this movie was political, and i am political. some of my thoughts are political, others are writing oriented. others still are muddled trying to sort one of these categories from the other. i think erik killmonger is an extremely fukking good character. the rest is under a cut.
erik killmonger is a genius. also, he was made ruthless by the united states military. his backstory is shown to be traumatic, but it was his history in the US military, explicitly and repeatedly said to be a colonizing force, that made him violent. (this is a whole essay in itself and i don’t plan to expand on that here.) martin freeman’s role was useful in terms of emphasizing that killmonger is the way he is owing to US military training and efforts as a colonizing body. however, the fact that killmonger grew up black and without a father in oakland is still significant to his character. killmonger was EXTREMELY well done imo and i’m having trouble handling critique against his character.
martin freeman should have died. he was briefly useful in contextualizing killmonger and the excellent butt of white people jokes but then he should have died so that he couldn’t report wakandan shyt back to the US. jesus h christ.
it did not initially strike me as damaging that the majority of the movie’s political message & statements came from killmonger; however, it is significant that they all came from killmonger, who is the villain. i am still ruminating on this. perhaps it is significant that t’challa’s character, being the central figure, had the concerns of government to contend with. he grew up in an environment where his sights had to be on the nation, its people, maintaining isolationism. he undergoes complex character development, but he spends the majority of the film conflicted. the politics/message in a film like this must come from “the believer,” who could not have been the protagonist in this case. from a writing point of view, this is why it didn’t bother me that the political message lay with killmonger, but from a political point of view, it naturally dilutes the message when it comes from the source of the threat. even though killmonger was EXTREMELY sympathetic, he was nonetheless the person we were rooting against. this seems a flaw of the superhero genre more than anything, and it seemed like the ryan coogler was doing his absolute best to fukk with that structure as much as he could, but here we still had to be.
nakia shares and also vocalizes killmonger’s POV, well before we know who killmonger is. this is significant. however, nakia values wakanda, state and people both, and will fight for her beliefs within existing structures (+reform), which is also significant. killmonger is explicitly said to be trying to destabilize the state to further personal aims at the expense of wakandan people, but that doesn’t make this less of a “magneto was right” situation.
no person states a view that someone else doesn’t also share at some point in the film. this seems important and intentional both.
nakia also undergoes considerable character development. she no longer feels so strongly at the end of the film, it seems to me, as she did at the beginning about how sharing resources must come about. t’challa has come to her point of view, nakia has come to his. this pleases me from a writing and character development POV, but i am still processing something politically here. it seems to have to do with killmonger again—he was given a LOT of sympathy, and thank god, but he was not given a similar chance to evolve. this again says a lot about what happens when you have to give the villain your central message. to reiterate—i think the writing here was sublime, but it’s a flaw of the superhero genre that he had to be placed at such incommensurable odds with t’challa. t’challa’s victory did not feel victorious, though; it felt like mourning, and that mitigated a lot of this genre-based shortcoming to me.
w’kabi’s betrayal was a LOT more damaging, from a political point of view, than pretty much anything to do with killmonger, from my white-person point of view. he essentially turned his back on his nation and contributed to the bulk of the fighting in the civil war, electing not to respond to reasonfrom those he trusted, without any obvious character motivation. killmonger is ruthless because the US military made him so; w’kabi betrays without any clear reason. it was an attempt to show another point of view, but it is worse to me (both writing-wise and politically) because he incited violence against his own people baselessly. w’kabi’s seeming lack of motives and martin freeman’s survival are the film’s main flaws to me.
i deeply enjoyed this movie. it felt real, it was well-structured, well-paced, well-acted, well-written, heartfelt, political. i thought michael b. jordan in particular was sublime. i will see it again in the near future.
