Review of Black Panther (2018) by Sam O — 28 Feb 2018

A really great movie! Lots of fun watching it! This isn't your typical superhero movie, in fact I would hesitate to even call it a superhero movie since it mostly centers around a conflict confined to one country. The action scenes are really cool and all of the characters and villains are really interesting. They also did a great job with all stunning and beautiful settings. This movie is very colorful and uses many diverse styles of architecture that really draw you into the movie. If there was anything I didn't like about the movie it was that it moved a little to fast in the beginning for my tastes and some of the typical disney/marvel brand humor moderately disrupted the flow at times.

Now of course a movie like this is going to have some political themes as well (I mean it's BLACK PANTHER for God's sake) which speaking as someone who's moderately conservative and voted for Trump, I think they couldn't have done a better job! The movie actually started off surprisingly pro right-wing, emphasizing the importance of isolationism and displaying very socially conservative/traditionalist themes. Of course the movie's politics slowly shift more towards black power, which was satisfyingly not like the typical left-wing, victimhood, virtue-signaling that most overly progressive movies display today. Movies that do progressive politics wrong (i.e. star wars 8) could really learn a thing or two from this. It was really cool and even put a heavy emphasis on female empowerment through the heavily female body guards which were super cool to watch in the action scenes!

It works so well because you don't feel like you're forcefed some overly diverse/female cast. You just legitimately like the characters and they work great together, which is pretty much the most you could ask for.