“A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for a joy ride only to hit the same exhausted story and franchise-expanding beats. Not this one.” With Creed (2015), Ryan Coogler “shook the dust off the Rocky series by giving it an African-American champion played by Michael B. Jordan. For Black Panther, Mr. Coogler brought back both Mr. Jordan and some former crew members—including Rachel Morrison, the director of photography on his first feature Fruitvale Station—continuity that may help account for this movie’s intimacy and fluidity.”
What we have here is “the best Marvel movie so far, by far,” declares IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “Nobody has ever seen anything like Black Panther—not just an entire civilization built from the metal stuff inside Captain America’s shield, and not even just a massive superhero movie populated almost entirely by black people, but also a Marvel film that actually feels like it takes place in the real world.”
It stars Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa, “the African king who fights evildoers in the guise of a wildcat,” explains David Edelstein at Vulture. “It’s primarily set in Wakanda, described in onscreen news accounts as Africa’s poorest country. (Trump would have choice words about Wakandan immigration.) But the poverty turns out to be surface deep, literally. Under a lush cover of trees is a city both ancient and futuristic, where sonic-powered railways snake among great stone towers, the works fueled by the metal Vibranium . . . T’Challa’s do-gooder on-and-off girlfriend, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), is bent on crossing the border to help other imperiled African countries. Far more dangerous, though, is the aptly named militant Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who looks to Vibranium to power a full-scale international race war.” Black Panther is “is unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.”
The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin notes that Black Panther “is far from the first black comic-book star to get a film of his own: that would be Spawn in 1997, followed by Wesley Snipes’s Blade the following year, both of whom landed long before the genre mushroomed. Yet he is the first to lean heavily into an ethos known as Afrofuturism—very roughly speaking, an approach to science fiction and fantasy grounded in black experience and the cultures of the African continent. In music, it’s been thriving for sixty years plus, thanks to acts from Sun Ra to George Clinton and Janelle Monaé. But in film it never emerged from its niche. . . . Perhaps, that is, until now.”
“It’s an action-adventure origin myth which plays less like a conventional superhero film and more like a radical Brigadoon or a delirious adventure by Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs,” suggests the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Those were the colonial-era mythmakers whose exoticism must surely have influenced Stan Lee and Jack Kirby when they devised the comic books in the 1960s, supplying the Afro- in the steely afrofuturism of Black Panther that generations of fans have treasured and reclaimed as an alternative to the pop culture of white America. But it’s the futurism that gives Black Panther his distinctive power.”
“What would this film have been like if its action scenes had been cut cleanly and clearly, instead of chopped into the usual wasteful, visually confusing slice-and-dice mashup?” asks Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “The whole thing moves a little too fast: There are so many gorgeous details—from Ruth E. Carter’s Afro-futuristic costumes to Hannah Beachler’s Emerald City-a-go-go production design—that you might find yourself wishing you could linger on certain images just a bit longer. But Black Panther is still a cut above—perhaps many cuts above—any other recent superhero movie, and some not-so-recent ones too.”
“It starts a little slowly,” notes Matt Singer at ScreenCrush. “But then T’Challa and his crew return to Wakanda, and just about every scene from that point forward is better than the one that preceded it.” And TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde finds a good number of “thrilling moments that make the film’s occasional pacing lapses forgivable.”
This is “a superhero movie which is part spy thriller, part all-out battle, and part social commentary,” writes Screen’s Tim Grierson, “and while all the pieces don’t always work, Black Panther is consistently propelled by tonal and thematic flourishes that break with the conventions that have defined this lucrative franchise.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy notes that “the usual Marvel post-credits teaser reminds us that its next offering will be Avengers: Infinity War, coming May 4 and in which T'Challa/Black Panther also appears.” Peter Debruge warns of “mild spoilers” before launching into his review for Variety: “Virtually everything that distinguishes Black Panther from past Marvel pics works to this standalone entry’s advantage.” More from Rodrigo Perez (Playlist, B+), Mike Ryan (Uproxx), and Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times).
Writing for Little White Lies, Callum Costello argues that “Black Panther shouldn’t be read as a film about a black superhero, but rather a black film about a superhero.”
Last October, Tre Johnson, writing for Rolling Stone, noted that “Coogler has set out to do something with the modern black superhero that all previous iterations have fallen short of doing: making it respectable, imaginative and powerful. The Afro-punk aesthetic, the unapologetic black swagger, the miniscule appearances from non-black characters—it’s an important resetting of a standard of what’s possible around creating a mythology for a black superhero.”
Ramin Setoodeh interviews Boseman and Coogler for the new Variety cover story, and inside, Marc Bernardin talks with Joe Robert Cole, who co-wrote the movie with Coogler, and Evan Narcisse, co-writer of Rise of Black Panther for Marvel Comics.
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