#wakandaforever

[glass_icarus]

Watched Black Panther last night at laaaaaaast, and with great company! At least, it feels that way; it was only released here about a week ago but even that was pushing my limit re: spoiler avoidance. The worldbuilding and the design aesthetic just blew me away, and I could easily have watched another 3 hours/movies of actual storyline unfolding. Things I loved, more and less specific:

- T'Challa the sensitive, empathetic, compassionate hero with an incredible sense of responsibility/loyalty/ethics FTW! His story is such a refreshing, palate-cleansing change from the whitebread superhero narratives of individualistic self-absorbed manpain and angsting on rooftops/etc.
- ALL THE FAMILY LOVE! I include the friend/kin/tribe relationships as an extension of this. No one is an island, and basically everything about the movie does an excellent job of showing that. T'Challa and Shuri are the MOST ADORABLE sibs omg, and the "hi, Auntie" line! asd;lfkajs;
- On a related note, how amazing is it that the conflicts between T'Chaka and his brother, and T'Challa and Killmonger, aren't based on clashing views of people as human beings, but on whose people should be considered "theirs"? The transnational/diasporic solidarity issue makes me flail SO HARD, you guys.
- ALSO. KILLMONGER. SUCH WOW, AMAZING LINES, probably the best complex human villain I've seen in Hollywood films to date? I love that his reasons aren't fundamentally wrong and irrational or based in selfishness, but that his fuck-the-consequences, justice = vengeance approach are what actually make him the antagonist.
- ALL THE BOSS LADIES. I could watch a trilogy about the Dora Milaje, but also about Nakia and Shuri and the Queen Mother being their entirely different HBIC selves, with their various and complementary priorities.
- Selected favorite ladies' scenes: ALL OF SOUTH KOREA but especially the club fight with Okoye whipping her straight hairpiece off at someone like she's discarding trash, and later skidding down the road on the roof while Nakia rolls up in her magically-intact ejected-looking car seat; Shuri's wisecracking sib suit shenanigans in her lab; Okoye jumping in front of the rampaging war-rhino which halts just to lick her on the face asd;lkajsd can you get more boss than that??
- Other themes of win: the thorny ethical questions of intervention and protectionism for never-colonized, developed Wakanda when its neighbors/fellows are post-colonial; the different levels of personal, familial, national, transnational loyalties and how to prioritize them; tradition vs. modernity... I love that the movie managed to tackle them all!
- On leaving the theater, a friend made a crack about the two Tolkien white dudes, lol. I can handwave Klaw as comic relief/plot point, but I'm unconvinced that Martin Freeman was at all necessary, tbh. There's no reason that a CIA operative needs to be a white man, right? :P
- I simultaneously feel that the character development for most people in this movie was both great and insufficient. Killmonger's arc was pretty complete and satisfying, but T'Challa's felt a bit... shortchanged? I'm not sure if it's a pacing thing or something else; I'll probably need a rewatch or two to figure out what my quibbles are.

Comments

[inkstone]

BUT WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT M'BAKU?

[glass_icarus]

M'Baku!!!! Ahahaha, the shut-up-Ross scene was the best. ♥

[gramarye1971]

There's no reason that a CIA operative needs to be a white man, right? :P

I was going back and forth on this as well! I mean, it was worth it for the scene where the white man gets told to sit down and shut up because the grown-ups are talking and no one wants to hear his ill-informed colonizer opinion...but at the same time, I feel like Martin Freeman wasn't the best casting choice? I could buy him if he'd been an MI6 operative, but not as Air Force-turned-CIA. So yeah, I would have recast him with someone else.

[glass_icarus]

Hee! That scene was great, yes. I don't know if I'd have appreciated a differently-casted white dude more, but Martin Freeman seemed sort of a random draw.

[lovepeaceohana]

Uuuuuuuuuuugh I wanna see this so bad!! I'm so glad to see that it's actually filled with things I like, plot-and-characterwise, although frankly I'd have gone to see it purely for the aesthetic.

[glass_icarus]

I hope you get to see it soon!

[sheafrotherdon]

I loved this movie, and I love all the things you loved!

I thought that having a white dude be the CIA guy was actually an insistence that white people own their shit. He explicitly says that Erik is "one of ours" - that the things he did were because of people like Ross and his ilk. I thought it actually worked that it was a white guy who delivered those lines. Had it been someone other than a white guy, I would have felt really uncomfortable. (I would cheerfully have enjoyed Ross dying, mind you. :D)

[glass_icarus]

Hm, that's possible! The colonizer/sit down and shut up bits seemed to be constructed with that intention in mind; I found the one of ours comment a bit ambiguous, though.

[inkstone]

Oh, the "one of ours" comment is definitely a US/colonizer reference. The whole thing about Killmonger is that while he has a point, he is not right. His methods are colonizer's methods: sexism, misogyny, divide and conquer, destabilize, the murder of women and children, a complete & utter inability to look toward the future (WTAF, you're king and you burn the garden that's supposed to give powers to your heirs, thereby securing your dynasty???). Look at what happens when he sits on the throne? Five minutes later, there's a mini-civil war.

[glass_icarus]

For sure, Killmonger's methods are a result of his inability to see an end to vengeance. He doesn't bother to think about what happens after the world's done burning because he's never going to be done with the burning phase. When Ross said "ours" I wasn't sure if he was being CIA-specific.

[indelicateink]

Wasn't it great??

I thought it was hilarious and DELICIOUS that there were only two white second-tier actors in the whole thing. And one of them (spoiler alert) gets popped off halfway through. I didn't mind Freeman being cast in this role (having carried it over from Civil War, where he seemed so much bitchier?); for me, I felt for this movie to have a white guy be present, be characterized as competent and respectful, yet be almost totally in the background, was an intriguing choice. It is just the exact role so many black actors have had to play since forever. For me the choice felt pointed, necessary. (Sure, he could've been edited out, I agree. But he helps tie them further to the rest of the movieverse. And I just loved the shade of having the white man blatantly play the role usually reserved for a person of color, to drive it home for people who Just Don't Get what that feels like.)

(And, well. It's Martin Freeman--I find he's always fun to watch.)

("Tolkien white dudes"/"token white dudes" is such a fabulous pun, I bow down.)

This movie was so awesome. Teared up several times just from the AWESOME (seeing Wakanda for the first time!), and then again for the poignant and heartbreaking moments. (And ho wow, Killmonger's last lines. I'm amazed Disney didn't fuck up the director's vision of the film of course, but beyond that, for them to let those lines stand was IMPRESSIVE. Didn't know Disney had it in them.)

The women in this, THE WOMEN. And yeah: need to watch a whole miniseries on the Dora Milaje.

All of it, all of it was so satisfying!!

[glass_icarus]

Haha, the casting is a statement of its own, this is true! :D

I didn't realize Freeman's character was a carryover, so I didn't enjoy the bitching that much. In the context of this movie I think more of it would have smacked too much of smug superiority and the kind of toxic masculinity/racism the writer seems to have made it a point to avoid/write antidotes to.

SO MUCH satisfaction, and the kind that can only generate more!