Even before I saw the film, but already knowing about it from reviews, trailers and all that, I thought I would end up writing a completely different review. I thought I'd say this:
It's a movie made specifically for black people, but it's not bad. They are a long-suffering people who have endured too much and who still live with the complex, because they have never had their own great history with kings, commanders, spiritual leaders, architectural structures, great discoveries, etc. They were absorbed in our history before they had their own. But they would like to have their own great state with palace intrigues, warriors, technology, and so Marvel gave them a fairy tale in which the black people have it all. If cinema can fill a void like the national complex, why not?
And of course, that was not the case, and I'll come back to that. But first of all, let me entertain you with the usual film sins:
- Vibranium previously simply reflected any amount of kinetic energy. Now he still gives high intelligence, heals, and magical flowers grow on him. Is there anything he's not doing?
The Queen scolds Shuri for showing the fac, even though it happened behind her back. The Queen has eyes on her ass?
- The princess makes some really stupid words at her brother's coronation. She mocks the age-old tradition, but none of her own condemns it. But it is this behavior that causes her brother to fight. What if he lost and died for her jokes?
- The king of the country is chosen by primitive duel. That is, a complete fool who just fights well can easily come to power, and the whole country will have to indulge his craziest whims.
- Why is Klo still involved in criminal cases? Earlier, Ultron paid him so much that he provided his family for 10 generations.
- How did Killmonger travel from America to Africa? How did he get through a barrier that even alien monsters can't climb through? How did he know where the secret part of Wakanda was hidden from the world? And if he did, why did he ask Clo to take him?
- At some point, the characters say "Praise Hanumanu." Hanuman is a Hindu deity. Why do they worship him?
- Why is Shuri telling the CIA girl everything about Wakanda, about technology? She gave away all state secrets to a U.S. government agent with whom Wakanda has no agreements yet. Yes, the agent had to be cured, but it could be done indoors without telling him anything.
- At the end of the film, Tchale is asked a question, he does not answer it clichédly and looks at the shot with a smile. Then the post-credits scene, he's asked the question again, and he does the same thing again. If you do that in reality, you're either an idiot or you're mocking the other person.
- The translation does not convey this, but in the original, all black characters speak English as a foreign language, barely coping with it. They chew and gouge out words. It's not an African Nollywood movie, the actors are American.
- The villain of the film is so cruel that it looks like a caricature. He killed hundreds of people in all different countries, in all the wars that he had, and put marks on his body for every person killed. Did he have any babies for breakfast? Before him, there were fascists, terrorists, sorcerers, aliens, an evil robot, but none of them were so cruel.
I now return to the original question. This is not a film that should please people of African descent. It does not show the life of blacks in America, it is devoted only to the opening scene of the film, in which the target audience was reminded that blacks are bandits with guns who always want to rob someone. Let’s say America was not needed here, it’s a fairy tale about Wakanda. How is it shown? In it, the poppy color grows so inflated incredible technology that it even knocks out of the lore of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wakanda is Mary Sue of the countries, she's stupidly the best, she's got everything. This shows that the authors themselves treat this image with irony (which not everyone will understand). But at the same time, against the background of the highest technologies, Wakanda society is at a primitive level, warriors in the 21st century walk with spears, the king is chosen there as in a flock of chimpanzees, he dreams about a primitive paradise, the characters speak the Papuan language of Xoza, but they speak English with difficulty because it is too white and civilized for them. So this movie just sat the Negroes on a branch and gave them bananas. Exaggerate? Towards the end, the ruler of a mountainous province plugs the white with a real woo-woo gorilla, this is not some hidden scene, it is given directly to the forehead. And the god Hanuman was brought here because he is the Hindu god Monkey. The average viewer does not know or will not pay attention to this, but yes, the Negroes wove the god of a completely alien culture for the sake of this hidden mockery. It won’t be understood or remembered for a long time, but I’m sure that in decades to come, someone will look at this film as an example of a deliberate rabid mocking racism that was sold to black people for their money.
The hero is shown to be quite weak, women who have neither superpowers nor nanosuits fight with him. He stews being a king, asks for advice from the folder, timid in front of a woman, his sister makes fun of him. None of the Wakandi kings cared about the black people as a whole, hiding from the whole world, and under the salvific dome is not even the whole of Wakanda, but only its developed part, while outside there are its poorest purely agrarian territories, over which the world community laughs. But the villain was the one who wanted to elevate his race around the world, albeit through weapons.
Marvel, under the auspices of Disney, made a subtle mockery for black people, seemingly giving them the fairy tale they dreamed of, but at the same time mined it with this message: “You Macaques, go back to your Africa, run there with spears, climb trees and be proud of your primitive homeland.” I do not share this message, I only point to it. And yes, almost no one noticed this subtext, the film was received with hurrah, it showed excellent fees, critics under fear of being considered intolerant did not dare to say words against it and inflated assessments to sky-high. They even got an Oscar nomination. Peeple's doing it. And perhaps this example shows that the African race itself is not yet ready for the equality it so desperately demands, because it takes national ridicule at face value. For comparison, in Russia, too, they showed a superhero movie, in which one hero is a cranberry bear, two more are churks, and the third prepares borscht, so our viewer did not swallow this mockery, and the authors cursed.
To summarize, Disney is not doing this for the first time. In Star Wars 8, there was already a completely unnecessary background story, in which a black, Asian feminist, the fight for the rights of oppressed children and animals were shoved into one at a time, and then the whole branch was cut off, because the characters were going to fail, they achieved nothing, and the whole line can be easily cut out of the film with ordinary home editing. That is, they threw to the offended minorities what they always demand, just to shut up. Now that the whole of Black Panther was made in this and even more caustic way, there is no doubt that all the tolerance and progressiveness of Disney is some kind of incomprehensible double game. It is not equality that they are engaged in, but the whipping up of new social tension.
