Review – Black Panther lives up to the massive hype

Marvel’s Black Panther has a lot riding on it. As the first major superhero film to feature a predominately black cast and be helmed by a black director, Black Panther has been embraced as a major political signifier well before most people have even had a chance to see the movie. Entire screenings have been bought up exclusively for black youth, and the film has come to represent a popular upswell of anti-Hollywood sentiment that picked up steam back with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and has only gained traction with the rise of the #MeToo movement. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a single movie, especially one that has to fit into the massively commercial interlocking Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Black Panther still manages to show us a superhero film unlike any we’ve ever seen before.

Following his father’s death in Captain America: Civil War, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes King of Wakanda, a fictional African republic that on the surface is nothing more than a dusty, wind-swept region undergoing a massive drought. In truth, under the guise of a Third World country, the hidden inner sanctum of Wakanda is actually the most technologically advanced nation on Earth, thanks to the use of the precious alien metal vibranium that lies beneath the country’s soil. Investigating a stolen Wakandan artifact, T’Challa travels to Busan, South Korea with Okoye (Danai Gurira), the leader of the Wakandan Dora Milaje fighting force and his ex-lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), in pursuit of the arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis). The buyer is soon revealed to be C.I.A. agent Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman), and following a thrilling action car chase through the streets of Busan, Klaue is taken into C.I.A. custody. He is quickly broken out by Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), a vicious killer with Wakandan ties who wants to rule Wakanda and bring it out of hiding for the betterment of black lives throughout the world, regardless of how many people he has to kill in the process.

While the plot is often very busy, at its heart, Black Panther, like all superhero stories, is about duty and responsibility — to one’s people, and to society at large. Killmonger is by far the best MCU villain to date, a figure with a tragic back story and very clear motivations that actually make sense. If it wasn’t for all the killing, his ideas would be perfectly reasonable — why should Wakanda be allowed to hide its technological marvels from the world? Doesn’t Wakanda, and by extension its leader, have a responsibility to help the plight of fellow black people beyond its borders? There are obviously real-world issues the film is tackling, and with the recent “shithole” controversy down south, it’s exciting to see a powerful African nation portrayed on film, one which has little use for the U.S. (one of the only white characters in the film is derided as a “colonizer” at one point).

With very few concessions to other MCU films (save for the requisite Stan Lee cameo), Black Panther truly has a look and feel all its own. Director and co-writer Ryan Coogler imbues the film with a level of tech-wizardry and political strife that comes across like a mashup of James Bond and Game of Thrones, tonally setting the film apart from any other superhero film in recent memory. The film’s vision of afrofuturism is expertly handled by cinematographer Rachel Morrison, who brings the explosively colourful palette of Wakanda to life, a city that looks like Addis Ababa set amidst the world of Blade Runner.