a string of stereotypes

Rating: 5/10 (27 May 2018)

There are things we know.
° The technologically advanced show their power by fighting. (Though really their most impressive feat is containing a rhinoceros in a rickety wood rail fence.)
° Powerful female warriors are all tall, thin, striking, and beautifully dressed.
° Bullets bounce off magic unitards. (Of course we've known this since the first Superman comics were printed. Well, I guess I didn't know it quite that far back, since that was before I was born back in the Middle Ages.)
I understand why it was popular: the social shift, whose importance I don't dispute. But otherwise I saw little to recommend it; that social shift deserves better -- deserves real characters and drama, not poor comics. At least a third of the movie is spent in fights (seemed like more ... they felt interminable), which drew far more on CGI than on choreography. The plot is shallow and uninventive. Yes, few things in art are truly new, but this hardly has any new slants. I look at the long list of quotes from the movie on IMDb and don't see a single one that I'd call interesting.
Stereotypes abound (see above) -- I've probably forgotten some in the days since I saw it. Vibranium bears an eerie resemblance to the magic lozenge that W S Gilbert wanted to use as a plot device and which his equally famous collaborator rejected. I found it insulting that Wakandans' success was basically credited to an accident of place rather than to their skills and ingenuity.
In stories *about* the movie, much is made of African tribes, African history. I did not sense much of that in the actual movie though. Mostly lots of fights and individual posturing. Very little sense of any community. To the extent that tribal customs and dress were represented, they were so subsumed to the action as to be no more than background, and obscured background at that.
Oh, Africa? AFAICT, not a single frame was shot in Africa. Studio work was all done in or near Atlanta GA. The "British museum" scene was shot in the High Museum in Atlanta, and the "Oakland" basketball court was in Atlanta. They went to the expense and logistics of spending a lot of time filming in South Korea -- scenes which were almost entirely fights. The dramatic waterfall, scene of fights that seem to go on forever, is in Argentina. Africa is represented by three continents, but Africa is not one of them.
The soundtrack is resolutely late Romantic European style, with a few splashes of late 20th century American popular and general movie-score music. If there's anything in it that sounds African, I don't recall it, and don't hear it in the soundtrack sampler on IMDb. Isle of Dogs has more that sounds African. (The soundtrack sampler seems to consist only of the parts by Ludwig Göransson, and there are other soundtrack credits, so perhaps some are more apt. I do hear a bit of kalimba in one of the Göransson samples ... but the string orchestra accompaniment wipes out the African effect.)
OK, it was a superhero movie. I don't watch those -- this was my first ever -- so I didn't really expect much. It lived up to my low expectations but did not exceed them. I don't doubt that (as widely reviewed) it's better than all the other superhero movies, but that's a low hurdle in my book. I recognize that the black cast is an important innovation in this genre and understand why that excited many people, but the genre lags movies in general. I won't say I was bored during it, but in looking back, I'd rather I had spent my time watching something else.