Black Panther doesn’t have the aura of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Yes, it features allies and enemies we’ve met in prior outings like Age of Ultron and Civil War. Yes, it has a jovial vibe throughout its cast that buoys heavier moments. And yes, it has the mandatory, climactic third act battle, draped in CGI and stuffed with the usual fanfare.
But Black Panther also stands apart from the rest of Marvel’s offerings on the silver screen. It is unabashedly Afrocentric in its focus and in its approach. It is a forthrightly political film, meditating on the legacy of colonialism, the oppression of people of color around the world, and the push and pull of calls for isolationism and for global activism. Though squeezed into the standard hero movie structure, Black Panther takes its audience to a different space, one untouched by the rest of the world and, in some ways, untouched by the broader cinematic universe the film exists within, which gives the movie its unassuming strength.
It is a uniquely, profoundly black take on the modern superhero film, one long overdue, if for no other reason than for how it breathes new life into that familiar formula. There’s nothing wrong with comic book movies hitting certain standard notes of uncertainty, challenge, and self-realization. But Black Panther is a cinematic argument for broadening the franchise, showing the renewed, distinctive character these classic stories take on, when they’re told from a fully-formed, confident, and altogether different perspective.
That distinct atmosphere, crafted by writer-director Ryan Coogler, is the best thing about Black Panther, along with the clear sense of camaraderie between its cast and characters. No hero is an island these days, and while the film’s title character has a notable arc that’s done well, the most enjoyable portions of the movie emerge when the plot mechanics of his story take a break while he chats, spars, and laughs with his tech-wiz sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his determined, worldly ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and his fierce, principled guard Okoye (Danai Gurira). So much in these sorts of films depends on the chemistry and connections between the personalities the audience is asked to spend two hours with, and Black Panther soars on that front, building a rapport among those core characters that carries the day.
"Now, where's that person who turned me down for the prom?"
At the same time, Chadwick Boseman gives one of the best dramatic performances ever to grace a Marvel film. Thematically, the movie centers on the notion of whether someone like T’Challa — who has a kind heart, but also uncertainty about how and where to guide his people — can be a good leader, and Boseman brings the inherent decency and heft to the role to make these grand ideas land.
Black Panther constantly sets its eponymous hero in between conflicting choices and impulses. T’Challa has to balance his inherent sense of mercy (shown to the leader of a challenging tribe), with his desire to deliver swift justice (shown when he threatens an enemy of the state). He has to reconcile his strongly-felt love for his father and his deep respect for his people’s traditions, with his growing realization that his ancestors were men, not gods, each of whom made mistakes, and the nagging sense that maybe his homeland needs to change to meet the times. T’Challa must square his country’s tradition of geopolitical isolation, with the competing calls to share the nation’s wealth and knowledge in order to help those in need, and to use those resources to bring down the oppressors around the world who create that need.
The film’s script, penned by Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole, excels at creating a central character who’s pulled in multiple directions, on multiple dimensions, leaving him unsure what path to take and what sort of man to be, until the right direction is forged in fires of challenge and hardship. Together, Coogler and Cole produce a film that is a political story, a cultural story, a family story, and a personal story.
They don’t seem particularly interested, however, in the ways that it is also, necessarily, a superhero story, even if that doesn’t hinder the film too much. Movies as tonally diverse as Logan and Deadpool have shown you can create a multitude of different sorts of films with very different approaches all within the same superhero flick framework. But there’s a sense in Black Panther that the comic book-y elements are often perfunctory, that Coogler and Cole had a compelling story to tell about legacy, power, and obligation, but couldn’t tell it without including the de jure superhero fireworks.
"These are totally real people in a real place! We swear!"
That means Black Panther is at its best when it shows its title character confronting his responsibilities as a citizen, son, and leader, or finding strength, challenge, and affection among his friends and family. And it’s at its weakest when it shows him punching and kicking those things in comic book movies that inevitably must be punched and kicked.
At times, Coogler and director of photography Rachel Morrison capture the same sort of raw intensity of combat from a boxing match in Creed. The close quarters combat of the challenges for leadership are tight and visceral, giving an immediate sense of the personalities clashing at the same time bodies are. And a digitally-stitched together, but nominally unbroken action sequence early in the film has all the energy and fluidity of a splash page.
But too often, the film’s fight sequences are a big jumble, edited to bits and nigh-impossible to follow from one blow to the next. Worse yet, the CGI is especially conspicuous in these sequences. Digital characters move without weight; animated creatures and vehicles disrupt the immersion of a scene, and climactic fights between fully computer-generated figures in a computer-generated world feel like gameplay clips pulled from Mortal Kombat.
Similarly, the caped avenger aspects of the film’s narrative break little new ground. Notably, Marvel’s own Thor trilogy covers much of the same territory, from the prince questioning his place as king, to debates over the appropriate level of engagement with the outside world and the legacy of colonialism, to unruly yet sympathetic relatives (with an appetite for conquering) angling for the throne.
And with thrones this cool, who wouldn't?
But what makes Black Panther so refreshing is the perspective from which it approaches this material. There is a richness to the cultural wellspring that Coogler and his team draw from, one underutilized in big budget filmmaking. The film is rife with distinct hues, specific cultural signifiers, and unique and personal delights and sore sports, that inform the movie’s sensibilities even as it applies them to the usual smash-and-then-find-yourself routine that the Marvel origin movies have nigh-perfected at this point.
It’s the critic’s crutch to see a film’s story as a metaphor for the film itself. And yet it’s hard not to see parallels between the story of T’Challa deciding whether to bring Wakanda into the rest of the world, and the story of Ryan Coogler deciding whether to bring his Black Panther into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the wonderful things about the MCU is the way that it can create a cohesive sense of place among different films, and foster the sense — through scattered easter eggs and the occasional team-up — that all of these events are taking place in the same world.
But despite having a few of those continuity nods and connections, Black Panther feels like it occupies a world all its own, one full of its own color, character, and vibrancy. At the end of the movie, T’Challa opts for outreach. He decides to open Wakanda’s borders, and share his nation’s knowledge and culture with the world. With this film, Ryan Coogler & Co. do the same for Marvel, telling their own story in their own way, while bringing such a distinctiveness and a specificity to it that makes the world of these films a deeper, richer, better place, for Black Panther’s presence within it.
