No But I Read the Comic

Black Panther a film by Ryan Congler.  With Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira.  ****

I hate comic book movies, and almost never go to them.  I don’t like movies with super heroes, and people with spectacular special powers.  I don’t enjoy the special effects of modern movies, and get tired of preview after preview which shows some spectacular effect which has no relationship to the real world.  I don’t like gratuitous over-the-top graphic violence, and I don’t like movies where everybody—every single person in a given civilization—is good looking.  I don’t believe in great heroes, and don’t believe some wonderful superhero is going to come along and save the world.  I hope the people who flock to these movies don’t believe that either.

But I loved Black Panther, which I went to because my wife had heard so many good things about it and because the whole world seems to be going.  One thing I liked was that, though it presented a number of stock characters and stock situations, there were people in the movie who stood out as individuals, and won me over.  The Black Panther’s sister, played by Letitia Wright, is so winning and interesting a character that she almost made the movie herself.  I’m a sucker for a father-son situation, and there are two father-son plots that are vital to the story.

The larger question which this movie poses is also a fascinating one: if there were a utopian civilization, where life was more or less paradise (don’t know how they would have eliminated all the problems of human nature, but still), would they owe it to the rest of the world to help them out, even though mixing with others might ruin their utopia?  What if they were an African nation, and many people of color around the world were suffering from injustice?  Would they have some obligation to rescue them?

My own utopian visions are rather different.  I prefer the utopia described in the first chapter of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, a place where the Buddha had supposedly left behind his most advanced Tantric teachings, the entire society practice meditation faithfully and followed his teachings, so life became a kind of paradise.  Those people were warriors of compassion.  I also loved the dystopian utopia presented in Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home (which I regard as her best and most interesting book, though the world at large doesn’t see it that way).

It’s interesting to me that this younger generation (the director of this movie is an astonishing 31, with only two full length features to his credit) puts their hope in a civilization where technology has saved the day, there’s a magic metal that can solve any problem and cure any disease.  It’s also a society where everybody apparently spends hours a day in the gym, because they’re all in fantastic condition and capable of amazing physical feats.  On the other hand, nobody—at least not any of the main characters—seems to have coupled up, so they avoid all the problems of a relationship (though one may be emerging at the film’s end.  Do I smell a sequel?).  This movie begins to look like a millennial dream.

I don’t entirely understand the central fact of the plot.  At some time in the past, the kingdom of Wakanda sent out spies to a number of other countries, and a couple of them wound up in Oakland, California (the hometown of the movie’s director, by an odd coincidence).  There was some dispute between two brothers, and one—the eventual King of Wakanda—wound up killing the other, and leaving behind the man’s child.  I wasn’t sure why.  Years later, that child, Erik Killmonger[1] (Michael B. Jordan) has transformed himself into the world’s greatest warrior, and comes back not only to challenge the present King, the Black Panther himself (Chadwick Boseman) to a duel (which he can legally do, since he’s genetically a member of the community), but to take the place over and conquer the world.  His anger and his dreams of world dominance are obviously misplaced.  On the other hand, he wants to stand up for the oppressed people of color in the world.  Unfortunately, his solution is to make them the oppressors.  He’s a weird combination of Rosa Parks and Adolph Hitler.  You hate and fear him while admitting he has a legitimate gripe.

I didn’t understand the super powers of the various heroes of the movie (maybe I’m just too literal).  In an early scene—which took place in South Korea, of all places (and was so much like a scene from a James Bond movie that it verged on plagiarism)—our Wakandan warriors were driving what seemed to be a kind of super car, which travelled at tremendous speeds and seemed indestructible, when all of a sudden it was practically vaporized; you could have carried away the remaining parts in a bucket.  The Black Panther himself seems to specialize in attaching himself to the tops of cars—how, exactly, I do not know—but what he does from there is less clear.  He seems in his technologically perfect suit to be virtually indestructible himself, until he isn’t.  I understood the deal with Superman.  He was good unless somebody showed up with Kryptonite.  The situation here is less clear.  (I might be able to answer my questions by reading a comic book, but that ain’t gonna happen.)

At the end there is a stupendous battle between the two young men, who are actually cousins, and of course it’s no grand surprise who wins (though again I wasn’t sure how or why.  I also don’t know how T’Challa survived a fall from what seemed to be the largest waterfall in the world).  Good wins over evil in Wakanda, but they see that their antagonist had a point, and try to find a way to address his concerns.  I can’t imagine what the sequel will be, although I can pretty much guarantee there will be one.  I had to try on two separate weekends to get a seat to this movie, and the place was packed on the day I went.  I hope that director Ryan Coogler will go back to movies like his first feature, Fruitville Station, now that he’s a multi-millionaire.  But somebody will go on with this.

[1] Nice name he has, as Molly Bloom once said about Paul DeCock