This Movie Was Perfect, Wakanda Forever

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2018)

First of all, the colors in this movie were gorgeous. The various sunset scenes or the scenes on the ancestral plane just felt so alive and so beautiful. I guess I'm too used to the old washed out "realistic" palette most films favor now where real is shades of brown and grey but Black Panther was just a feast for my eyes with the brilliant colors blasted across the screen. This ties into the fact the outfits were lovely and pretty much like nothing that's seen on the silver screen too much. The whole Pan African inspiration slash futuristic technopunk vibe, I really enjoyed it. I only thought one piece looked back and that was Okoye's (Danai Gurira) wig in the casino scene but given she throws it at an attacking goon I'm sure the bad wig was intentionally. And of course the Panther suit looked really good especially with the lights they gave it to signal how charged it was with kinetic energy, I'm glad they chose purple for T'Challa and gold for Killmonger's suit as those are both royal colors which makes sense for the characters but also breaks they old cliche of Good Guy in Blue and Bad Guy in Red.
The set pieces and scenery(both real and computer generated) were very gorgeous. I liked the big rocks that looked like panthers and gorillas, it brought an epic feeling to the movie something like the Pillars of Kings did for the LOTR movies. Shuri's lab looked very clean, bright, and sparkly which I thought fit the character's personality very well so I'm sure that was an intentional choice and a good one.
I loved almost every single character in the movie and became quite invested in their storylines. I thought certain characters fell a little flat(Everett Ross doesn't really have much going for him other than he's a US government agent and W'Kabi wasn't very interesting) but I think that might have been a time issue where their roles were cut down to keep the movie from running overly long and the characters still worked well in the story so I can't complain.
I did not expect to laugh as much as I did in the theater, there were some parts where the whole audience cracked up and we were all roaring together. That was great, Marvel's been real good at snappy one-liners and quick jokes and this movie definitely keeps that alive. Klaue and Shuri were the ones with most of the laughs but both had a lot more going on than just being comic relief so it never became grating.
Killmonger is, hands down, the best Marvel villain so far. He's got a complex mix of personal motivation and ideological motivation which makes him a heck of a lot more interesting than the old and tired "money, dear boy" or "i just want to rule the world because reasons" motivations you typically find for superhero movie villains. Michael B Jordan I thought played him fantastically, his performance was extremely charismatic, I'm just sorry to see the character leave so soon. To me it didn't make sense to have T'Challa repeat the same mistakes as T'Chaka did by killing his blood but this is somewhat mitigated by the fact T'Challa is shown to actually be making changes to solve the problems that allowed the villain to become who he was in the first place. I still wish they had kept Killmonger on though instead of killing him, that's the most fun I've had watching a Marvel villain since Loki.
The romance of the fill was very smooth, it did not disrupt the plot or hog screen time. Such a breath of fresh air! Though hopefully it will be explored more in Black Panther sequels. You can tell there's much more to it than what was shown and I'd like to see T'Challa and Nakia together as opposed to the separate exes-in-love-still thing they had going in this movie.
This movie also proposes some heavy questions. Is it right for an advanced nation to be isolationist while disadvantaged people suffer around the world? Is violence the only means free a class from oppression or can it be done peacefully? What is the cost of the lost identity many black Americans have with their ancestral homeland of Africa and how heavy do the chains of slavery still weigh on the black men of the US? The movie also speaks strongly in condemnation of colonization and the looting of the natural resources of Africa by foreign powers. It's a thinker as well as your good old smash-bang-flip superhero movie. It ends hopefully, it doesn't leave you feeling down despite the heaviness of the questions it raises and that makes it worth so much more to me. We all need hope. We all need to believe the future will be a brighter place than the present. We all want to believe in heroes.
I think it's crazy this movie is only resting at a 7.9 at the time of this review. I think a lot of the negativity is probably bitterness that this movie continues to outperform standard fare at the box office and people are hating it because it's been so popular to praise. And there's definitely some spoil sports trying to sink a black-directed and majority black cast movie, unfortunately that's the world we live in. Insert the Kanye shrug here, some people are just determined not to have a great time.
I can't find a single solid thing to complain about here in this movie hence my 10. I eagerly await the sequels to this.