O Snap! The Hype is Political Correctness on Vibranium!

Rating: 5/10 (30 April 2019)

Despite my lame title, it wasn't so much the dissonance between the movie and the spectacular hype surrounding it that was most jarring to me experientially - this would come later, rather it was that so many of the narrative elements were so spiritlessly conceived, assembled and executed, that it even got in the way of the entertainment of the thing.
The Vibranium powered hype is easy to understand. Marvel, a hot franchise, decides to do an all black cast Black Panther movie with a largely African setting, and banks on the novelty of the very thing for marketing vitality. The idea is rich in politics and rich in optimism - that quintessential of Hollywood opioids. The critics, already on a decades long MCU high, fall in love with the pre-sell and go in hard for their hit, and all at once what we get is a frenzied race to the bottom, critics working hard to outdo each other in elaborating and praising the addled qualities of their latest trip.
But the product is vastly different from the synthesized hype. Few things work and the whole is discord at best. Despite being armed with a massive budget, the makers seem to have been overwhelmed by the central task of populating the film with believable African characters with a back stories rooted in African reality and culture. As an African myself, this was particularly devastating for me. The accents were nothing like anything I have ever encountered. They weren't Fulani, Luo or Zulu, or generic Nigerian, Kenyan or Chadian. Instead they were all over the place, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, often fused within the same character, such that they came to us robbed of all semblance of singularity, the way, say, an Irish accent in a movie identifies a character to the audience as an Irishman and all the cornucopia of meaning and sensibility that comes with that. This to me was perhaps the original sin of the entire enterprise because it's all downhill from here. The actors could not get in to their characters because they were the worst sort of amalgams with no cultural unity, which led to very weak depthless portrayals, and even far more artless dramatic interactions between the characters on screen. The affected mannerisms by the actors played out more like burlesque than anything seriously intended to communicate humanity to the audience.
The direction and filmography of the movie seems to have come from a place that was either cognisant of these limitations and therefore endeavored to cover for them with various tricks of the trade, or was complicit in the negligence and it was, again, all they could do to hide this behind special effects, set design and costuming, and hope nobody watching caught the flaws.
The movie just doesn't work primarily because the people behind it were either too lazy, overwhelmed, or uninterested with delving into real research on the people and cultures that they were seeking to populate their production with. Instead they seem to have just copy pasted whatever they could put together from quick scans of Google search results and hoped for the best. There are numerous examples of this from the movie, but just one will suffice to show the extent of the travesty. The Jabari tribe, a mountain dwelling, wood carving, isolationist tribe, that worships Hanuman (the Hindu monkey god!), and whose calculated role in the movie seems to be to make the political statement that not everyone is for technological advancement, yet their leader (who sometimes speaks with a generic accent, other times with an Igbo one) makes a challenge for the throne of Wakanda. How farcical is that?
Perhaps someone will say that bringing an over critical eye to the movie experience is what's at fault here, that if I had just managed to get past the flaws I would have allowed myself to be entertained, but that to me is not how movies work. Films work, I contend, by directly engaging the audiences sense of empathy. They invite us to believe that the persons on the screen are real persons going through real imaginable experiences with real emotional consequences. We get to see this emotions captured on the faces of the actors, be it a smile, laughter, anger, sadness and everything between. Our minds ability to take flight, or get immersed within this simulation of life depends a great deal on its authenticity. By this I don't mean how realistic it is relative to everyday life (Audiences connect with animations and fantasy movies all the time). Rather, I mean how much our minds feel that the emotions, situations and characters portrayed mirror stimuli that is within our repertoire of familiarity. The more familiar, the more authentic and the more engaging the material is. Black Panther was simply none of this.
And that is really the tragic part, because all that that hype on steroids seemed to dwell on were notions on representation, the celebration of a hitherto marginalized people, the idea that finally peoples of African descent could go to the movies and see their lives reflected on the big screen. Instead, what Black Panther proves is that, for truly authentic African stories to be told, it's not the amount of money thrown at the project and the marketing thereof that will make the difference, but the heart and commitment of the storytellers in relation to their subject matter.