f13.net

Thoughts?

I'm surprised we had no thread on it commenting on the Fake Rotten Tomatoes reviews, etc...

I'm hyped for this. He's probably my second fave character behind Captain America.

It sounds like it's a really good movie. There are a lot of good actors and good director behind this so I will be very disappointed if it's not at least good.

I'd like to take this opportunity to pimp Christopher Priest's run on BP. It's really great, as long as you don't have a problem with his story structure (Priest tells stories out of chronological order).

Watching tonight, excited.

I would be fine with seeing this as soon as possible, but we will likely wait until Monday.  Or maybe earlier.

The movie looks good.

I am not terribly interested in the whole DCEU thing though.  They can try to drag down Marvel the only way they can!  Have fun with it, I guess.

This was good, not mind blowing but good.

Apparently this was packed, on an English showing no less, last night here in Laos.  I've never been to any movie here that had more than 1/5th of the theater filled.  Which is really weird given the movie and location, frankly.....

It's getting really good critic reviews but it's also getting trolled with user reviews.  I wonder why. :oh_i_see: :facepalm:

Fucking white people.

The cast is fantastic and a lot of them get to play really great characters. For the most part the plot is pretty good as well but I have no idea what Killmonger's plot through the first half of the movie is. Once he gets to Wakanda, that stuff is all clear but prior to that the sequence of events doesn't end up adding up to anything.


I had a lot of fun with this though and Shuri (Letitia Wright) would be an excellent replacement for Iron Man in a post-RDJ MCU. She's absolutely the highlight of the movie.

Velorath's plot issues aside,  it was really good. I dismiss that plot issue a bit by thinking KM was just waiting for the best opportunity, missed his window and had to take drastic measures to get what he wanted.  I think KM was one of the most interesting and impactful baddies in the MCU, though.

Minor quibble... Wakanda felt very small to me. I feel like it should have been bigger. I'd like to have seen more of it, even if just in a few momentary flashes.

Regardless, when the weakest performances were from Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker, you had a damn good cast. They were not bad... just a bit flat compared to other cast members.

Extremely good movie. The story was very well crafted, and the characters were extremely well done, with a lot more depth of character than is typical of a superhero movie,  but I get the feeling that it is going to push the wrong buttons for a certain demographic.  It touches on quite a number of social and racial issues that some people are not going to want dragged out into the spotlight in the way that a blockbuster motion picture can do.

I especially can't wait to see if we get any kind of response from the Trump camp and the MAGA morons, as the message the movie sends (especially the UN Speech in the mid credits scene) is literally like someone throwing a gauntlet in their faces.

Fuck Them.

Outside of Michael Jordan's character this was fairly standard Marvel stuff.  Good not great.

This was the movie the first Thor should have been.

I really enjoyed the movie. Killmonger is my fave BP villain and I think they did him justice.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWMPcQFVAAAzN_a?format=jpg)

No comment

Metacritic 88 (http://www.metacritic.com/movie/black-panther?ref=hp)
Rotten Tomatoes 97% Fresh (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/black_panther_2018/)

Looking forward to it.

This was fucking great.

Yes, still the standard Marvel plot in some ways, but the best possible version of it.

I agree Kilmonger came in a little late and it made the back half confrontation seem a bit rushed.

I find this funny. Because this movie is a 7/5 and I can't say whether its the hype talking or that I "get" most of the small moments (beyond the politics) where someone did some research on African culture (my mom being Cameroonian). This is a typical marvel movie, hero does hero shit, hero meets bad guy who is them +1, hero kisses the girl as their future seems bright and clear. Its the meat in between that gives this formula the extra humph it needs.

Oh and killmonger is hilarious. Because he is a "The Wire" of marvel villains. His narrative is literal red meat to black audiences who will see one thing and white audiences who will see an entirely different thing. It's a confirmation bias that i have to assume was unintentional he manages to please all movie goers.

You're just saying that because he is Wallace.   :awesome_for_real: 

Where's Killmonger, String? Where's Killlmonger?

So, um, I watched this movie.

I was bored.

It was not for me. 

I'm ok with this.

(It was basically Black Thor.  Which, again, I'm ok with, but that's what bored me.  I can see how people would love the shit out of it, as I know people ARE loving the shit out of it.  And that's great.  But it was not for me.)

Anyway.  Onwards.

Hmm, just got back from this.  I enjoyed it, but I’m leaning a little more towards Ironwoods view on this.  Don’t think it was as tight as many here say, and didn’t really keep me as interested as most other marvel movies do.  I still enjoyed it overall, just think it was maybe a little over hyped for me.

Yeah, it was good, the Afro-Futuristic aesthetic was fresh, and I can see why people for whom "looks like us" in superhero movies has been limited to Black Heimdall feel really excited about it. But under that, it's a fairly standard MCU offering, competently executed. I enjoyed it, I will probably watch it about as often as I do the Edward Norton Hulk or original Thor, but it's not going to make my personal short list of "best comic book movies".

--Dave

I had a real issue with Wakanda though.  I wanted to know how the economy worked.  I wanted to know how everything worked. 

Instead, Magical City.  It was basically Black Asgard.  Even Jane in the Soul Forge was the same as Bilbo in the Spine Forge.


I will say the fifth tribe was fucking awesome, especially M'Baku who basically summed up MY attitude to the whole film when he interrupted the squabbling with 'Are you done, get the fuck out my house'.  Which I couldn't stop giggling about.

I get it.  I was NOT the target audience.  I'm happy for those who finally got to see the movie film they wanted and needed.  Same as Wonder Woman.

But.  I was bored.

Edited to spoil that shit since I got carried away.

I haven't seen this yet, but this is kind of how I feel about the latest series of Black Panther written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I get that it's good but I'm definitely not the target audience.

Yeah, pretty much. 

It's like when I had to read Atwood at Uni.  It wasn't for me.

I really, with hindsight, shouldn't have taken that Womens Literature semester though.

Dear God, I would PAY to have video of you in that class.  :why_so_serious:

I'm still wondering what I think of M'Baku; they used him in an interesting, albeit non-canonical way.

mild spoilers:

My only complaint about the movie


This is wasn't really that culturally significant to me. Black Panther was always a power fantasy for African Americans less so for people actually from Africa, where I'm pretty sure my people wouldn't imagine a super advance civilization where the primary weapon is chucking a spear.  That's more of a American imagination of Africa. While this wasn't any step forward for me, its also not a step backwards either. They could have phoned in a mediocre movie with some good moments (wonder woman), but instead decided to do a good movie with great moments and some not so obvious complexity that went over the heads of its target audience.

But this is basically as good as Ant-man which i enjoyed and rewatched a few times so, second marvel movie reinanssance all a fucking board. Do. Not. Fuck. Up. Captain Marvel.

There's a lot of minor hang-ups sure and overall I really liked this world they built, even if unrealistic is was interesting.  One thing however that almost ruined the movie for me was the final in-suit fight with bp and kilmonger.  That fucking cgi was spiderman3 bad.

The fight scenes were the worst part of the film.  They either needed to be cut down to half the duration or rewritten to be more character driven.  With such an entertaining cast of capable characters, the film would have been better off giving them anything else to do besides punch each other.

It's also tragically short sighted for Marvel to kill off Killmonger, a charismatic, sympathetic, competent, imposing villain who should have been the MCU's Magneto.  i'm glad the film let him say some of the things he did and express a perspective not often seen in a blockbuster.  At least the film was careful not to vilify him for his cause so much as his methods.  That made for a much stronger conflict.

Every.Single.Time. 

Marvel just does not know how to stop fucking themselves over when it comes to villains.  Hell even Serkis was knocking it out of the park in this movie and nope, can't have that!  Heroes are only ever as good as their villains and if they ever did wanna make a BP2 the chances of them topping these ones are virtually nil.

Serkis, as the minor threat villain who's just having a blast, was the perfect companion for every overly serious Marvel villain ever.  I can think of a number of films that would have been miles better by just giving him a coup,e of minutes' screen time.

I'm hesitating to post this, because it touches on serious themes and this is not the politics subforum, but I do want to share, so here goes.

Going in Sunday for a matinee showing my wife and I were surprised to find the first show sold out even thirty minutes before showtime (rarely happens here even for mega hits). Not to be daunted, we pre-purchased tickets for the next showing and went about killing a few hours before coming back in. This time we got there only ten minutes before the trailers started, but even so the theater was so packed that we had to split up and seat separately.

The audience was probably 95 percent black to 5 percent white/other. The lights were still up when we came in so I got a good look at the demographic breakdown, and we are talking entire extended families. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa -- and I'm pretty sure the adults equaled or exceeded the number of teens/kids present. Lots of folks were dressed like they just came from church.

I hope the Grandmas and Grandpas liked it. I'm pretty sure it was kinda loud and violent for many, and as it has been pointed out by some here, while enjoyable this was not the Citizen Kane of comic movies. It was pretty good, and I think Ryan Coogler and Chadwick Boseman and all the rest can be justifiably proud of what they accomplished, but it was probably the first MCU movie a lot of the crowd has ever seen. But I could hear some at least getting into it, and the audience applauded at the end. And most stayed for the stingers. Well, the first one.

I've deleted a couple of longish social analyses. I'm not that great at expressing that sort of thing. But I do think that political events over the last couple of years has scared some folks plenty, and maybe people are feeling like they need to come out and start representing again. Even if it's just to show support for a movie that *gasp* has a nearly all black cast and doesn't have (much) to do with basketball.


So back to it just being a MCU movie with comic book heroes: I liked it a lot. Strong cast, neat effects, and I have no problem with a simple story told strongly. Will watch again.

I do disagree with the common complaint here that Marvel "wastes" its villains. I'm pretty sure that's by design, and it's a good one. Repeating a bad guy weakens that bad guy, until he is just a joke. You know he's going to lose (again) and it just gets harder and harder to suspend disbelief every time you see him. Or you actually start *rooting* for the guy to finally catch a break (Loki).

MCU let's their villains burn brightly and then burn out, and I'm okay with that. Let the antagonism between the "good" guys be the friction that heats things up over the movie arc, and let the bad guys be brief.

I'd be interested in reading your social analysis.  Please post what you feel comfortable with so we can get that conversation started.

Yeah, I don't get the villain complaint.  Of course you have to kill them.  If you make a follow up to the movie, I don't want him fighting the same fucktard again.  It had better be somebody the hero hasn't fought before, so no need to keep whoever locked up.

The other issue is that the MCU isn't really designed / plotted in a way that allows for the re-use of anything other than a very small handful of villains, most of whom are either going to be "organizations" like hydra, or "Major Bads" like Thanos..  Loki is re-usable because he is as much anti-hero as he is bad-guy, and his on-the-fence chaotic nature allows him to make a great plot device.  Pretty much all of the "big" bad guys however, don't really work for repeat uses in a setting that is likely only to use them, at most, one more time.  The MCU has so many characters, each with their own movies, that you want to see new and fresh things happening in each movie, not a return to a villain we have already covered.  I mean, re-using Killmonger would be awesome the only thing that existed in the MCU was BP and you were expecting to get 4 or 5 movies out of it.  Not quite so much if you are likely to only get 2 over the next 10 to 15 years, and have 6 other major properties to fit in between.

Reusing villains works in TV shows better than movies, though I do feel superhero movies tend to kill their villains more than they should. I'm not saying villains should be reused often but at least from a plot perspective, it's nice if they don't ALWAYS have to die.

Kill monger is so human and relatable and charismatic that he pretty much is an antihero.  If his methods were less ruthless or brutal, he could be a good guy.  I didn't compare him to Magneto for no reason.

I think Killmonger had a lot more potential for re-use than just about any other MCU villain. There's enough to the character that he could work in situations other than just fighting Black Panther again. He's one of the few that would likely be willing to fight a bigger evil like Thanos, and he'd also be a good fight for Cap or Bucky. Wakandan technology being what it is though, if they really wanted to bring him back later they could explain it away pretty easily.

They are only dead, nothing stops them coming back if the writers want them instead of someone new.

Mostly I think this is because superhero movies, as opposed to the comics, are actually recognizing what happens to people who are a serious threat to the existing order of things, and a mortal threat to the heroes personally. The Joker in Dark Knight would never, ever be let out of maximum security for any reason; he likely would be executed. Nobody who has just defeated a person or force that could have destroyed the world is just going to say, "we'll be ready next time you almost destroy the world!". It's barely credible that a guy like Klaue would be able to hide, and that's just because he's ultimately only an arms merchant with a supply of vibranium. Step up the threat level and there's no way you make it past a single confrontation.

It's really one of the dumb things about comic-book storytelling--the first time the Joker kills a thousand people or comes close to it should pretty much be the last time. DC humans are radically different than people in our world in their views of crime and punishment, but DC writers never really acknowledge that.

Bringing back the same villains is lame and dumb, you end up with caricatures of the original character like Loki.

I think if you really look at the list of MCU villains we've seen thus far, there haven't been too many big losses in who they've killed off:

Stane - Dead
Abomination - In Custody
The Leader - never fully introduced
Whiplash - Dead
Loki - Alive
Laufey - Dead
Red Skull - unknown, easy to bring back
Killian - Dead
Mandarin - Fake, with a real one somewhere that we've never seen
Malekith - Dead
Pierce - Dead
Zola - Possibly Dead, easy to bring back
Crossbones - Dead
Ultron - Dead, easy to bring back
Yellowjacket - Dead
Zemo - Alive
Dormammu - Alive
Mordo - Alive
Ego - Dead, easy to bring back
Vulture - Alive
Hela - Dead, easy to bring back
Surtur - Alive

Crossbones and the deaths in Black Panther are really the only ones that seem like potential wastes. Unfortunately that's largely because villains have been one of the weak spots of the MCU. If/when they do a Fantastic Four movie, I certainly wouldn't expect them to kill Dr. Doom off.

Loki is far more interesting in Thor 3 than he ever was as a villain.

Once again, Magneto has been a villain or antihero in almost every X-Men film, and he always worked well. 

You can say "easy to bring back" for any dead character in any fiction by virtue of writers being able to come up with any excuse. That doesn't mean it's even remotely likely however.

Dude died with magic flower in him.  Coming back to life ain't shit.

Sure, but for some the explanation is baked right into the character whereas guys like Whiplash and Crossbones are humans who blew themselves up.

With Yellowjacket, Iron Monger, and Whiplash all you would  really need to bring back are the suits.

Also, I guess Batroc is still alive and kicking.

The guy who's grand betrayal plan consisted entirely of "walk in a different direction" and was outsmarted by Thor? he wasn't the most interesting, he was reduced to a goofy sidekick.

This flat out bored me in the middle. Beginning and end were solid for me, but honestly I feel like I've seen this movie enough times that if it's not slightly more interesting/funny/something in the main body, it's going to lose me. Somebody said Black Thor? Yeah. Kids and wife liked it tho, so that's good, I guess.

I also didn't like that Killmonger was the exact picture of every black punk that the right stereotypes all black guys to be, because I don't wanna wade through all the bullshit they're going to bring on that score.. Yeah, he wasn't wrong on his politics, but the look and attitude were awful. I know that's the character, but it rubbed me wrong. I would have preferred a more cerebral character, but that's me.

The reason nobody minds if most of the MCU villains die is also, yes, because they're not very interesting in and of themselves.

It's a bit odd. I think it might be because we don't have much consensus any longer about what makes somebody evil.

Super-heroes began by fighting gangsters in an era where public organized crime and corruption was a serious menace in cities and even in some rural regions. Then they moved to fighting Nazis. Then they fought Chinese and Russian agents and giant monsters. Then they fought street crime at the height of urban crime waves in the 1970s. And then in that era, their own mythology started to accumulate such weight and influence that the villains were increasingly defined by the genre's own history. When writers in the 1980s and 1990s moved to make "relevant" bad guys, they mostly failed; what worked were reinterpretations of existing bad guys that gave them more depth and personality. The problem is that most of those moves were deeply self-referential and required a knowledge of comic continuity to really appreciate. (Take for example the current writing in Black Bolt's own series--it's really good, but that's partly because it's giving the Absorbing Man a personality and backstory beyond "big bald criminal who absorbs powers and likes to beat up superheroes".)

When you sift through all of that, you only find a few villains who have complex, resonant psychological or sociopolitical reasons to be "bad" who can support many stories and who garner a bit of sympathetic connection with readers. Magneto didn't start that way, but Chris Claremont discovered a genius 'hook' that moved him beyond being a standard Stan Lee conquer-the-world bad guy. Some of Batman's Rogues have acquired deeper, more interesting archetypical or psychological hooks over the years that sustain multiple treatments. But there's almost no supervillain that has an origin equivalent to "parents shot in alley, takes vow to avenge them by fighting all crime" or "doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple", where the origin is a never-ending story engine.

Doctor Doom in his best writing, yes. Arrogant but with a reason; mother prone to dabble in sinister forces; part of a hounded people mistreated by the local rulers; secretly entitled to the throne of his backward country; dangerous experiment intended to rescue his mother's soul; unable to concede that another man could be better than him; so proud he disfigures himself in order to reign in hell. Essentially conquers the world through mind control or other ulitmate power multiple times only to find that what he really wants is the earned affection and devotion of his fellow humans, and that there's no way to get that other than to be a good man--or to at least make other people's lives better. But Doom can also be utterly cornball or unintentionally comedic--it's a really delicate line, and it explains why the movies have not even tried to do him right so far.

For Marvel, that's almost it. Kingpin only acquired psychological depth very late; the Daredevil series did good work pushing that further. The Red Skull has never really been interesting; the best they can do is make him a more subtle Nazi. Galactus never gets beyond the metaphor of "natural disaster than has a consciousness". Thanos is just dumb--"he's in love with Death and wants all the power in the universe" is a teenager's idea of a motivation for an antagonist. Doctor Octopus has become interesting since the second Spider-Man movie, maybe helped by the film's portrayal. Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin is mostly just a psychopath or a bargain-basement Doctor Jekyll type. Kang the Conqueror is just a hot mess of complete stupidity as a character and utterly unusuable without a fundamental rethink. You can keep rummaging through Marvel's closets and you'll only have a few spare crumbs of interesting ideas to work up for the movies. So no wonder they just keep running through these guys as discardable story McGuffins, because that's what they are.

Killmonger is an interesting model for them to look at, though. Because here they took a discardable story McGuffin and found a resonant motivation and backstory for him. In the comics, he's just been generic dumb bad guy #10012 ever since he was introduced. They very nearly reinvented him completely. So maybe that's a model--just use the names and maybe one or two minor concepts or hooks, and rebuild them from scratch entirely otherwise.

Dear god. Comics are serial. Movies are not. Comics don't need to actually have a beginning middle and end. Movies do even when we expect a sequel or a trilogy "defeat the villian" is in the movie script DNA. Because continuity takes second place to story structure. These movies aren't comics. They succeed and sometimes fail because their movies first and foremost that pay a lot of attention to bringing in the spirit of the comics.

Well, they didn't kill Keaton, so I'm good with it.  He was the best thing about that movie.

Think about this, we could have had Jeff Bridges chewing scenery as a minor/major antagonist versus Robert Downey in multiple movies.  That's what good cinema villains bring to the table beyond just being comic book characters.  People are just seeing the character here, the backstory and the 2d comic archetypes.  Mads Mikkelsen was by far the best actor in Dr Strange and not so major a villain they couldn't have just had him be defeated, only to serve a greater villain next movie.

I think they're setting up Mordo as a way more interesting dude than comic-book Mordo.

Thanos, though, pffft. I cannot imagine a way to make him psychologically or narratively interesting beyond "BIG FUCKING MONSTER WHO STOMPS EVERYTHING".

Anyway, Black Panther! Fucking great movie, I am sticking to that. Really enjoyed it.

The MCU has a lifespan because actors do, and because we're less likely to accept an eternally young Captain America through recasting than we are an eternally young Cap in the comics.

As such, they only need to save the truly iconic enemies to keep them around.  Most of these heroes have enough villains to keep trucking through the lifespan of the character in the MCU.  Then, they can bring back these enemies in different versions when they reboot the MCU in 12 years and people won't be talking about the Obadiah Stane they saw for the last 24 years...

I will be waiting to see how captain marvel does to believe the mcu model is sustainable in 12 years.

I mean... you are still never gonna see him again.

We've been saying that since Iron Man, not a single MCU character is an A lister (well Spidey, but they had to beg for him back). If they can knock shit like Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr Strange, Ant Man and Black Panther out of the park there is zero reason to believe Captain Marvel is where everything falls to pieces.

I know this X-men movie franchise has been around for 18 years now but once New Mutants comes out next year we'll find out if it really has staying power.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

I never thought they'd give transformers 5 movies before scrapping that or that there would be 9+ fast and furious movies either.

I liked it as well as any of the Marvel films that weren't GotG or Ragnarok. I saw it in a theater full of very old white people who were mainly silent, the few young and/or non-whites laughed and cheered in the right places.

I laughed at one old shitstain that complained on the way out that all the white people were bad guys.

There was a white CIA agent who was somehow a good guy.  But comic book movies don't have to be realistic.

It's weird he even made the comment because I think if you include the museum lady there are only three white people in the movie with more than one line of dialogue and only one was evil.

Rattan, what city did you see the film in?

Here in OC, CA, there were huge lines for the film.  We saw the first showing on a Saturday, and while most of the audience was white (OC), the film went over really well.

Mesa, Arizona. Land of the Nearly Deads.

We can take it to politics(where you can't(?) go) if this gets contentious but the general thrust to me was an indictment of hegemony on a moral level.

Killmonger isn't just "an American" he is "one of us", as explained by the the guy they call colonizer. He goes to a top quality American College, he joins the top quality American military institutions and then uses that knowledge in order to destabilize a nation with the intent to make Wakanda the new Hegemon of the world. Killmonger's thesis is that American hegemony isn't working so lets try Wakandan Hegemony. But all the kills he racks up? Besides the ones you see on screen he does this for the US.

The Hero is more or less an Obama/Clinton style democrat. A humanitarian interventionalist, (with the initial isolation being untenable), who is willing to use force if necessary in order to achieve justice for his nation, but also willing to work with others and let them lead when its necessary.

Shoutout to the Tolkien white guys.

It was partially that. Killmonger (And his father before him) both felt that the injustices perpetrated on their brothers and sisters in other countries were wrong and that they had duty as the most advanced nation in the world to help their fellow black people. The difference between father and son came from the son's life without that father to guide him and only the hatred of a people he'd never known and the focus of being a weapon of that American hegemony. "I've even killed some of my own brothers on this continent, all so I could come here and kill you." He wanted to empower the disenfranchised using the only tools he had, violence and death. When all you have is a hammer...

What I think is great about Killmonger as a character is that in some sense he's not wrong--T'Challa's alternative vision of a non-profit in Oakland is in some sense just standard Gates Foundation/NGO strategy that is right now accomplishing very little to change how power and wealth are distributed in the world. In some cases, development agencies just make that worse in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, even with the best intentions in the world. He's not right, either--if the Wakandans have been watching world history as avidly as they appear to be, they know that violent imperial interventions in the name of making things right also don't work (and usually don't have anything remotely like a good intention). But the emotional impulse behind the thought that if there's going to be no justice, if people who've committed great evil are going to get away it again and again, then why not burn the whole thing down? That's sound. It's both righteous and wrong. It's evil in a Shakespearean sense--a completely sympathetic kind of evil that it is tempting to endorse.

Totally. Which is one of the things that makes him arguably one of the best MCU villains to date.

The best villains are always ten degrees off of being the hero.

This is the best superhero movie I've seen in a while. I loved the aesthetics and the soundtrack, and Killmonger is now one of my favorite villains.

Which is nonsense.

If the world finds out what Wakanda is sitting on, they'll wait until they have the ability to overrun Wakanda.  Which means, at best, that one of the super powers takes over Wakanda, and establishes a vibranium autocracy.

Or, more likely, China and the US blow up half the world and wipe out civilization.  Leaving Wakanda in ruins, and its people long dead.

Sure, that's the long game, but...

I mean, if you ever played Chris Crawford's Balance of Power a zillion years ago, you learned really quickly that the game would always 'allow' an early invasion of Iran (I think it was Iran?) by the Soviets which you couldn't prevent. You just had to accept it and contain them to that. But more than a few times, folks playing it would just decide that on that move, or maybe some later move by the Soviets, that the game had been 'lost' and they'd just blow it all up out of spite. Because if the alternative in any situation is simply to accept that you must lose, that doesn't seem worth it.

If I had the power to inflict mortal wounds on powerful forces that I knew would eventually defeat me and cast my cause into ruin, I might still consider it. Because you know that if you mortally wound a dragon, even if you get eaten, it's likely to die after--or to be easy prey for the next adventurer to come along. Every revolutionary and rebel in world history has made the same calculation: that to hurt a vastly more powerful foe in a grevious way is worth it even if defeat is inevitable, to make the powerful feel fear and to encourage others to rise.

This might be of interest:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/26/17029572/black-panther-marvel-politics

In other news BP has made over 720 million internationally.

Marvel Box Office Updated (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=avengers.htm)

BP is 3rd in box office, 5th if adjusted for inflation.  May end up #2 overall in both given the weak upcoming box office.

So I was sitting in a bar with a few friends. Relatively mixed crowd and describing black panther since we all saw it. We all agreed to liking the movie, and I found that funny because of the mixed crowd. So I describe killmonger as the following;

"Killmonger is interesting because for white people he is a straight villain and for black people he is a anti-hero"
And without pause the white guy in the group shouts "Killmonger is a villain!"
......
:grin:
:grin:
"Point made" :oh_i_see:

You are right on the motives but I don’t think that the thrust of the movie is that Killmongers motives are wrong but his methods. And for the most part a villain cannot really be constrained by circumstance to do something wrong for the right reason. If this were the case they would be a tragic hero.

So I don’t think it’s quite this because he is MIT educated. If he takes over Wakanda he should know that he has more options than violence and death. So it could have ended after the challenge if it wasn’t tool specific. He specifically makes the choice to not use soft power options because he believes that they do not work compared to hard power options. This is why it’s an indictment of US Hegemony.

Unfortunately for the movie it doesn’t quite go as hard into this as it should. Killmongers “oh no immediate threat” is to use terrorism. Activating implanted sleeper cells to cause devastation in major economic hubs.. Which is not really the “American Hegemonic way”. Not to suggest that what we do isn’t bad but the tactics Killmonger takes imply a force disparity that is not supposed to exist. Wakanda is supposed to be the preeminent economic and military power in the world that simply no one knows about.  Step 1 should have been activating the military to sink US carrier groups, and making targeted strikes against nuclear facilities.

But marvel has really really shied away from depicting US or Western Hegemony and what causes it. Not only would they not want to depict military attacks on US facilities (but they white as shit wouldn’t want to depict them in service to a noble goal!) but they don’t even like depicting the fact that they exist because doing so makes any movie super political immediately. I am kind of giving them a pass on this aspect because of it. I mean there is fearless and then there is stupid.

Also Killmonger is neither the villain or an anti-hero for white folks. He is the hero we deserve

With their level of technology I would be shocked if any amount of nuclear carnage would bother wakanda proper even the slightest.  Worst case scenario the rest of the world is in ashes and they just keep on going as normal.

Really?

You must know some stunted white people.  Very few of the white people I know thought of Kilmonger as a straight up villain.

Its really depends on how conservative or liberal leaning. the white guys i went to see killmonger with, who leaned more villain felt he was compelling. my right wing friend while he didnt hate killmonger didnt see the much beyond marvel villain number 12.

It also depends upon your definition of villain.  A 'bad guy' is a villain, but a dictionary definition of villain is also someone that furthers an evil scheme.  A character can fit the definition of hero, anti-hero and villain all at the same time.

Regardless Killmonger was one of the most interesting characters we've seen in the MCU.  I don't give a shit about the label applied to him.  Hero, anti-hero, villain... I hope he rises and returns to the realm of the living.  There are a number of ways that could be done in the MCU.  We have magic, Wakandan advanced science, and time travel.  They just would need to find the right angle to do it - and hopefully a way to do it that doesn't invalidate what his journey meant for Wakanda.  They could move on to other characters as villains, but I could see a longer journey for this character that is worth telling.

This was good and had the potentially to be really great but didn't quite see it out.

It was held back by the action which was really weak and the fact that Black Panther himself just didn't give Killmonger enough to work with/against. Also the movie felt rushed at times you wished it wasn't rushed and its hard not to think that this was because time was wasted on shit we didn't need to waste it on. The could have certainly found a more useful white good guy insert than the stupid CIA character that would have taken up less time in the movie to make work.

All told though one of if not the best MCU villain, overall a solid marvel movie carried by parts of the movie that so far haven't been any of the marvel movie's strengths really.

My biggest disappointment was that there wasn't a much more big deal post trailer setup for Infinity War.

Top grossing Superhero Movie ever. It is one of my favorites, but this surprises me. Still third when adjusted for inflation, but still...

In the US.

Killmonger is an anti-colonial, anti-hero. My reading of his tactics was that these are very much the tactics he's been trained in by the US, methods of disrupting and collapsing governmental structures in countries. He might have the option of just sinking US carrier groups but the first stage is destroy the confidence of the populaces that their governments can protect them. Killmonger is, I think, a villain not because he doesn't have anything noble or justifiable in his worldview but because he's seen 'his' people oppressed and harmed and his response is revenge. He isn't out to make the world a better or fairer place but to take current unjust system and reverse it, conquer the colonisers and make them feel the oppression. If you feel sympathy towards anti-colonial movements that's pretty understandable, I think he's a villain but I think he's also a nuanced and interesting villain. He's a not a moustache twirler, he's motivated by outrage at injustice.

That's fine, except he's also hugely angry at Wakanda, punishing them and using them.

So, he's basically a cock.

Also, I'm not sure what spurred your post to action.

I was catching up on the thread and got to the bit arguing about whether Killmonger was a villain or an anti-hero and didn't really care to comment on the relative strength of the box-office performance :grin:

Fair dos

Utterly a dick. Still had the best line in the film with, "Drop me in the ocean with my ancestors that knew death was better than bondage."

This was top to bottom such a well crafted and well put together film. Easily one of the best MCU movies I’ve seen yet.

Serkis was great as Klaue (which translated from German could either mean Claw or Thief/Thievery) and Killmonger is easily one of the most believable villains/anti–hero characters yet.

We had so much fun seeing this.

Looks like it will end up second when adjusted for inflation in the US, and 5th from non-US perspective (3rd worldwide).

The performance surprised me given that it was a fairly new character that is clearly not an A tier character in the comics. 

Now, the question is whether Infinity War blows it out of the water, competes with it, or falls short.

Don't forget this film was released in February. It's done absolutely insane, summer tentpole numbers in a month that is traditionally where studios send movies to die in obscurity.

True.

Black Panther pitch meeting.  :grin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MvS_NehZU

IMO war rhinos are both stupid AND awesome.  :why_so_serious:

killmonger isn’t anti-colonial. He is anti “us being colonized”. He is pro “us colonizing other people”.

It’s explicit in its theme here. Killmonger supports insurgencies against governments he doesn’t like. He isn’t just going after the West but also the rest of the world. The Hobbit explains it simply that “he is one of ours”. IE he is an American in philosophy, strategy, and tactics.

Yes--but importantly, *black* American. E.g., he agrees with old-style American imperialism but at the same time, specifically wants it to redress the suffering of African people in the diaspora, who are the main victims of modernity in some sense. Which, if there really was an unambiguously powerful technology that conferred an unbeatable advantage on small numbers of people in miiltary conflicts, would be a reasonable position in some sense. It's no less than what Western Europe did circa 1875 to Africa, the Middle East and South Asia--a brief window of serious force asymmetry opened with the repeating rifle and then the machine gun that lasted about 35 years, and that asymmetry was used to advance rapid imperial conquest. When you go back even 75 years, European forces (and American ones) enjoyed virtually no meaningful advantage over most non-Western militaries maintained by centralized states in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

So his plan isn't ridiculous when it comes to expressing supremacy and expressing an ideology of supremacy/vengeance. It's just afterwards that's the problem--and that's what T'Challa and other Wakandans see very well, I'm sure in part because they've been observing world history so thoughtfully from behind their screen.

I just saw this today, and I agree with Ironwood... I may have been more interested in it if it came out 10 years ago, but it's a pretty standard Marvel affair.

Killmonger seems a weak villain, he blames Wakanda for too much. Everyone was trading slaves throughout history, what were they meant to do? At the time, they probably didn't see anything wrong with it. He just seemed like a complete sociopath that I can't sympathize with him at all. He manipulates everyone around him with his charisma to do what he wants, like his "bonnie" at the start of the film and Klaw, and then when that doesn't work, uses lethal force. Unlike Magneto, who hates non-mutants because of what they would do as a race, Killmonger is projecting what Black Panthers Dad did to the world, because his Dad tried to kill him and his buddy? He didn't even have much of a scene with his father in the afterlife either, so any motivations he may have had for vengeance never get explored and he proves he's doing it just to see the world burn.

That Gorilla clan was the highlight of the film though, such ballers.

I also so this recently and thought it was mediocre. It could have been more interesting in my opinion if the villain hadn't been so comically bad and the good guys would have needed to justify to others (and themselves) why they were going against the result of the leadership challenge.

Yeah, he's an American in some ways but he's also a European, and in particular a Brit, or at least someone modelled on them. Because he wants Wakanda to do what Europeans did to non-white parts of the world, as you say.

He says his plan is to take control of much of the world so that "the sun never sets on the Wakandan Empire", which echoes the boast once made about the British empire.

So he is a villain, even though his motives are good.

However, the fact that the film raises questions about whether he really is bad or not - and also works as a straightforward narrative at the same time - shows how good it is.

It really doesn't.  He's bad.

Sure. But he's also not wrong in his feelings about what he's lived and seen. Which is the best kind of bad.

Finally saw this on Amazon.  

Good to maybe great.  Really enjoyed it.  Killmonger was terrific.  All the actors, production, script, pacing, not easy to predict... really good.

This just popped up on Netflix so I watched it yesterday.

I have been pretty much avoiding the Marvel movies over the last few years because I am frankly have not found the last few I have seen to be all that appealing.

I was impressed with this one though. Good flick.

Same here... wife saw it on Netflix and decided to watch. I'm not a Marvel movie fan which she's not happy about. Still not a Marvel fan sadly. I like my villains a little more cerebral. But the cast and visuals were pretty amazing.

I thought Killmonger was one of the better Marvel movie villains tbh.  Not that the bar is super high.

(insert picture of your favorite dumb Marvel villain here)

The only one I've even been remotely impressed by was Purple Man.

They really, really made that fucker scary.

I'm a big fan of vincent d onofrio's kingpin as well and wish they would allow him to be in a spiderman movie.

Infinity War should win an Oscar solely for the feat of making Purple Man scary rather than ridiculous.

I think he's talking about Kilgrave from Jessica Jones.

Of course there's a Marvel villain whose literal actual name is Purple Man.

Lol, who were you talking about?

Thanos?

Muffin Chin is certainly purple but yeah I'm definitely sure Ironwood was talking about Killgrave.

Huh, I guess he is purplish.  For some reason I was remembering him as being more blue, but I guess not when I look back at movie screenshots.  I'll blame alcohol.

Kilgrave was good, Kingpin was (still is?) good, and I also liked Cottonmouth.  Wish they wouldn't have killed him off.  Nobu was a good foil to Daredevil as well, because of his innate ninja-ness.

Yes, I was. 

edit: wrong thread

We discussed it in another thread but Batman did a good job as the bird man in Spider-man as well.

Finally watched this, the one thing that sat awkwardly was how much African American culture appeared to supplant African culture in a film about Africa which was in general working really hard on how it presented Africa and Africans.

Music especially stood out as not sounding at all African.

We don't have many Africans here and I have no idea if the consensus of actual Africans thought the same or if I am nuts.

The film uses an Afrofuturist aesthetic to represent African cultures, and Wakanda is pretty openly a kind of utopian pan-African vision, which is an idea that comes as much from the African diaspora as anywhere else. So there are visual elements that borrow from or develop out of a number of different African societies--I spotted buildings that were clearly riffs on the architecture of the Western Sahel, a few riffing on Great Zimbabwe and similar structures in southern Africa, etc. Fashions come from all over--there's some Sotho-looking outfits in the 'rural' scenes, etc. But in all cases, the visual designers are trying to extrapolate what those styles would look like in a technologically sophisticated and wealthy society rather than just represent them as 'frozen' quotations from the past. Imagine if you were trying to do a futuristic Paris and all you did was just plop existing buildings into it and then lit it up with some neon.

So I think you have to think about the music that way too--there's a difference between music *in* the film world and the soundtrack that we hear, for one (what film critics commonly call the difference between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements of a film--no one in the film Black Panther is 'hearing' the soundtrack within the setting of the film). But in both cases, they're really heavily African--particularly instruments and rhythms from Senegal and the Western Sahel and from South Africa. Remember that contemporary African music is a: different in different parts of the continent, Africa is not a country; b) is just as influenced by world and African-American genres and trends as anywhere else--there are active hip-hop and reggae scenes in South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya; soukous and hilife in West and Central Africa have influenced African-American music and vice-versa. I think the folks who did the music took the challenge to root it in African traditions, instruments, etc. pretty seriously.

What did you see as "African-American" in the film, aside from Killmonger?

African rap is huge, and largely unknown in America.

The only African rap I know is Die Antwoord (and that's South African with white people fronting it) and they are significantly different from African-American rap, though heavily influenced by it. I don't expect that African rap in various countries is that far different from Die Antwoord.

Enjoy some M.anifest then, because he's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S6_tx9TjSo

 :thumbs_up:

Die Antwoord is actually really unusual. Rap and hip-hop is pretty common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, it's just that the groups are more local. Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, and more all have a lot of acts that do rap in some form. There's even a Kenyan Catholic priest who goes by the name Sweet Paul who was disciplined by the church over the summer after intermingling his rap act into a service.

I married into a Kenyan family. Nigerian music has a lot of influence there (both were British colonies, but Nigeria has a bigger scene).

My wider music tastes are alternative, but I can't object to the vibe of even the mainstream stuff from there.

Best I can do on the hip-hop front is Nigeria's Wizkid featuring Drake (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW18C4plZ8).

And this is pop music, but I just... fia fia fia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORvJcpe2Oc)


Black Panther really annoyed my wife. Wakanda is supposed to be right next to Kenya in east Africa, and most of the characters had west African accents. She didn't like the movie as a whole either.

It gather from my in-laws that it was very popular in Kenya, but... there is no secret African superstate next door; they just have to continue trying to make their way.

Yeah, the accent got a lot of attention all over sub-Saharan Africa, because it doesn't really sound like any African national/regional accent. The characters generally are speaking Xhosa when they speak a sub-Saharan language.

Not much one can do about the *location* of Wakanda: it's gotta be somewhere that it's not. Marvel sometimes put it closer to the Atlantic coast, near Gabon and the two Congos; the decision to firmly locate it up by Lake Turkana is more recent. (It's also where J.K. Rowling decided that the African "wizarding school" is.)  I think if I were going to try to come up with a hidden African country I might pick somewhere in the upper Volta, where the Mossi states were, but anywhere you do it, you're essentially taking a real place that has a real history and turning it into a fictional place. Like deciding that Oz is actually IN Kansas, off in the corner or something.

Yeah, and if you try to make it just a part of that region with the same culture and language then you wreck the whole "African Atlantis that has hidden itself off from the rest of the continent for hundreds of years."

As for Utopian (not directed at you Khaldun, somebody else said it), well, most anyplace with a high standard of living looks Utopian from outside. They obviously have societal issues, not the least of which is adherence to outmoded traditions, and then there is the whole "lets hide instead of help defend the rest of Africa from colonial aggression" thing.

I honestly think Marvel did an amazingly good job, considering the restrictions they were working under. I was expecting to just have to suspend disbelief at Wakanda, but I ended up rather impressed.

I saw this on an airplane a couple months ago, and my chief complaint was that it seemed a bit of a stretch that Killmonger was such a badass figther compared to Black Panther, where he didn't really earn it.  Maybe I was too tired and missed some details.  I also sort of thought that it was a bit over-pandering to the black community and came off a bit false, but then I remembered that I am not part of the black community and they can make their own judgements on such things.  Good enough for them, good enough for me.  Above average Marvel flick.

Killmonger spent his entire life basically as a special forces/CIA assasine, going around the world murdering people.  He was also a psychopath obsessed with murder and killing, so you can say he had the mental focus to spend all of his waking hours concentrating on how best to fight/kill people that no normal sane person would.  It’s not really a stretch to say he would be such a badass fighter.

I agree and it didn't bug me much however I would have liked a "show, don't tell scene" of Kilmonger being really badass somewhere around the museum heist scene. I think they could have easily incorporated something there to show his abilities off rather than just having bilbo explain it.

Today we lost Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer.  He had not spoken publicly about his diagnosis, but he'd been fighting it for four years.

AP Coverage (https://apnews.com/5f4352111fdead278da3651b44d311b8)

Fuck Cancer.

Fuck Cancer. Fuck 2020. Fuck Everything.

I'm watching this again all weekend.

Fuck this simulation.

Chadwick Boseman forever!

At the risk of being gross I wonder if Chadwick's illness was known at Marvel. IMO odd decisions were made in Black Panther. The obvious one would be the destruction of the herbs (T'Challa and Killmonger would be the last to have BP's powers).

Less obvious is the usage of the villains. IMO the three "best" BP villains are all in this movie: Killmonger, M'Baku, and Klau. Four if you count "White Wolf" (who is Bucky in the movie; in the comics it's a totally different guy). I could see them not using White Wolf in the future (he's too similar to MCU Loki in terms of character, and pretty much has a BP suit so too close to MCU Killmonger), I just didn't get them using the first three in the first movie, and making M'Baku more of an anti-hero (tbf this was a great change in hindsight). Maybe everyone knew there more than likely wouldn't be a second BP so just put everything they could into this one.

I'm sure they knew, but I'm also sure they just wanted to get through Endgame and then think about where all this goes next.

You can bring the herbs back pretty easily and you have the comics-friendly option of making Shuri into Black Panther (in fact, who better to find a way to make the herbs again).

As far as villains, yeah, BP in the comics does not have a deep bench. But considering how deeply meaningful they made Killmonger, who was always just a fourth-rate goofball in the comics, they could probably do some great stuff with relative throwaways.

For example, Moses Magnum has an origin that isn't usually dwelt on in his later comics appearances, but he was originally an Ethiopian who sided with the Italians when they invaded before World War II because he was fascinated with industrialized weaponry and then he became an unscruplous international arms dealer. He isn't really a dedicated Black Panther villain but he would be incredibly apt for a BP2, *especially* if Shuri became the Black Panther.

Kraven the Hunter is another obvious character to throw in with BP rather than Spider-Man. And if they get the rights, Namor is another, though he's harder to work if Wakanda isn't coastal, which it is not in the MCU.

Feige has already stated that they knew of his illness and prepared for the worst. Shuri will assume the role of Black Panther at some point in BP2.

The quotes I saw say that Feige had no idea until the day of Boseman's death.  He was sent an email before Chadwick passed, but did not read it until after. 

Disney has not announced that Shuri will take on the title, although "insiders" keep reporting it.  They had no insurance to cover this situation, and there are a lot of Marketing dollars that have contingencies that need to be considered before they know the cost of any given approach.  I think Shuri will take on the title in the next movie, but it is not a lock, yet.

When they started writing the movie, Chadwick did not know he was ill. 

Regardless, they were looking for BP to fill a central role in team storylines as a member of the Avengers, Illuminati, etc...  BP 2 will likely be a war with Namor and Atlantis.  They have a bunch of stuff to do with the character that doesn't require them to use his immediate Rogue's Gallery, and they could easily still use M'baku, Klaw, and others given where they left off.  (Klaw would need to come back from the dead, but that happens to him a lot). 

MU Klaw is a pretty different kind of dude than MCU Klaw though.

I really think MCU plans are in as much of a holding pattern as anybody else--I don't think they have overly developed plans past the Eternals, Shang-Chi, another Spider-Man and Doctor Strange 2. I'm sure they had another BP on the drawing board but I would guess it's completely adaptable not just to Boseman's death but to the current development marketplace.

They have plans for Phases 4 and 5, with a preliminary outline of 6.  That would be the next decade or so of movies, and TV.  The further out, the more flexible, of course. 

As for Klaw - MCU and movie Klaw start out in roughly the same place.  I am a bit surprised they did not have him pushed into a machine to off him so as to preserve their options if they were going to kill him, but they could still do something with it.  It would not be hard to have him rescued while bleeding out and saved with the technology that turns him into living sound. 

Except for the fact that living-sound Klaw really sucks as a villain. He has zero personality, he's a one-note character, and no writer has ever really thought about what "living sound" means in either visual or character terms.

Living sound.

One note.

Poetry.

Seriously there is a lot you could do with the concept, but MU writers have just made him a freak who mostly just uses his sound hand like Green Lantern's ring or a blaster or something.

From a character perspective, they've not done much with the Living Sound.  From a way that his abilities interact with Vibranium, there are all sorts of possibilities.  If they make him a secondary bad guy, he doesn't need to have a lot of depth. 

Regardless, whether they use Klaw again or not is the least of the concerns right now.

 :oh_i_see:  :awesome_for_real:  :drill:

I completely meant that.

Cough.