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Black Panther Review

What I liked: Most of the Mavel CU takes place in boring places like New York or fake Russia. Real Russia was already copyrighted. Unlike these settings that are essentially genericified giant cities, Black Panther clearly draws from exisiting inspiration but succeeds in creating a vibrant, imaginative world. Wakanda is beautiful, the buildings are cool, the costumes are beautiful and functional, the technology is elegant. This is the kind of setting that most comic book stories need. I also really liked how the women were presented. I think Wonder Woman would have been at home in Wakanda: the general and royal guards are really awesome women warriors. The queen mother and leaders of several of the tribes are clearly respected leaders. Black Panther's Q is his sister, who is spunky and a brilliant engineer who solves every problem from neurosurgery to questionable stablization of probably not unstable metals. The main spy we encounter is Black Panther's ex-girlfriend. I appreciated this as both a non-sensational way to portray real women and a thoughtful acknowledgement of matriarchal societies. I liked seeing several existing characters again. Gollum really bulked up for this role, I'm not sure muscles is a good look for him. Watson has finally lost his mustache from Civil War. As always, Sherlock was right, the mustache was definitely not the look for him. I like the variety of weapons we got to see, the spears were cool and I really liked the circular blades. I liked the rhino armor. Usually when I see a rhino my first thought is not "how could I turn that creature into even more of an indestructible tank?" Clearly this was a failure on my part. I liked the kinetic energy transfer of Black Panther's suit. I'm pretty sure that's not how kinetic/potential energy work but I think it would make high school physics a whole lot cooler if it were.

What I didn't: When you have a to do list with look at the sunset and seek emergency medical attention for being impaled, there is only one acceptable order to proceed through that to do list. There are 4 tribes all united under one king. Why are there only two tribes fighting in the final battle? Were the other like "well let's just sit back and see who wins and just say we were fighting on their side"? I feel like whoever built the metal detector should be fired. The woman walked through with metal bracelets all the way up to her elbows and a giant necklace up to her chin and the detector didn't go off. How is the TSA better at detecting things that a super hero movie? Apparently Vibranium is highly unstable and needs to be inactivated by sonic stablizers. So... is it radioactive? volatile? highly reactive? Regardless of the specifics it doesn't seem like sonic stablizers would be very effective. The only thing that I think you could accomplish would be helping the metal to its resonant frequency. This is probably not a good plan, just ask the Tacoma narrows bridge. The bad guys didn't have great plans. Gollum's plan clearly did not work great. Killmonger's plan was essentially I'm going to kill people. I would be more upset about this if his name wasn't Killmonger. I mean with a name like that what else was I expecting.

Who should watch this? People who like superheroes and people who like awesome costuming

Would I watch it again? Yes.
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Comments

  1. Sarah ChowMarch 8, 2018 at 10:24 PM

    This has been widely commented elsewhere but it's so funny I have to share here: the only two white actors are Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins) and Andy Serkis (Gollum), making them the Tolkien white guys.

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