A few years ago the idea that a major studio would entrust the next film in their "Cinematic Universe" to an young African-American filmmaker best known for directing Sylvester Stallone to an Oscar nomination would have sounded pretty unlikely.Yet now we have Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, a bracing work of personal vision and political engagement combined with studio resources. Black Panther the character has been around since the 1960's, but his relevance to 2018 concerns has driven enthusiasm and conversation to a level that Marvel will find hard to match. While much of Black Panther takes place in the fictional African country of Wakanda, it is Coogler's conception of a country coming to its own place in the world that gives his film such a unique moral urgency. T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is set to become King of Wakanda shortly after the assassination of his father T'Chaka (John Kani), an event you may remember from Captain America: Civil War. T'Challa is a Prince, but also a protector. In the guise of Black Panther he assists his former lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) in a mission to disrupt human traffickers so that Nakia may come home for his coronation. To the rest of the world Wakanda is an impoverished country, but we learn in an animated introduction that a meteor has provided Wakanda with a mineral called vibranium that has facilitated incredible technological advances. Suri (Letitia Wright, infectiously charming and a source of comic relief) is T'Challa's younger sister and serves as a sort of Q to his Bond, having designed a new Black Panther suit contained in a necklace and displaying a particular talent for controlling vehicles remotely.
Black Panther also contains a second prologue, a scene set in 1990's America involving the death of a Wakandan named N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown). It is this death that, in the body of the film, will drive not only the conflict between T'Challa and Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) but also Coogler's central thematic concern. Wakanda is a nation that exists on its own terms, without the African economic deference to the West that we think of in discussions of foreign policy. What does Wakanda owe the rest of the world? More specifically, what does Wakanda owe black people in other countries? T'Challa believes that protecting his country's independence is paramount, but Killmonger wants to use the Wakanda's vibranium resources to start a worldwide revolution. The idea of geopolitical agency is one of many veins running throughout the film, including questions of how sons must reckon with their fathers' sins and when loyalty to a state conflicts with loyalty to an individual. Though Wakanda has never been colonized, Black Panther also reckons with the legacy of European colonialism. We first meet Killmonger looking at relics taken from Africa by British soldiers, and T'Challa later journeys to South Korea to recover such a relic from the mercenary Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis). The Korean trip turns into the film's best action set piece, a shootout which turns into a car chase which Coogler and cinematographer Rachel Morrison (an Oscar nominee for Mudbound) shoot with a kind of perpendicular visual logic that I don't think I've ever seen before. The climactic battle is a large scale melee that makes use of the conceit that the Black Panther suit can store kinetic energy. Characters react when hit in a self-aware, exaggerated way that calls attention to the use of digital effects, but the one-on-one fights in which T'Challa must defend his throne from challengers are far more visceral.
All of the ideas contained in the screenplay by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole wouldn't matter if Black Panther didn't function dramatically and visually. Coogler has cast the film marvelously well, with great attention to the strong and varied women that the source material requires. Danai Gurira is a standout as the warrior Okoye, head of T'Challa's all-female royal guard and torn by her sense of duty when Wakanda's throne comes under threat. Gurira, a cast member on The Walking Dead, gives the kind of performance which I hope she'll get the chance to repeat as the world of Black Panther crosses over with other Marvel films. Nakia and Suri are also full participants in the action scenes, with Lupita Nyong'o transcending any kind of cliches about what a romantic lead in these action-heavy films should do or be. Chadwick Boseman has been saddled with the burden of playing African-American historical figures in recent films, but in Black Panther there are no expectations to live up to and Boseman gives T'Challa a wonderful kind of tired dignity that turns into something deeper and sadder as the film goes on. The large supporting cast is filled out by such talents as Daniel Kaluuya from Get Out, Forest Whitaker, Isaach De Bankole, and Angela Bassett as T'Challa's mother. All of these actors enrich their roles, and they benefit from the pan-African costume design of Ruth E. Carter.
Black Panther contains a fully realized world of tradition and accountability the likes of which big-budget genre franchise films weren't really built to contain. While I can appreciate the film as something rich and satisfying, I can never really know how it will resonate with so many of the people who've already driven it to box-office success. From an article in The New York Times Magazine by Carvell Wallace:
The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this. “Wakanda itself is a dream state,” says the director Ava DuVernay, “a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” She and Coogler have spent the past few months working across the hall from each other in the same editing facility, with him tending to “Black Panther” and her to her much-anticipated film of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” At the heart of Wakanda, she suggests, lie some of our most excruciating existential questions: “What if they didn’t come?” she asked me. “And what if they didn’t take us? What would that have been?”
0 Yorumlar