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drwexNot because the movie is bad - quite the opposite. It's an excellent movie (with one caveat and a couple minor quibbles) and if you have not seen it you should. After a string of mediocre MCU entries, and a couple I outright didn't like, this movie resets the bar for what this creative universe can be.
It's intense, it's exciting, it's _super_ political in the best possible ways, it features a stellar cast all of whom turn in good-to-great performances. It has the best antagonist in any MCU movie, edging out Winter Soldier by giving him more screen time, a deeply resonant story, and better dialog. It breaks new ground particularly in that it envisions Afro-futurist sci-fi in a way that no film has done before, though there are a lot of good novels in this vein. No, that's all the easy stuff. What makes writing about this movie hard is that it has been written about, in depth, by people way more talented than I.
So instead of a review-like-review, I'm going to just touch on some personal things. This is long and spoiler-filled.
The only serious critique I can make of this movie is that it continues the MCU pattern of queer erasure. That stings hard in a movie that is so good at making so many things visible. Coming hard on the heels of Thor:Ragnarok's similar erasure it feels worse. Dora Milaje canonically include same-sex relationships and it's a deliberate decision of the filmmakers which parts of canon to visualize and which to leave out. It's hard to argh at a film this good, but it's also important to recognize that even media we love may have problematic elements. Almost every other complaint I have with this movie is a quibble; this is substantive.
I think that the film itself is good enough to compete for an Oscar, and Ryan Coogler's direction of his/Joe Robert Cole's script is clean, crisp, and worthy of recognition. For me, though, the stand-out is the script itself, which accomplishes more brilliant things than three normal movies.
I've already mentioned that the film is explicitly political. It takes on contemporary issues such as Boko Haram's depradations and doesn't shy away from showing how black people are complicit in many of the ills that afflict Africa today. By far the most important political statement, though, is the film's discussion of the African diaspora. Juxtaposing ideologies (isolationism, technology uber alles, foreign/refugee aid, black nationalism, revolution) all play out through this script and every point of view comes across as authentic. There are no cardboard characters, no paper-thin rationalizations.
Everyone we see is deep and authentic, and each plays an important part in the story. One of my quibbles: I would have named this film, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" because Wakanda itself is such a central part of the movie. As one critic put it, calling this film "Black Panther" is like calling a Guardians of the Galaxy movie "Star Lord".
Yes, T'challa and the struggle for the Black Panther mantle are central to this story. But those things would not exist without the nation of Wakanda, and Wakanda itself figures prominently in a political point of view. Wakanda is the MCU's statement that (white) colonization and exploitation are to blame for most of Africa's ills. Wakanda has never been colonized and its mineral wealth has not been plundered. As a result the nation is extremely advanced technologically ("You have hover bikes?"). T'challa and Killmonger fight over the crown, but also over their disparate visions of what Wakanda should be and how it should use that wealth and technological prowess.
Part of the genius of this script is that it doesn't narrow down to wealth and technology. We see people in Wakanda farming, raising animals, and practicing the kinds of crafts that other African nations practice. The visions of clothing, daily life, tribal interactions, and religious/cultural traditions that we see throughout the film flesh out Wakanda in our minds. They make it live and breathe and we understand why people fight for it, will risk their lives for it.
Also amazing: thing this script manages to have every character a stand-in for something, without being a stereotype. Obviously, T'chaka stands for the old, isolationist ways and tries to draw T'challa to that view. Nakia stands for those who would use Wakanda's power to help others in Africa. Killmonger stands for the African-descended diaspora who are denied the knowledge of where they came from, what their heritage is.
Probably the easiest way to see this, though, is in the two white characters of the film: Ulysses Klaue stands for every exploitative white person in history. He knows the secrets of the Dark Heart; he plunders its resources for his own gain. He doesn't care who gets killed along the way and if he had his way he'd likely wipe out the Wakandans to take their wealth just as generations of colonial exploiters did before him.
Everett K. Ross, by contrast, stands for people like me. (White) people like me who mean well but whose schooling didn't teach them anything about African history before white men arrived on the continent. Ross clearly means well - despite the Wakandans' worry that he will report them out to his CIA masters he never attempts that. He takes a bullet for one of them (great white protector much?). Then he throws his lot in with the Wakandans he knows best, and is up-front about how his (white) society created Killmonger, trained him and made him what he is. In fact, that's arrogance of an extraordinary kind, as we later find out, but it's exactly typical of a certain breed of liberal white patronizing of Africa/Africans.
Another thing that the script gets almost note-perfect is its treatment of women. In fact, you can generally grade the goodness of characters in this film by how they treat women. Those who listen to and respect women are generally the film's good guys (even if flawed); those who do not are the bad guys.
Pygment noted one bad exception to this where T'Challa employs the "couldn't help myself" line to justify a minor moment. On the scale of this movie, this shows us he's still not an unsullied good guy and I rate it as one of Coogler's few slip-ups.
Jordan is a good actor in his own right, having spent nearly a decade working on well-reviewed TV series. I actually liked his work in Fantastic Four, a movie that was... not very good in most respects. I think he still has a potentially great career ahead of him, but right here, this role is nomination-worthy.
Killmonger is a simple person on the surface, with incredible depth that Jordan lets you see through his interpretation of key scenes. Early on he steals an African mask from a museum because it "speaks to him" - only later will we understand why. Later we see him casually killing people and learn that every mark on his body represents a kill. Not only does he carry the reminder of his murders with him, literally, he adopts a time-honored tradition of scarification to do so. He is a walking contradiction that tries to resolve itself in reclaiming a heritage that was denied to him.
Earlier I noted that Ross tries to claim credit/blame for making Killmonger what he is. But in fact, he is Wakanda's creation. T'Chaka's decision to abandon the boy to discover his own executed father set him on this path. He learned his ideology (not subtly inspired by the American Black Panther Party) at his Wakandan father's knee. That he used Ross and the CIA as ways to hone the skills he felt he needed is his choice, not theirs.
The greatest tribute to Jordan's performance that I can cite is the emergence of a "Killmonger was right" social media thread. When Killmonger accuses the rulers of Wakanda of abandoning "two billion people who look like us" he's giving voice to a sense of abandonment and resentment that is widely shared. But he's wrong and the film makes no bones about it. He shoots his lover the moment her body becomes an obstacle to his desires - remember the rule about how people treat women.
He torches the best possible future a child of his might have, presumably believing that he'll never have a child, an heir. And at its core, his ideology is the same as the failed American policies of the last couple decades. You swap the phrase "black liberation" and "establish democracy" and you've got the belief that if we just ship weapons to the "right" people we'll somehow end up with a better world and not just a lot more dead people of all creeds and colors. The US has been trying this in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria and all we have is more dead innocents.
Killmongers' plan would trade Wakanda's security advantage for a pile of dead bodies. He's fine with that; we shouldn't be. But Jordan sells it and the script gives him a truly fantastic death scene to play out. I'm sad he's gone, and that's a tribute to the character created here - a unique and award-worthy element of this film.
Like, the way the Dora Milaje fight is just brilliant. Did you notice how they work to disable, hamper, capture their opponents? The entire combat style featured in the film is unique and consistently appropriate, from the fight in the casino to the very end. When three of them take on Killmonger they're still not trying to damage him. They come very close to taking him down without shedding a drop of blood. This perfectly sets up a moment later on when T'challa will go for blood and Killmonger will be surprised by it. Did you notice that Shuri flat-out tells us that she's not a warrior and when she gets into a fight she makes the rookie mistake of using a ranged weapon but then closing to melee range with a skilled hand-to-hand combatant?
I've read a couple reviews of the movie that call the ending fight a "bloodbath" and I think that's exactly missing the point. Very little blood is spilled before the rhinos appear and most of the weaponry we see deployed is defensive. I quibble with some of the green-screen work on the armored rhinos but overall I found the choreography and direction of the fight sequences very good.
It's intense, it's exciting, it's _super_ political in the best possible ways, it features a stellar cast all of whom turn in good-to-great performances. It has the best antagonist in any MCU movie, edging out Winter Soldier by giving him more screen time, a deeply resonant story, and better dialog. It breaks new ground particularly in that it envisions Afro-futurist sci-fi in a way that no film has done before, though there are a lot of good novels in this vein. No, that's all the easy stuff. What makes writing about this movie hard is that it has been written about, in depth, by people way more talented than I.
So instead of a review-like-review, I'm going to just touch on some personal things. This is long and spoiler-filled.
The only serious critique I can make of this movie is that it continues the MCU pattern of queer erasure. That stings hard in a movie that is so good at making so many things visible. Coming hard on the heels of Thor:Ragnarok's similar erasure it feels worse. Dora Milaje canonically include same-sex relationships and it's a deliberate decision of the filmmakers which parts of canon to visualize and which to leave out. It's hard to argh at a film this good, but it's also important to recognize that even media we love may have problematic elements. Almost every other complaint I have with this movie is a quibble; this is substantive.
I think that the film itself is good enough to compete for an Oscar, and Ryan Coogler's direction of his/Joe Robert Cole's script is clean, crisp, and worthy of recognition. For me, though, the stand-out is the script itself, which accomplishes more brilliant things than three normal movies.
I've already mentioned that the film is explicitly political. It takes on contemporary issues such as Boko Haram's depradations and doesn't shy away from showing how black people are complicit in many of the ills that afflict Africa today. By far the most important political statement, though, is the film's discussion of the African diaspora. Juxtaposing ideologies (isolationism, technology uber alles, foreign/refugee aid, black nationalism, revolution) all play out through this script and every point of view comes across as authentic. There are no cardboard characters, no paper-thin rationalizations.
Everyone we see is deep and authentic, and each plays an important part in the story. One of my quibbles: I would have named this film, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" because Wakanda itself is such a central part of the movie. As one critic put it, calling this film "Black Panther" is like calling a Guardians of the Galaxy movie "Star Lord".
Yes, T'challa and the struggle for the Black Panther mantle are central to this story. But those things would not exist without the nation of Wakanda, and Wakanda itself figures prominently in a political point of view. Wakanda is the MCU's statement that (white) colonization and exploitation are to blame for most of Africa's ills. Wakanda has never been colonized and its mineral wealth has not been plundered. As a result the nation is extremely advanced technologically ("You have hover bikes?"). T'challa and Killmonger fight over the crown, but also over their disparate visions of what Wakanda should be and how it should use that wealth and technological prowess.
Part of the genius of this script is that it doesn't narrow down to wealth and technology. We see people in Wakanda farming, raising animals, and practicing the kinds of crafts that other African nations practice. The visions of clothing, daily life, tribal interactions, and religious/cultural traditions that we see throughout the film flesh out Wakanda in our minds. They make it live and breathe and we understand why people fight for it, will risk their lives for it.
Also amazing: thing this script manages to have every character a stand-in for something, without being a stereotype. Obviously, T'chaka stands for the old, isolationist ways and tries to draw T'challa to that view. Nakia stands for those who would use Wakanda's power to help others in Africa. Killmonger stands for the African-descended diaspora who are denied the knowledge of where they came from, what their heritage is.
Probably the easiest way to see this, though, is in the two white characters of the film: Ulysses Klaue stands for every exploitative white person in history. He knows the secrets of the Dark Heart; he plunders its resources for his own gain. He doesn't care who gets killed along the way and if he had his way he'd likely wipe out the Wakandans to take their wealth just as generations of colonial exploiters did before him.
Everett K. Ross, by contrast, stands for people like me. (White) people like me who mean well but whose schooling didn't teach them anything about African history before white men arrived on the continent. Ross clearly means well - despite the Wakandans' worry that he will report them out to his CIA masters he never attempts that. He takes a bullet for one of them (great white protector much?). Then he throws his lot in with the Wakandans he knows best, and is up-front about how his (white) society created Killmonger, trained him and made him what he is. In fact, that's arrogance of an extraordinary kind, as we later find out, but it's exactly typical of a certain breed of liberal white patronizing of Africa/Africans.
Another thing that the script gets almost note-perfect is its treatment of women. In fact, you can generally grade the goodness of characters in this film by how they treat women. Those who listen to and respect women are generally the film's good guys (even if flawed); those who do not are the bad guys.
Pygment noted one bad exception to this where T'Challa employs the "couldn't help myself" line to justify a minor moment. On the scale of this movie, this shows us he's still not an unsullied good guy and I rate it as one of Coogler's few slip-ups.
Jordan is a good actor in his own right, having spent nearly a decade working on well-reviewed TV series. I actually liked his work in Fantastic Four, a movie that was... not very good in most respects. I think he still has a potentially great career ahead of him, but right here, this role is nomination-worthy.
Killmonger is a simple person on the surface, with incredible depth that Jordan lets you see through his interpretation of key scenes. Early on he steals an African mask from a museum because it "speaks to him" - only later will we understand why. Later we see him casually killing people and learn that every mark on his body represents a kill. Not only does he carry the reminder of his murders with him, literally, he adopts a time-honored tradition of scarification to do so. He is a walking contradiction that tries to resolve itself in reclaiming a heritage that was denied to him.
Earlier I noted that Ross tries to claim credit/blame for making Killmonger what he is. But in fact, he is Wakanda's creation. T'Chaka's decision to abandon the boy to discover his own executed father set him on this path. He learned his ideology (not subtly inspired by the American Black Panther Party) at his Wakandan father's knee. That he used Ross and the CIA as ways to hone the skills he felt he needed is his choice, not theirs.
The greatest tribute to Jordan's performance that I can cite is the emergence of a "Killmonger was right" social media thread. When Killmonger accuses the rulers of Wakanda of abandoning "two billion people who look like us" he's giving voice to a sense of abandonment and resentment that is widely shared. But he's wrong and the film makes no bones about it. He shoots his lover the moment her body becomes an obstacle to his desires - remember the rule about how people treat women.
He torches the best possible future a child of his might have, presumably believing that he'll never have a child, an heir. And at its core, his ideology is the same as the failed American policies of the last couple decades. You swap the phrase "black liberation" and "establish democracy" and you've got the belief that if we just ship weapons to the "right" people we'll somehow end up with a better world and not just a lot more dead people of all creeds and colors. The US has been trying this in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria and all we have is more dead innocents.
Killmongers' plan would trade Wakanda's security advantage for a pile of dead bodies. He's fine with that; we shouldn't be. But Jordan sells it and the script gives him a truly fantastic death scene to play out. I'm sad he's gone, and that's a tribute to the character created here - a unique and award-worthy element of this film.
Like, the way the Dora Milaje fight is just brilliant. Did you notice how they work to disable, hamper, capture their opponents? The entire combat style featured in the film is unique and consistently appropriate, from the fight in the casino to the very end. When three of them take on Killmonger they're still not trying to damage him. They come very close to taking him down without shedding a drop of blood. This perfectly sets up a moment later on when T'challa will go for blood and Killmonger will be surprised by it. Did you notice that Shuri flat-out tells us that she's not a warrior and when she gets into a fight she makes the rookie mistake of using a ranged weapon but then closing to melee range with a skilled hand-to-hand combatant?
I've read a couple reviews of the movie that call the ending fight a "bloodbath" and I think that's exactly missing the point. Very little blood is spilled before the rhinos appear and most of the weaponry we see deployed is defensive. I quibble with some of the green-screen work on the armored rhinos but overall I found the choreography and direction of the fight sequences very good.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-27 11:03 am (UTC)