Black Panther: a review

There were so many things to like about this film, but also a few things to make me think it was not the movie it was trying to be, and would have been better as something else.

First off - the pros. So! Many! Women! Characters! Being! Awesome! I cannot tell you how happy I was that women were the warriors, the royal guard, the tech geniuses, the confidants, the useful people. For any movie was an impressive number, but for a Marvel movie it was amazing. To date all they’ve had is Black Widow and Scarlett Witch, and they seem to be doing their best to turn them into Love Interests With a Side of Personality. HUFF. We had the villain being an idea, not a single person (although a protagonist brought that to the fore quite nicely). I liked that we had very very few White Dudes in it (and they weren’t missed) - go ahead and make jokes about the Tolkien white men in it. I loved the scenery and the idea of what a city would have looked like if there hadn’t been colonising, meddling, Shanghai’ing, and general fuckery back in the day. I loved the other tribes and especially the magnanimousness and humour of M’Baku - he may even be my favourite character. I loved that it was an African nation on their terms, without caring what outsiders thought of it - if the studio had done the same it would have been more of a movie, I think. It was good to see Sterling K Brown (A.K.A. Gordon Walker, for Supernatural fans) and Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) in such prominent roles and Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira were outstanding.

Now to the cons: apart from battle rhinos (really? Rhinos are waaay behind in the death toll caused by hippos, Africa’s deadliest animal) and the possible tactical failure of making a concept of separatism the villain of the piece instead of just an evil moustache-twirler getting too big for their boots, there weren’t many drawback of this film. However, the CGI fights (especially those on top of cars) were so flashy and so fast that I couldn’t really track them and therefore didn’t care. There are only so many incredible slow-motion back-flips you watch in media before you find them boring, too. The actual hand-to-hand fights were much more accessible and I enjoyed them a lot - Danai Gurira was excellent in every way and I hope we see more of her character in every Marvel movie possible. I’m not sure this should have been an action flick; part of me thinks it deserved to be more of a Captain America: the Winter Solder than trying to be another Avengers. What I mean by that is more a thinking movie and less of a flashy, effects-laden action film trying to keep action fans and Marvel fans happy.

And now to the elephant (rhino?) in the room: some reviews I’ve seen online did not think that this move was a landmark at all, and in fact found it boring and meaningless. However, after seeing Wonder Woman come out last year and being totally thrilled at seeing a film about women doing women things for other women (and it not being a fucking rom-com), I get what people see in Black Panther. Other people don’t understand what I see in Wonder Woman, and why I rate it higher than I actually think it deserves. It’s because of one single fact: the people who are tired of seeing the same characters on screen (and by that I mean Straight White Dudes) because they’re not one and can’t relate to them outnumber those who are one of them. And Hollywood has known this since before its sign went up on that hill but they’ve always run Hollywood for the good of the Straight White Dudes. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Straight White Dudes (“some of my best friends are SWDs”), but the world doesn’t revolve around them and I just want more choice in my movies. Yes, I want movies like Ocean’s Eight where it’s mostly women in the cast. Yes I want movies like XXX: Return of Xander Cage where you have a diverse cast who are 90% not SWDs. And yes, I want movies like Black Panther where you have plenty of roles filled by the kind of actors that Disney says it can’t find, when challenged over why they’ve whitewashed yet another character.

Black Panther ticked so many boxes; diverse cast, a good gender balance, role models, a bit of humour, a good ending where wisdom wins out over everything else going on. It also had a very, very powerful ending where a few hundred years of shit was referenced in a solid, easily understandable way. It was such a burn in fact that the audience I saw it with contained a few people that put hands over their mouths in shock at the brutal way it was casually worded. A very good moment, I felt, and a very good way to end hostilities.

I’ve also seen a few online reviews that said that the delivery or the way it was couched “didn’t come over well” and ruined the jokes. I can see their point; I think Benedict Cumberbatch was the wrong choice for Doctor Strange because he just isn’t Doctor Strange material, and his delivery of the let-down joke is so poor he massacres the punchline. However, I did not find that to be the case with Chadwick Boseman or any of the Black Panther cast. What I did get was a chance to get used to another way of people talking, another way of people expressing themselves. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again; you don’t have to make everyone talk like a white American from an easily identifiable state in order to make them an important character. This has recently come to light in series such as Star Trek: Discovery, where Michelle Yeoh has kept her Malay accent and it’s been perfectly fine.

All in all, I enjoyed this, but if they’d cut out the CGI fights on top of cars and edited it together in such a way that the story flowed more easily, I would have given this a higher score.

Verdict: 8/10; for all the reasons above. You should see this - everyone should - so that people understand that audiences are bored of the Same Old Shit coming out of Hollywood. Also, the very end-end scene gives us clues about Avengers: Infinity War. Just sayin’.

And that’s it, I think. I have a course to go back to studying and telly to catch up on.

Until next time: soopytwist.