Black Panther

All the blackness aside, it's actually a pretty typical Marvel creation with all the slow waxing of boredom and laziness over generic visuals and impassioned speeches. I guess it's understandable, since young black folks would also like to have a hero they can identify with in the Marvel universe, so they really only had to do the same thing they did before, except in inverted colors. Fine, but it's still a chore and I can't stop marveling at how little it takes to satisfy people. Namely, the protagonist has no character, he functions like a hero in FPS video games so that as many people as possible can project themselves into him. It pretends to be a humanistic story, but the whole thing is an elitist quest where members of the nobility solve their problems somewhere in a country we know nothing about because the film has no interest in telling us about it. This detachment from reality is probably already just a projection of the real detachment of the filmmakers, who only know the outside world from Facebook, so we can at least entertain the fact that whenever the camera decides to go somewhere down among the working people, there are always farmers' markets on that street, whether we're in the US, South Korea, or Wakanda. It's great how this builds up the illusion after the fact that while the main characters, who never eat and always look worried, have to worry about the big problems for all of us, while the everyday people down below are actually doing nothing but shopping and idling. And these are things that I might not have needed to think about if, at least in my eyes, the expectations of a comic book blockbuster had been met and there hadn't been only two and a half action scenes (of which only one is actually any fun anyway) for 134 minutes of running time. But the five white swans always fly reliably between the buildings in the panoramic scenes. So my advice: watch the first two installments of Blade and instead of the third, which sucks, watch Django Unchained, and then you'll understand what a properly fearless African-American should look like. And I'm advising you from the proven position of a European white guy with mixed Jewish blood and a not-so-bad salary, so you can't go wrong. If you have a problem with that, I can hire a black man to say it for me. Nudge nudge wink wink wink. (05/17/2018)

Once again, a very fresh comic spectacle. Almost all of it takes place in Africa, so the design is, as expected, wonderful and the viewer gets to see a lot of great ideas on how to combine folklore with science fiction. Moreover, everything is helped by Ludwig Göransson's perfect music - quite possibly the most imaginative soundtrack of all the Marvel films. T'Challa was sufficiently presented to us in Civil War, so the story can follow that film smoothly, and although it actually tells the story of the origin of another superhero, it does it at least fairly uniquely, it’s own way and with great actors. (02/16/2018)

You know the rhetoric. A Marvel fanboy yells at a DC fanboy for his heroes being anchored in reality. It is impossible to root for someone who is as rich as Bruce Wayne or as divine as Diana of Themyscira. Then, all of a sudden, the Marvel fanboy now has an African Atlantis starring the royal prince. Hmm. (12/29/2018)

Direction-wise a solidly crafted Marvel movie with literally amazing action scenes, but with an average main character. The existence of the comic book character doesn’t help him and neither does the fact that Marvel is attempting to balance the representation of genders of the human race. Maybe it wasn’t intended in that way, but it definitely looks like it; Wakanda is so boring and unfunny that it’s hard to find anything positive about it. But yeah, I realize that Black Panther has a place in the universe. He for sure won’t be my favorite hero, though. (10/19/2018)

It's definitely not the best Marvel film, and a big role in the hype is played by the political level which, btw, sounds perfectly fine to me, like when a black boy from the Ghetto tells you a fairy tale that he has been hearing since childhood. T'Challa is a remarkably humble figure by MCU standards - Tony Stark stripped of vice and infected with a mixture of Shakespeare and the Lion King. It's magically naive and refreshing, because unlike other Marvel films, Black Panther is really devoted to its characters and, for example, the villain played by the charismatic Jordan is better depicted here than most of his competitors. Black Panther in turn shrinks the MCU world and curtails it by a cosmic dimension. In fact, it only deals with very familiar and current problems, and as a result, it feels like an even bigger fairy tale and escapism. In a way, Coogler concluded his black trilogy, which creates the figures of black saints. In Fruitvale, his efforts were undermined by social realism and in Creed by a lot of clichés, whereas Black Panther feels like his most convincing film, despite all of its problems with tempo and tricks. It's a pity he doesn't have a slightly sharper edit and a greater use of the hip hop soundtrack. Otherwise, this textbook Afrofuturism is really a very pleasant companion. A film that believes in a better world and that the super-protagonist is sometimes the one who just does something selflessly for the community. Political correctness? I say common sense. (02/13/2018)