Watching Marvel’s “Black Panther”

Watching “Black Panther” ’cause T is teaching it today in her Afrofuturism class. Were this a perfect world, it would be in the upper half of Marvel movies, but carrying some flaws in effects (some of the modeling is no better than, say, Raimi’s SPIDERMAN II CGI), and I’m not totally happy with the Casino fight scene, which showcased the female characters but did not give T’Challa the same level of power and authority in movement that say Captain America would have had in the same context. His action was actually crisper in CIVIL WAR (although his movements were too Asian, not African enough. That’s o.k.).

So I would have given it a strong “B” in a perfect world, where there had been a hundred other such films. But…this isn’t that world. In THIS world, there is barely a single image in the entire film that wasn’t an act of creation and emotional resonance on a par with the breakthrough “No Man’s Land” shot in WONDER WOMAN, or the battle cruiser crossing the screen in the beginning of STAR WARS. In THIS world, it is sui generis. I am so incredibly proud of every damned creative human being associated, all of whom brought their “A+” game. I totally “get” people being unimpressed: nothing is loved by everyone. And those who thought it was just “O.K.” But I totally, totally understand why those black kids got up on their desks dancing when they learned they would be seeing it.

We’d never had anything like this. And people like Terry Gilliam, who had countless such films, television shows, books, and myths to feed their souls, and…