Visually striking and smart

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2019)

The first thing that struck me about Black Panther was visual imagery. From a simple detail like a milk cart for a net on a street basketball court to the way the spectators were placed for the ritual over the waterfall to the pastures and futuristic urban landscape of Wakanda. Then came the questions. Like, if your country is in possession of something valuable that allowed you to make extraordinary progress and give your citizens good lives, do you keep it to yourself or do you help others at a risk of losing it all? The movie answers this in a rather naive, simplistic manner. Well, it kind of had to, being a superhero movie. Just as it had to have all those silly fights and rhino robots. But it also had a villain whose goal is actually quite noble, making things beautifully complicated. And that, along with the actual beauty of which there was so much, made it well worth watching.