Summary: A review of the Black Panther, what might be the hottest film of the year.
“People need stories, more than bread, itself. They teach us how to live, and why. …Stories show us how to win.”
— The Master Storyteller in HBO’s wonderful Arabian Nights.
The Black Panther is great entertainment, like a bag of properly cooked and buttered popcorn. Most of its critics miss the key point. Superhero films are fantasies of personal empowerment. Rather than debating their plausibility (zero), we should ask why such children’s fare has become so popular with adults. The answer is important; I wish I could see it.
The CGI is up to Hollywood’s usual excellence, although unimaginative. The film’s pace is slow, other than the frantic fight scenes. I found those — the film’s core — to be long and uninteresting. I have seen too many similar ones. Of course, tastes vary in such things.
Lots of exposition, which I suspect only true fans will find of interest. The plot is complicated, but well-constructed.
As with any film having a large cast — the hero, two villains, and a half-dozen of the hero’s supporters — the secondary characters are only lightly sketched. But good writing and skillful acting makes them seem more like people than the archetypes or cardboard cutouts that people most films. The bad people have rational motives, rare for a superhero film these days (too many villains are motiveless, mad or do evil for its own sake).
Most of the major male characters are weak or evil. More on this below.
The end avoids Hollywood trope of tying all the loose ends into a happy ending. You already know that the good side wins. But it is a messy victory — due to just luck (see below), which will offer T’Challa severe challenges both within his kingdom and in his attempt to forge a new relationship with the world.
About T’Challa, the Black Panther
And the Black Panther has been an important myth to many African-Americans since his first appearance in 1966. In the Marvel comics, T’Challa has it all. Skilled hunter & tracker, strategist, politician, inventor, scientist, and King. Rich, handsome, and one of the eight smartest people in the world.
Instead the film shows T’Challa as an average guy (ably portrayed by Chadwick Boseman). He freezes in battle, sometimes loses fights, and does not seem very bright (certainly less so than the women around him; he has an IQ of a squirrel compared to his sister). He has been dumped by his girlfriend (probably as a “nice guy”) and, as with so many films these days, and is treated with casual contempt by the women around him (just as in The Force Awakens, where Rey treats Kylo Ren as a wayward younger brother, and Leia and Holo treat Poe as a rambunctious child).
Further normalizing T’Challa, he wins only through an act of immense stupidity by one of the bad guys. Only superhuman self-control prevented me from standing in the theater to shout “Don’t do that, you fool.”
This is in keeping with the great theme of modern Hollywood: they do not like strong male leads. For example, Peter Jackson drastically revised Lord of the Rings to turn Aragorn into a weaker and conflicted man. In products of modern Hollywood only two kinds of people can be strong and smart with well-integrated personalities. First, women. Second, bad guys. The strongest man in Black Panther is M’Baku (Winston Duke), leader of the Jabari tribe. He is a real role model — and evil in the comics (as we will probably see in the Avengers: Infinity War film).
Wakanda is a dream
This is what Africa would’ve looked like if white people had left it alone.
— Said in many ways in countless Tweets.
“{M}yth supplies models for human behavior, and gives meaning and value to life.”
— Mircea Eliade in Myth and Reality(1963).
“This movie will show what could have happened if white colonialist would never have landed in Africa… Everything we could have built. Everything we could have been.” (John Kani, South African actor who plays King T’Chaka, former King of Wakanda).
— Tweet by Val L. Carbone (@val_carbone).
Decades of comics and now films have put Wakanda on the roster of mythical cities. Places such Wonder Woman’s Themyscira, Shangri-La, Atlantis, and Camelot. Each embodies a dream. But I wonder if this helps anyone unless it guides their actions and spur their ambitions. Time will tell if the Black Panther film has any substantial effect on African-Americans.
Three aspects of Wakanda are of special interest.
First, Wakanda has no visible gender polarization. You could randomly assign a men or women to each role in the film without changing the script — excerpt for the names and titles (this is common in modern films). Even the Black Panther. In the comic his sister Shuri becomes the Black Panther and Queen.
Second, Wakanda it picks its ruler by combining two primitive and proven ineffective methods — hereditary and by combat. Western monarchies demonstrate the folly of hereditary monarchies. The film demonstrates the folly of choosing the best killer as ruler. I lost my ability to suspend disbelief during the big challenge scene, wondering why the people of Wakanda were so stupid. Perhaps the film is a cautionary parable of the West: advanced technologically with dysfunctional politics.
Third, Wakanda is run in many respects along alt-right lines. Below is a summary. See more about this here.
What I hoped to see
“A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group”
— Joseph Campbell in Occidental Mythology – Masks of God(1968).
I have spent a lot of time as a storyteller at home to my boys and in classes and around campfires to Boy Scouts in the troop I led. They featured inspirational figures from the past, real and mythical, stories of conflicts and choices and valor. I told boys the story of The Odyssey
With my foolish optimism, I hoped Black Panther would sketch out a new way forward for African-Americans. Something with useful politics (not just the usual sermons). Or offer a film about marriage and its importance as a bridge to the future. Or how to grapple with the pathologies of drugs and crime. Or about ways to band together to reform their communities. Instead it is a fantasy about some tribes in Africa who long ago were given magic rocks.
Another African-American superhero
M.A.N.T.I.S.
This is a 1994 TV series about Dr. Miles Hawkins, a brilliant biophysicist paralyzed by a bullet while saving a young boy during a riot, He then developed an exoskeleton (M.A.N.T.I.S.) that would enable him to get out of his wheelchair and fight the crime ruining the lives of so many in his city. It grappled with race, drugs, gangs, and urban politics. It made most TV crime and superhero shows look like chalk drawings on the sidewalk.
The pilot was great in every aspect, with an all-Black cast for the major characters. Fox completely reworked the concept, added major white characters, dropped the racial aspects — and then cancelled it when it bombed.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
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- Review of Dr. Strange: a good film misunderstood by the critics.
- Jeff Beck reviews “Wonder Woman”, a contrary note amidst the ecstatic applause.
- “Justice League” is the film we need, not the one we deserve.
Trailer for the Black Panther
