Black Panther: All Hail the King

For many years, Marvel has been trying to shake things up and give us a movie that seems new, fresh, special. Black Panther, which was already following in the steps of Wonder Woman by creating a superhero for a very specific demographic – black viewers, who have yet to see a superhero who looks like them take the role of the main hero – has also become the shake-up that Marvel needed, a new type of superhero movie that we all needed. Instead of focusing on just the hero and his commitment to fighting his specific bad guy, Black Panther tells the story of a country, a history, a people who are vibrant and breathing and alive, bringing a new life to superhero films that does not just focus on one character or one team. Black Panther focuses on a whole new world, and its characters both inhabit it and bring it to life in a way that we haven’t seen from Marvel yet.

After the events of Captain America: Civil War, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns home to Wakanda to officially take his place as the new king. The remote African country hides a secret from the rest of the world – thanks to its position on top of the only known deposits of the most versatile metal on Earth, Vibranium, they are more technologically advanced than any other country. In order to protect their traditions and way of life, Wakanda hides their abilities and presents the front that they are a poor nation. T’Challa returns to find that one of the country’s tribes already disapproves of his rule, and there are those who believe that Wakanda should show the world what they are capable in order to help countries who are less fortunate than they are. As T’Challa tries to decide what kind of king he is going to be, a man named Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) steps forward to challenge his right to throne, and Wakanda’s way of life may be on the verge of destruction.

Marvel has taken us to Asgard, to Knowhere, even to a planet that is personified as a person, but their depiction of Wakanda and its culture is maybe the most other-worldly and fantastical as they have ever given us, and that is because of their exceptional world-building. If we had spent half the time learning about Asgard as we had about Wakanda, Thor’s movies wouldn’t have needed Thor: Ragnarok to save the character from all movies being at the bottom of the Marvel Quality Spectrum. Wakanda, simply put, is an utterly fascinating other world that exists, not out in space, but on our own planet. The film is infused with the culture of the Wakandan people, everything from clothing specific to tribes, music that brings to mind romantic notions of tribes long ago, and even the lingo that the people of Wakanda use – calling white people “colonizers” is probably my favorite, especially when it comes out of the mouth of T’Challa’s brainiac younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), who is easily the best new character of the film (though they are all amazing). Even though Wakanda is not a real country, the history of it and the way that history has affected its characters feels more real than any other film in the Marvel franchise has ever made us feel. Perhaps this is because T’Challa is more connected to his country than any other hero has been, as the future king (while Thor has always been happy to go traipsing around the rest of the universe and most of the Avengers are rather mobile, their hometowns less important to them than the mission they face), but it is also a perfect way to highlight the black power that fills this movie’s runtime and presents us with a very different type of movie than we are used to seeing from Marvel.

This film would not work nearly as well if its cast of characters did not play their parts to absolute perfection – even the smaller parts. In fact, you could almost say that Boseman is the least interesting of the group, and that is because we’ve already met him. Instead, we want to learn about his team of all-female guards, lead by Danai Gurira as Okoye, whose devotion to her king and country is the cornerstone of her entire life. We want to watch Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o, who works as a spy outside of Wakanda and believes that the country could be helping hundreds of people if they were to reveal themselves to the world (and dated T’Challa, once upon a time). Daniel Kaluuya and Forest Whitaker also appear as friends and advisors to T’Challa, with Angela Bassett as his regal and powerful mother. Jordan also takes to his role as Killmonger with an intensity that more Marvel villains need to emulate. He is both a man who wishes to rise against the unfairness that black people have faced across the world, and a man who has been raised in a world dominated by white people, and he has learned how to think and fight their way. That way of life has made him both hardened and vulnerable, leading to a more complex character than we are used to getting when the focus of the film is on the title character. Black Panther is not just about T’Challa, king and protector of Wakanda – it is also about the personality and spirit Wakanda itself, whose people and history makes it as much a character as any of the people who are delivering the dialogue onscreen.

There are minor flaws, of course, there always are – though we now have seen Black Panther in full form twice, we don’t know all that much about his powers (except that it’s remarkably easy to take them away and give them back, apparently). His suit, designed by Shuri, is explained in great detail, but his strength, speed and abilities out of the suit are still a mystery to us. You could potentially argue that, while Killmonger is interesting to watch, he is also the same problem Marvel usually has with its villains in that Black Panther will fight another version of himself (like Iron Man vs another guy in an Iron Man suit, Captain American vs another guy with super serum, etc). I’m also not quite sure what to make of Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), who was presented to us in Civil War almost as an adversary, but in this film is as blown away as the rest of us and totally behind T’Challa and Wakanda’s power. This highlights the fact that Black Panther is very much a standalone film, with Ross, T’Challa, and Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) as the only characters we recognize, and with little to no mention of the rest of the MCU. This is a story about Wakanda and its people, not the rest of the world, so the characters we know are just little dashes of a world we know set into a world that we are just learning about. And that new world, Black Panther’s world, is the one that we really want to see. If more Marvel films can create their singular worlds as effectively as they can (occasionally) create their extended ones, more Marvel films will have the power and strength of Black Panther.

5 / 5

If what happens in Black Panther determines what happens to the rest of the world, what does that mean for Infinity War?