Straight Out of Wakanda...

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2019)

This is more than a film. The Black Panther movie is a cultural phenomenon. A fresh and sterling example of how it takes the whole world to help the whole world achieve a higher and more salutary plane and state of survival. This should be painfully obvious, but evidently needs restating every now and then with all the ways and means available and at our disposal.
There is an understated depth and complexity to this movie that viewers and fans will be exploring and discovering and debating and enlightening themselves about for years to come. After the dust has cleared and settled from all the knee-jerk reactions and cultural shock, mine included, people will at length be done shaking their heads with a wry smile at how two Jewish Americans also members of a group persecuted throughout the millennia could somehow through a medium designed for soldiers at war and more particularly for children find themselves members among the unlikely authors of a re-genesis of African and Human Consciousness.
This is essentially what Jack Kirby and Stan Lee have done. Make no mistake about it. The Black Panther is the brainchild and the product of the Marvel Universe which is the invention and result of visionary artists and writers such as Kirby and Lee who postulated it into existence.
The appeal here is to the imaginative prowess of Mankind. Many writers and artists of color were so mired down in the angst of the oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples around the world and their victimization that they were hard put to envision a place and a time where and when this would no longer be the case. Richard Wright was able to have his protagonist Bigger Thomas consider why Blacks did not have their own governments and armies in a nascent fashion, but his roadmap to Wakanda and other destinations of interest in Africa was somehow misplaced. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois were busily engaged in postulating an education for African Americans that might proof them against and preclude future involvement with slavery, but only Marcus Garvey and a few others, possessed the pluck, through whatever personal limitations, to suggest that there could be a United States of Africa or a Commonwealth of African States. We have yet to postulate a media which will celebrate the industrial, entrepreneurial, and technological triumphs of people of color in concert with the peoples of the world, bu this movie is a step in the right direction.
There is more that can be said and, I'm sure, will be said. But for now, let me just say, kudos to the cast and crew. You have done a monumental thing. Perhaps one day we will consider as well the Epic of Sundiata and Gassiere's Lute as appropriate grist for the Cinema...