Review of Black Panther (2018) by David P — 28 Feb 2018

You can say what you will of the several decades long Marvel cinematic franchise, but one thing you can't say it is not is "average". Marvel and subsequent owners Disney have constructed a Michelin 3-star bivouac of action movie tent poles in which to house the American collective unconscious. These are movies that are guaranteed to give you a chuckle, a thrill, maybe a chill, but you certainly won't be leaving the theater any more or less enlightened than when you walked in. This makes the franchise the pinnacle of what "esteemed" American director Paul S. W. Anderson calls "populist film making". In that aspect, Black Panther undoubtedly joins the ranks of the franchise's finest, like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Howard the Duck.

"It's popular ergo it's good" is a statement one would attribute to flawed logic. Just look at the Fast and Furious, Resident Evil, and Transformers franchises. Please don't misunderstand me here; this movie doesn't even come close to stooping to that level of crapola mediocrity. It is killing at the box office not only because it hardly has anything to compete with, but, on a technical level, it checks all of the boxes. Lucky for Marvel Disney there is a justifiable reason for all of the hype and accolades, but as I hope to make a bit clearer, there is something very tainted surrounding Black Panther, a conflict lying hidden within the deeper layers of the film. You could see it as a profound commentary on American society, an ingenious marketing ploy, or something antithetical to the filmmakers' philosophical aspirations.

In the most indefatigable subtext, Black Panther is a story of the Black people working against their oppressors, within and outside - told by Ryan Coogler, an African American, a Black man, a Black director working in a very white Hollywood, within a literary world crafted by and serving a primarily white audience. As the box office numbers will attest, this is an intellectual (and, more importantly for white people, financial) coup for every facet of mainstream movie making. This is the mold-breaker of tokenism. Not only does it fulfill all vicarious expectations that would be required of white action, adventure, and fantasy tropes for a Black audience, but it makes those same tropes accessible, adoptable, and funky fresh for white audiences. You think the main villain is Andy Serkis? Bam! He's a Macguffin villain. You think Martin Freeman is a necessary character with agency? Bam! He's a Macguffin white savior of absolutely no consequence except to be window dressing for the Black power utopia.

On the other side of the political aisle, Black Panther gives white nationalists all the vitriolic virtue signaling that they detest Hollywood for in the first place. The soundtrack is primarily African rhythms and hip-hop, and every major character is Black and indestructible. The major nationalistic debate of the fictional nation Wakanda is isolationism versus jingoistic, world-policing presumptions and condescension (that could in some perplexing esoteric context be mistaken for a parallel to American military interventionism). The final conflict ultimately comes down to Black on Black violence only reinforcing the presupposition that, absent the white man, none can bring a better homeostasis to our global economy, especially when a Utopian Black society is reduced to hand to hand combat via electromagnetic, neon nano-tech versus alloy-armored GMO rhinoceroses.

Like so many movies, it all comes down to what you brought in with you to cinema. Are you ready to fight the man, or do you just want to shut your brain off? Or do you want to feel emboldened by the fact that the mainstream media is a farce, dictating to the world what the powers that be think you need to think, yet never back up in any sort of sociopolitical policy outside of the cinema? Black Panther has it all folks. It's everything you want and not. It's so average that it transcends the amalgamation of all genres it inhabits. Truth be told, I yawned a lot, but it's good food for thought...and Hollywood inches ever closer to a satisfactory "intersectional, progressive values" to profit ratio.