Hello!
This is the first post since the blog moved from Hatena over to WordPress!
Saw it on opening day~~
So, same as always, here we go!
*A warning:
There is analysis and speculation ahead. And spoilers for everything in the MCU up to now.
The speculation post is here.
Trailers are here.
Almost the entire cast here is Black. And it’s true that most Black-led films are heavily social — discrimination, violence, that kind of subject.
Killmonger’s motive is social too: freeing his oppressed people by force. But this is still an enormously entertaining, enormously fun film, exactly like every other MCU entry.
The film puts the spotlight on Africa, a place cinema hardly ever goes. Wakanda is overflowing with new things, sci-fi things — and at the same time it has old things, traditional dress and a monarchy. And the two coexist beautifully. The city is drenched in bright paint, the costumes are visually fresh, and not one frame of it feels manufactured. On top of that, the music is the best. Drums fused with something you’d hear in a club — wonderful. A film you can ride from the first frame to the last!
It takes Africa as its spine, fuses all sorts of things onto it, and opens up a whole new possibility for cinema: sci-fi Africa. And you can see in the programme that all of it comes out of exhaustive research the crew did into the continent.
And the African accents from the cast were superb. The other language you hear now and then in the film is Xhosa, one of South Africa’s official languages. They apparently coached the cast off the back of it, with a heavy h sound.
You can also read it as a spy film in the 007 mould. The casino sequence, precisely that. I’d love to see a sequel with T’Challa operating abroad.
So much care went into it. The most purely fun film in the whole MCU.
First appearance since Civil War.
Watching it back now, the T’Challa of that film really is a kid lol
He loses it over his father being killed, throws on the Black Panther suit without a second thought, and gets his identity made by government people.
Though it seems Ross kept the lid on T’Challa being Black Panther.
The secret of Black Panther’s strength turns out to be the power you get from eating the heart-shaped herb.
The ritual for taking the herb lets you speak with your ancestors, your father first among them.
And those conversations aren’t images built out of your own memory — you really are talking to the dead.
That whole sequence is The Lion King, isn’t it lol
T’Challa beats M’Baku and shows you the king in him, and then turns around and pines over his ex, which is very human of him.
And unlike Captain America: Civil War, when he comes back for the throne after Killmonger has beaten him half to death, he is remarkably calm about it.
The strength of the MCU is characters who grow across a lot of films. T’Challa grew into a man in Civil War by forgiving his father’s killer — and here he’s wrestling with the thing that blocks him on the way to the throne: “what is a king, and what can a king actually do?”
The fights with Killmonger and company looked great! Black Panther is a pure physical fighter, and adding the shockwave really widens what he can do in a fight! Slightly Batman about it! lol If they made a game of it I reckon it’d come out like Arkham Knight!
Played by Michael B. Jordan.
He led Creed, the continuation of the Rocky series.
Creed and Black Panther also share a director, and this is apparently the third time Jordan and he have teamed up.
http://stat.ameba.jp/user_images/20130509/22/tommysansan/0c/ef/j/o0272023212532727965.jpg?caw=800
That’s roughly how he looks in the comics.
His real name is N’Jadaka.
https://theriver.jp/bp-erik-killmonger/
The article above is where this comes from.
Turns out he built the role by looking at the Joker from The Dark Knight.
And in the end he apparently never felt he’d fully brought Killmonger inside himself. He has already played seriously compelling characters in the MCU and elsewhere, and he’s still not satisfied — Jordan is something else. I also rather love his idea of the craft: “the best villains get their own way of thinking across to the audience too.”
The patience to wait years for the moment Wakanda goes unstable. The will to learn tactics across one battlefield after another and keep sharpening himself. Very cool. A character who never wavers, whose actions all line up, is enormously attractive. Take the moment Killmonger kills Klaue and his crew — for a second you think, mate, what are you doing? And then it lands: teaming up with Klaue, stealing the vibranium weapon, every single thing he has done was for the throne of Wakanda. And just like that he had me.
Burning the herb garden, and the logic of “if they oppress you with force, oppress them back with more force” — that bit of crazy is maybe a little Joker? lol
Putting him in the flashy suit T’Challa turned down is a lovely piece of framing: it stands for the method T’Challa turned down, which is force. And it’s just as interesting that Killmonger’s wish to do something for the powerless exists inside T’Challa too. The effects during their fight are a bit Naruto vs Sasuke, and I don’t think a hero and a villain have ever been set against each other this well.
https://www.inverse.com/article/26003-marvel-black-panther-st
Played by Sterling K. Brown.
An extraordinary man — for the recent series This Is Us he became the first Black actor to win the Golden Globe for Best Actor.
Personally he’s most familiar as Gordon Walker, the vampire hunter from Supernatural.
In the conversation with his grown son he talks about what he regrets. Nice that his thinking has something in common with T’Challa’s.
Below is the comics version.
https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/1/10/Ulysses_Klaw_%28Earth-616%29_from_Superior_Carnage_Vol_1_1_001.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/650?cb=20130718233151
http://media.comicbook.com/uploads1/2015/01/serkis-klaw-119110.jpg
He’s missing an arm in the comics as well.
Played by Andy Serkis. The leading figure in motion capture, no less — the man who played Snoke, Caesar and Gollum!!!
It was in the programme: he was brought in to coach Mark Ruffalo on playing the Hulk, and that’s when they put an MCU role to him.
Cannot believe they killed Klaue off…
What a shame, he was a gloriously unhinged villain. And I loved things like the scene where he scatters the crime scene about to make it look like amateurs…
I’d assumed the sonic cannon on his arm was some flavour of alien tech, and it turned out to be Wakandan lol
He’s a character who is laughing and messing about at all times, and yet the actor keeps this permanent sense that he is furious about something. Hats off.
Played by the famous Martin Freeman!!!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Martin_Freeman_during_filming_of_Sherlock_cropped.jpg
A very well-known actor — the series Sherlock, the film Hot Fuzz, and plenty more.
And he and Cumberbatch, of Doctor Strange, are a famous double act.
Both of them are in the MCU now, so let’s have those two on screen together soon.
In the comics he looks like this.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/Everett_K_Ross_BP_6.png
Apparently he’s a famous supporting player in BLACK PANTHER.
He throws himself in front of Nakia on instinct and wrecks his spine lol
Wakandan medicine healing him completely has a strong chance of connecting to War Machine walking again, the way he does in the Infinity War trailer!
In the programme Martin Freeman says Ross is technically a villain… hmm, not quite sure what he means by that… either it’s a misprint or I’m just not seeing it…
He gets called an American several times, but once you know his other work he is unmistakably a bumbling Englishman lol
Coming out of the film, Ross feels very much like the post-Phil-Coulson Phil Coulson.
Just an ordinary man among heroes. Here’s hoping he becomes a character the heroes are genuinely fond of.
Shuri, smarter than Tony Stark.
She’s confirmed for Infinity War, and she’ll almost certainly be in Avengers 4 as well.
Looks like she’ll take the inventor slot once Tony Stark is gone.
From that video it looks like she becomes Black Panther at one point, and also dies and comes back.
And the death came in a fight with Proxima Midnight. Proxima looks like this.
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Proxima_Midnight
She’s a villain who turns up in Infinity War too — so maybe Shuri dies once in Infinity War?
The little EMP bombs and the shockwave suit had me buzzing!
In the trailer Tony’s suit has become the skin-tight sort, like Black Panther’s, so you can already sense he’s been talking to Shuri.
And the self-lacing shoes are absolutely Back to the Future!!
Our heroine, a spy, and a spy is exactly why she and T’Challa broke up.
She fights well and she’s strong, but she didn’t leave much of an impression… did she? lol
In the comics T’Challa is married to Storm of the X-Men.
News
Disney acquires 20th Century Fox, raising the possibility of the X-Men and the Avengers sharing the screen
— Natalie
Now Disney has bought Fox the X-Men look set to join the MCU, so maybe it won’t be Nakia but Storm… who knows.
Okoye, captain of the king’s guard.
The action with that extending vibranium spear was great. Her vow is to serve the king and nothing else, so she goes along with Killmonger for a while — and then raises the flag against him once it’s clear he has no respect for tradition or discipline.
She turns up in Infinity War as well.
The elder who advises the king and runs the rituals. Long ago he did spy work on T’Chaka’s orders.
The actor was in Rogue One too.
In the comics he apparently got his superhuman strength by eating the flesh of a white gorilla.
I knew going in that he was coming, and since he’s a villain in the comics I had him down as one of the enemies — and then he turns out to be that decent…
The setup is that the gorilla faith is dangerous, so the believers have been pushed off into the snowy mountains. But by the end he’s standing with the other tribal leaders, so I suppose that’s sorted.
He plays it dead straight and it makes you laugh anyway — a genuinely funny character. And then he saves T’Challa and sends reinforcements! Far too good a guy…
Wakanda has about three defining traits, I’d say.
2, 3 and 4 sit together fine. Well, 4 doesn’t always lol
1 is the hard one — it’s very difficult to hold alongside the rest. And yet Wakanda has the whole set. The filmmakers said it themselves: Wakanda is unmistakably a utopia where the old and the new live side by side. That coexistence was a favourite of Jack Kirby, one of the character’s creators, and you could feel the same air in Thor: Ragnarok.
At the end T’Challa gives up Wakanda’s secret at the UN. Telling other countries about the technology, about how remarkable Wakanda is and about its charitable work has to do a lot of good — but the resentment over hiding all of it for so long, and over sitting on a monopoly of vibranium, is a frightening prospect…
The score takes a distinctly African sound and arranges it into something contemporary, and it lands.
https://theriver.jp/bp-score/
The drum rhythm spells out the pronunciation of T’Challa’s name. That floored me.
Two albums are out at the moment.
This one is the score proper, full of drums and other very cool things. I’m fairly sure one of the tracks works a phrase from the Avengers theme in there too.
This album is a load of artists writing original songs for Black Panther.
A first for Marvel. And some seriously famous names on it.
This is the one from the trailer. Not a trace of the African sound in it, but very cool music.
https://theriver.jp/bp-postcredit/
Bucky turned up at the end!!
They called him White Wolf lol White Wolf seems to be a character from the comics, so what it means going forward is worth watching.
Shuri also seems to have solved the brainwashing. Does that mean he graduates out of the MCU along with Captain America… Would be nice if something quietly developed between him and Shuri~
http://d-kamiichi.com/archives/18013
The Infinity Stones are enormously important objects in the MCU. There are six, and five of them have shown up in other films.
https://theriver.jp/find-infinity-stone/
That site has it all in one place.
I had this one pegged as the film where the last stone, the Soul Stone, finally appeared. Surely it’s the heart-shaped herb, I thought lol
But! It didn’t appear at all.
The next film is Infinity War, so this time it’ll definitely be there!
Turns out vibranium only comes out of meteorites. Ordinary ore can be mined in at least a few different places. I’d always wondered why vibranium seemed to exist only in Wakanda, and now we know why.
They say they’ve only scraped the surface of the meteorite so far — so just how big is the thing? lol
In the Infinity War trailer, Thanos’ army is near enough certain to attack Wakanda. You could read that as the Time Stone and the other stones being gathered in Wakanda with the heroes defending them — but I think the Soul Stone is at the centre of the meteorite. Which would explain why things that shouldn’t be possible keep happening in Wakanda: talking to the dead, a herb that grows there and hands out superhuman power.
He apparently isn’t in Infinity War, so there’s not much to hope for here…
Still, I half wonder whether the thing glowing orange inside that pod at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the Soul Stone lol
On July 24, 202…
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