn’t feature a single major white character, and you have the reasons why I never, ever expected to see a major motion picture made out of Panther’s Rage in my lifetime.
I am quite delighted to have to have been proven wrong.
The more popular a thing gets, the less self-imposed discipline the next iterations get from their creators. We’ve seen the same effect with the Harry Potter books (and movies), the films of celebrity directors like Tarantino, Scorsese, and even Kubrick, and the all-too-common double album phenomenon in the heyday of Album Rock (How’d that work out for you GnR? Yeah, Zeppelin made it look easy.).
There’s some of that in Marvel’s current phase, but they have definitely kept it tighter than others who let success go to their heads. The bullshit detector has been dialed down, but not completely shut off.
I’m not sure that was a mistake. It provided some continuity with earlier story lines. Rather than throw in a new villain out of the blue, it felt like a fairly organic segue to me. One of the great things about the MCU is the interconnectedness.
It’s interconnectiveness purely for its own sake, though - Klaw was never allowed to be important or interesting in his own right, he was just used to glue two things together. Good for marketing, maybe, but not good storytelling.
Another example of that is the alien artifacts in Luke Cage. The show built up a mystery about where they came from, but irritatingly never resolved it. Months and months later, Spider-man Homecoming did … but it wasn’t all that interesting a mystery or a resolution. The net effect was to annoy the Luke Cage viewers, not draw them in.
Modern superhero comics have the same problem. The universes are so interconnected, events sprawl over so many books, that you’re faced with the decision of either embracing it all (and spending a lot of money on many books you aren’t really interested in, and a lot of time tracking niggling little details to follow the interconnections) or nope out of the hobby entirely. And yes, a bunch of people buy in and see the interconnectiveness as a feature. But as someone who noped out of comics a long time ago for this very reason, I would argue many more see it as a bug. Mass audiences don’t want to have to do homework before they watch a movie.
One of the things I liked about the MCU is that it initially preserved the fun, fluffy, cameo part of interconnectiveness - oh hey, there’s Samuel L Jackson again! - without actually requiring you to watch all the movies. I hope they keep it that way, and don’t continue going down BP’s path of making the interconnections tightly bound to the plot (… but of course they will, because next up is Infinity War.)
I get this criticism of the MCU at large, but you really think this “tight interconnectedness” was a problem for Black Panther? It stands alone as well or better than any other Marvel film, and the Klaue connection really was about as light and fluffy as Fury popping up. You don’t need to know anything about his single other minor appearance in Age of Ultron, nor did that role in set up any questions BP had to answer.
But why not cut him? He’s not needed, and the movie is overcrowded as a it is. This is true of both BP and Avengers 2.
(Plus there’s the annoying plot thread of, “T’Chaka tried for 30 years to catch Klaue and couldn’t; Killmonger bags him like a chump in five minutes.” No doubt this is supposed to establish Killmonger as a supreme badass, because he can take out another badass so easily. But what it mainly does make the movie feel incoherent, because while we’ve heard Klau’s badassary asserted we’ve never actually seen it. The overall impression is, “Why did we spend time over two movies on a minor mook? All he did is delay the actual plot both times.”)
I do think Klaue was important, because Killmonger bringing him in helps establish his legitimacy to the thrown. Clearly he had been planning to kill Klaue for this purpose the entire time. So, Klaue in and of himself is not terribly important, but he is still a key plot device. Now a very valid complaint about Marvel movies would be that characters are routinely used simply as plot devices. I got no argument there.