Black Panther (2018, Dir. Ryan Coogler):
Up to now, Marvel movies have mainly existed in a universe of their own making. Oh sure, we recognize locales like San Francisco, Hong Kong, Washington DC and Queens, and every so often we’ll touch on an issue that strikes a chord with our current climate, such as the surveillance state debates in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but in the end, the imaginary stuff — be it an energy cube, a magic hammer, or super-futuristic tech — overwhelms all. And why not? When you have a global franchise, the last thing you want to do is tie the stories to specific cultural or geopolitical concerns. Do audiences halfway around the world really understand or care about anything other than magic power balls?
All that changes with Black Panther, which reverses the approach. Based in the entirely fictitious country of Wakanda, the movie would appear to be about cool armaments and magical hocus-pocus, but it really concerns the here and now. To drive home the point, we begin the movie in the slums of 1992 Oakland, during the height of the Rodney King riots. On the streets, kids play basketball with makeshift baskets for hoops; upstairs, two angry African-American men inspect their automatic rifles and plan a heist. This might be unfamiliar territory for Marvel, but it’s old hat for director Ryan Coogler, who made his directorial breakthrough just down the road from Oakland with Fruitvale Station (2013). Coogler specializes in dispossessed and desperate characters, and has a flair for rousing drama, as he demonstrated in Creed (2016). He brings all of the above to Black Panther, along with something often lacking in the genre: a point.
At heart, the film is a simple tale of succession. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a.k.a. the Black Panther, has just buried his father, and must prove himself worthy of assuming the mantle of king. Hidden away from prying eyes, his nation of Wakanda is a marvel of technological achievement, and very content to be isolated from the hurlyburly of the real world — until the real world comes calling in the form of two nightmares: Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), a cackling mercenary looking to profit off Wakanda’s mineral riches like so many other colonizers have profited off Africa in the past, and Klaue’s mysterious partner-in-crime Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who has very specific (and valid) reasons for usurping Wakanda’s throne. Like all Shakespearean kings, T’Challa’s head hangs heavy under his crown. He may think he’s ready to rule, but when your ex-girlfriend Nakia (a fiery Lupita Nyong’o) advocates a more activist approach to helping Wakanda’s oppressed neighbors, a rival tribe represented by the imperious M’Baku (Winston Duke) is angling for power, your best buddy W’kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) doubts your resolve, and your late father has a secret that may spell ruin for Wakanda and the world at large, it adds up to a heap of trouble. Above it all looms his father’s ominous final advice: “It’s hard for a good man to be king.”
Make no mistake, Black Panther is a comic book movie, and all problems are eventually resolved via fisticuffs, stealth planes, and battle rhinos. We get an urban car chase (the faceless metropolis used this time out is Busan, South Korea), CGI vistas, and shiny virtual reality tech, all of which are executed in workmanlike, uninspired fashion. If that was all there was to it, the movie would be another mildly enjoyable product off the Marvel mass assembly line; fortunately for us, there’s much more. Remaining true to the comic’s roots, Black Panther is black and proud, serving as a corrective to the milquetoast milieus of other action flicks. With the exception of Martin Freeman’s CIA operative Everett Ross (who is dwarfed, literally and figuratively, by the ensemble), the film commands our attention with its African-American faces — young and old, male and female. It’s a thrill to see old pros like Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker mixing it up with breakout stars Nyong’o and Kaluuya. The gals even get to have the most fun: not only is Danai Gurira’s bald and bold General Okoye a badass with a fighting staff, her impervious demeanor also becomes an unexpected source of comedy, while T’Challa’s genius kid sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) gets to play Q to Black Panther’s Bond, supplying him with his gadgets. (Coogler has an extra bit of fun with a casino scene that steals its production design and tone straight outta Skyfall.)
We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe. — T’Challa
Where Black Panther all comes together, though, is in the personage of Killmonger, easily the most compelling villain in Marvel’s stable thus far. Wrongly orphaned and left to fend for himself in a world that discriminates against his race, he’s raring to set things right. “The world’s going to start over and this time we’ll be on top,” he snarls, and Jordan makes you feel the hurt as well as the anger in the words. Like another Erik in the Marvel universe, Erik Lehnsherr (a.k.a. Magneto from the X-Men), Killmonger is a wronged soul bent on justice by any means necessary, and like Magneto, he saunters forth with the eloquence and edge of a Malcolm X. His hair gathered in a spiky do like a cock of the walk, Jordan brings the swag every time he’s on screen, his American-bred, street-wise rhythms playing beautifully off Boseman’s regal yet uncertain T’Challa. Their clash of principles — activism versus isolationism, righteous violence versus peaceful passivity — gives the proceedings a social charge not seen since the first X-Men movies, and it speaks to the strength of the film’s construction that it turns out they’re both right and wrong. In their duel to the death, Coogler embraces the Shakespearean dimensions of the conflict, and even grants Killmonger a concluding moment that would fit right in one of the Bard’s history plays.
As with most of the Marvel movies, the climax of Black Panther is a bit of a letdown: one can only experience hordes of battling armies and mano-a-mano beatdowns so many times before it gets to be old hat. (Sadly, Coogler doesn’t have much opportunity to display the action chops he showed in Creed‘s boxing scenes.) Still, Coogler keeps his eye on the ball for the denouement. “I’ve seen too much to just turn a blind eye,” Nakia says earlier in the film, so we end, just as we started, back in Oakland, in the midst of real-world poverty, as T’Challa pledges himself to make a difference, one kid at a time. “The wise build bridges, the foolish build barriers,” he says. (Paging Mr. Trump.) Such aspirations might seem as much of a fairy tale as the existence of a technologically superior African nation filled with beautiful people, but as with the best comic book movies, Black Panther succeeds because it is aspirational and inspirational. It’s a long way from Fruitvale to Marvel, but Black Panther proves Coogler is adept at thoughtful big-budget entertainment, and also serves as a reminder that movie franchises can indeed learn new tricks. As Shuri insists to her big brother, “Just because something works, it doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.”
