Marvel unleash a game-changer

Rating: 8/10 (26 February 2018)

When Marvel first announced they would finally be giving their most popular African-based superhero a most overdue solo outing, audiences and critics alike clocked straight away just how important the film would be, not only in the superhero genre, but for mainstream film-making as a whole. In recent years, social media has raised huge question marks over an industry that had been, and still is, failing to honour both women and ethnic minorities in movies, with last year's Wonder Woman being the first superhero movie of note to tackle the issue head-on, delivering astonishing results in the process. Black Panther is not the first black superhero lead - see the likes of Spawn, Blade and Catwoman - but it is the first to truly celebrate African culture and specifically focus on the 'Black Experience'. The results are, again, truly astonishing.
Marvel has unleashed a game-changer, and one that is well on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. But this was never really in doubt when they announced that Ryan Coogler, the enormously talented director behind Fruitvale Station and Creed, would be behind the camera, and expectations then soared as soon as the jaw-dropping trailer hit, which was our first real look at the vibrant and fantastical fictional African country of Wakanda. With Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa aka the Black Panther introduced two years ago in Captain American: Civil War, Coogler has been spared the need for origin story mechanics and has free reign to explore this previously unseen world. The big joke is that the rest of the world think of Wakanda as a third-world country full of goats and farmers, when in fact their technological advancements put everyone else to shame. Yet they choose to keep their major discovery - a crashed meteor carrying mystical substance vibranium - a secret for generations. After a brief read of African history, you can understand why.
So their country is a dazzling, futuristic sight, yet the Wakandans still honour the traditions of their ancestors. With their former king T'Chaka (John Kani) dead at the hands of Daniel Bruhl's Zemo, his son T'Challa has returned to Wakanda to receive his crown. He wants his old flame and active spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) there for his big day, and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), a science boffin who trumps the likes of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner in terms of intelligence and innovation, teases her older brother. Despite an initial reluctance, T'Challa is a willing and capable leader, both politically and physically, able to defend any challengers without the aid of the enhance powers of the Black Panther. While the lack of having to watch the protagonist wrestle with their feelings as they step up to a bigger responsibility is certainly refreshing, the lack of any real arc for T'Challa is one of the very problems with Black Panther. With a supporting cast so vast and impressive, T'Challa often gets drowned out of his own story.
Still, the supporting cast, which includes the likes of Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Daniel Kaluuya, Andy Serkis and Winston Duke, certainly deliver. Wright near steals the film, and Duke, as rival tribe leader M'Baku, makes a big impression in a relatively short amount of time. But a Marvel film wouldn't be complete without a big bad, and Michael B. Jordan's Eric Killmonger is easily their most complex, imposing and sympathetic since Loki. To say more about his character would be giving away spoilers, but Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole lay out his motivation and execution with real precision, and Jordan proves to be a thoroughly menacing presence. The cast, which is one of the best assembled in recent memory, help Cooger sculpt this fascinating world of progression and tradition, and even when the film can't help but indulge in a climax of CGI fisticuffs, you'll remain immersed because you'll care about the characters. Black Panther does something no other superhero has done before it - for me at least - and resonates long after the credits roll, proving timely in exploring the question of whether to build bridges or walls.
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