Directed by:
Ryan CooglerCinematography:
Rachel MorrisonComposer:
Ludwig GöranssonCast:
Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Sterling K. Brown (more)VOD (3)
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Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther” follows T’Challa who, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king. But when a powerful old enemy reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king—and Black Panther—is tested when he is drawn into a formidable conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people and their way of life. (Walt Disney US)
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Black hasn't been this cool in a long time. The boys and girls at Marvel seem to have understood that a watered-down save-the-world story with a ton of visual effects best applied to the destruction of a major American city wouldn’t hold up again, or at least not until the next Avengers (who imho pull a slightly different strand of entertainment). So they decided to be smart about it and use the current geopolitical issue of refugees to their advantage, and crammed national and racial disparities into a cool heroic story full of moral values and fine ideas, spiced it up with a healthily ambitious plot. It might not be the best Marvel flick, because Avengers, with Captain America will pummel it with all those cool dudes and a plethora of TOP figures on one set, but it is certainly one of the smartest comic book movies. Plus, with heroes who, strangely enough, don't want to destroy the world, but to liberate it.
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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.
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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.
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Six visits to the cinema and the first full score. I may be going against the tide, but for me, Black Panther is the most interesting and best Marvel movie since Winter Soldier. I haven't been a fan of Marvel movies much lately (Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy or the new childish Thor, which I downright suffered through), but Black Panther set my favorite serious, dark thriller tone and took away more or less everything that bothered me so far. There's no CGI Mess, just the gorgeous and impressive Wakanda, the villain is not an alien or mutant but a human, and right off the bat we have the best villain in the entire Marvel Universe, who also has a different plan than everyone else so far (Michael B. Jordan was incredible), and I can actually praise Andy Serkis, who was reminiscent of the Joker in his awesomeness. It's not fought in space or on an alien planet or dimension, but in Korea or Africa and it immediately feels not only more real, but more intense. The R&B and Hip Hop soundtrack is a big plus and the new track by The Weeknd, which was played in a local bar, was a real treat. I have only minor reservations about the action, and that's the faster editing, but it's intense and effective enough that I was able to enjoy it to the fullest. The finale is decently epic and tense, the characters are all great, the female cast also excels, the Rihanna-lookalike sister of the Panther was very funny, cute and technologically gifted, M'Baku provided funny interludes that were totally apt and appropriate and I really liked the African rituals, costumes and traditions. After a second viewing, the enthusiasm has waned.
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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.
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