Black Panther lets itself down — but only a little bit
Yet all of Marvel’s phase three films and their tentative questioning of the underlying political ethos of the franchise feel like buildup for
Black Panther, which in its second act comes very close to completely tearing down the Marvel Cinematic Universe en totale — and making viewers long for such a thing to happen.
The reason once again stems from the villain, Erik Killmonger, played with mesmerizing bravado by Michael B. Jordan. Where the titular character, Wakandan King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), is hesitant and uncertain of how to proceed, Killmonger is brash and certain. He’s confident that his plan — to overthrow the existing world order by arming oppressed peoples around the world and bringing every nation to its knees before Wakanda’s might — isn’t just the right one but the sensible one. No matter what horrors Killmonger commits in the process of building his new world order, it’s hard to disagree with him that the current one is hopelessly broken.
On a purely structural level, screenwriters Ryan Coogler (also the film’s director) and Joe Robert Cole have balanced these two characters by giving each what the other most wants. T’Challa lacks certainty and purpose, which Killmonger has by the boatload. But T’Challa has his people’s loyalty, a loving family, and the throne, all of which Killmonger desperately craves. If nothing else, it’s smart screenwriting.
But it’s also key to the movie’s knotty, complicated politics, in which Wakanda is the US, but also isn’t the US, but kind of is, but only in certain ways, while Killmonger stands in for both black revolutionary movements and American imperialism. A CIA agent explicitly says, “He’s one of ours,” of the American-bred and raised Killmonger (who nevertheless has Wakandan heritage), and his plan to arm potential insurgents the world over to destabilize regimes he doesn’t like and then wash his hands of the chaos is vintage American dirty tricks. But it’s not hard to note that his plan is meant to free oppressed black people the world over, to rebuild something centuries of history didn’t just break but actively shattered.
T’Challa’s Wakanda, meanwhile, is taking its first steps onto the world stage, but only tentatively. It has the money and the technology to really make a difference, but it’s also scared into isolationism by its belief that letting others know what it has would only bring them to its borders. If refugees come to Wakanda, one character warns darkly, then all of their problems will come with them. It’s ultimately a misguided comparison, but when Breitbart’s film reviewer
compared T’Challa to Donald Trump, you could sort of see where the comparison came from.
This is why the film’s third act rings a bit hollow. Where the second act takes its time unpacking all these messy realities of power and oppression, the third act has to find a way to shove them all into the standard “big battle” ending of many a Marvel movie. It doesn’t help that Coogler, one of the most promising directors of his generation, is still learning the ropes of CGI-enhanced special effects, and it turns many of the battle’s most important beats into a confusing mishmash.
But beyond even that, it’s not wrong to think that these questions can’t be resolved by a battle or a debate or an argument. They are questions so fundamental to the way the world is built that shoving them back into a familiar box is the only way some people can process them.
The movie doesn’t fall apart because Coogler and Cole finally decide that the proper answer to this question is synthesis: Killmonger’s aims but T’Challa’s methods. The movie’s final scene, with T’Challa opening the first Wakandan outreach center in Killmonger’s hometown of Oakland, is a lovely one, but its change is incremental. Wakanda will open its borders, but only a little bit. It will still be the world’s wealthiest, most advanced nation, but it will primarily use those qualities to promote its own sovereignty and greatness.
As a fictional construct, that’s more than wonderful. Wakanda is a fantastical kingdom unlike any other fantastical kingdom, built atop cultural, philosophical, and mythological traditions very far from the Western European ones we’re more familiar with from our fiction. It’s a place American stories have long needed, and one that I hope future films (and maybe even a TV series, please?) explore in much deeper detail.
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