Geek Review: Black Panther

Once again, Watson beat me to the review.  If you want to see his opinion, check it out.

If you want mine, see below.  Mine may be better.  Who can say?  The movie this time is, of course person who did not read the title, Black Panther.

Black Panther is, fittingly, the most political movie the MCU has done to date.  That’s entirely appropriate since the movie is, essentially, about what it means to be a good king–not a good superhero–and what role a powerful nation has in the world.  Aside from a handful of scenes and callbacks to Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther is the most standalone MCU movie since the first Iron Man, and heck, it may be even more standalone than that first entry.

Chadwick Boseman stars as T’Challa, the newest king of Wakanda following the death of his father.  He is, his father tells him during a trip to the afterlife, a good man, and being a good man isn’t always a good thing to be as a king.  Kingship is something T’Challa takes very seriously, and he’s being pressured by traditionalists in his country on one hand and love interest Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) on the other about how much Wakanda, long hidden from the outside world, should share what it has thanks to an ancient incident involving a vibranium meteor landing in their territory.

Meanwhile, working with one of Wakanda’s most wanted Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), there’s Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), an American-raised young man who is, in many ways, T’Challa’s mirror image, and for good reason.  Killmonger is filled with a good deal of righteous rage about the treatment of black people across the entire globe, and that alone may make him one of if not the most complex villains the MCU has ever produced.  Killmonger, as presented, isn’t even necessarily wrong in his motives, just in his methods to achieve his own ends.

With a colorful and politically-potent movie, director Ryan Coogler has brought a very soulful movie to the big screen, one that talks about the importance of fathers and the rightful duties of a king weighted against the tide of history.  Nine and a half out of ten hostile vegetarians.