I Probably Expected Too Much

Rating: 8/10 (5 March 2018)

When I saw Black Panther in "Civil War," I seriously hoped he'd appear again, and when I heard they were making a film about him, I was thrilled. The glowing reviews added to my excitement. The pluses are that the villain has a rational reason to want revenge, and he wants to stop the oppression of black people. (Sure, he wants to trigger a global race war, but nobody's perfect.) So the plot revolves around real-world issues, not some abstract Nyah-hah-hah take-over-the-world scheme. But the basic premise is preposterous, that you can hide a nation more technically advanced than anyone else behind an invisibility cloak. Where does Wakanda get all its scientific and technological expertise? If students go abroad, doesn't anyone wonder why there are all these exchange students from a dirt-poor country, or what happens to them? And even if Wakanda can cloak itself now, how did it keep its first steam engines secret? And the finale involves a chaotic set-piece battle royale like in "Civil War," again with nobody appearing even to get a skinned knee. Finally, I think they missed an opportunity by killing off Killmonger. In his final scene, he looked like he might be open to redemption. They could have done a lot with him as a flawed but slowly maturing hero.