Black Panther

CAST: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira

DIRECTION: Ryan Coogler

 

 In the months leading up to its release, ‘Black Panther’ had been hyped as a turning point in the superhero genre of movies. The superhero film production giant Marvel Studios for the first time fea­tures a black superhero. Introduced by Marvel comics in the 1960s, Black Panther had to wait 50 years for its long-awaited screen debut in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. If Civil War was a perfect launch pad for the character, director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther does some­thing greater. Not only is it a techni­cal marvel, it gives us a superhero who appears every bit human, filled with emotional complexities and vulnerabilities. After the death of the reigning king, his son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, is crowned the new king of the fiction­al African country named Wakanda. To others, Wakanda is a poverty- stricken Third World country that declines foreign aid and makes no attempts to involve itself in interna­tional trade. But behind this façade, Wakanda is actually a golden, tech­nologically-advanced city.

This reality is concealed from the rest of the world for the fear that outsiders may discover the real rea­son behind Wakanda’s prosperity—the metal Vibranium. This metal is found only in Wakanda. The natives have been using it to come up with cutting-edge technology and devices that would take the outside world thousands of years to develop.

As T’Challa ascends the king’s throne, he is skeptical about his ability to fill the shoes of his father and protect Wakanda and its secrets. As the story unfolds, he’s made to fight off terrorists who are bent on stealing Vibranium. At the same time, he encounters a surprise vil­lain who might pose a major threat to T’Challa’s throne.

Apart from Boseman as T’Challa, the film has a terrific supporting cast with the likes of Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Danai Gurira, Andy Serkis, Martin Freeman and Sterling K Brown. But the ones that truly stand apart are Michael B Jordan playing the villain Killmonger and Letitia Wright playing T’Challa’s sister Shuri. Killmonger feels fully realized. He isn’t your cardboard cut-out villain, hungry for world domination. There’s tremendous effort in the screenplay to human­ize the villain, and it works. Like­wise, technology expert Shuri is a wisecracking sidekick to T’Challa who provides some really funny moments.

Director Ryan Coogler’s oeuvre includes 2013’s ‘Fruitvale Station’ (which chronicles the final hours of a young African American man before he was unjustly shot dead by a white cop) and 2015’s ‘Creed’ (a spin-off boxing movie to the Rocky series). In all his films, protagonists have been African-American char­acters tackling themes like racial prejudice and stereotypical image of African-Americans. Black Pan­ther gives Coogler a bigger playing field. It may look like a formulaic Marvel superhero movie peppered with exotic African symbolism but Coogler’s storytelling isn’t slave to the established Marvel aesthet­ics. He delivers an entertainer that expertly portrays, on one hand, the rich African anthropological legacy and, on the other, the African-Amer­ican ghetto life.

Black Panther lives up to its expec­tation. It is a game-changer and will pave the way for bolder stories and voices that have heretofore not found proper place in mainstream Hollywood cinema .