Out of Africa: Black Panther arrives with a bang
Chadwick Boseman, star of Marvel’s new superhero blockbuster, recalls how he became involved in the film
Long before he was cast as the first black superhero of the modern Marvel era, and before he brought King T’Challa of Wakanda to life in his own groundbreaking standalone tentpole, Chadwick Boseman was keeping notes on what a Black Panther movie should be.
“I can remember several times writing in my journals: ‘That would be a cool thing to see in Black Panther — ideas from real life, from real history, or real archaeology or architecture,’ ” said Boseman, 40, taking in the sunshine on a Beverly Hills hotel terrace in the midst of a frenetic press tour.
“The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people — to black people,” said Boseman, a playwright and theatre director turned actor and, now, blockbuster movie star.
“To see black people in ways which you have not seen them before. So Black Panther was on my radar and in my dreams.”
Having come to wide attention as baseball legend Jackie Robinson in 2013’s 42, Boseman went on to play James Brown in Get On Up the following year and then-future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in last year’s Marshall. That run of critically acclaimed performances cemented Boseman as a go-to actor for (real life) heroes even before the high-profile Black Panther gig came along.
Fifty-two years after debuting in the pages of Marvel Comics, the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby is getting his biggest pop culture berth yet. Directed by Fruitvale Station and Creed helmer Ryan Coogler, and co-written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther arrives in theatres tonight on a wave of overwhelming critical acclaim and is poised for a United States box-office opening in the range of $150 million US.
Boseman and Coogler, 31, have already made an impact with their take on Black Panther, a sprawling work of Afrofuturistic fantasy flair exploding its way out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula and flourishing in the absence of, well, the Avengers. Instead of Tony Stark and his crew, it’s Boseman’s T’Challa and his fellow countrymen and women — played by Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Danai Gurira, Forest Whitaker, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke and Angela Bassett, leading a predominantly black cast — who take centre stage.
The lineup of black talent in front of and behind the camera, unprecedented for a movie of this scale, has already established Coogler’s film as a standardbearer for black representation in Hollywood. Even the setting — the fictional African country of Wakanda, a tech-forward tribalist nation that has long kept its advances, and its stockpiles of the powerful metal vibranium, secret from the outside world — is revolutionary in the comic-book genre.
Coogler’s world-building is transporting and vibrant, weaving the DNA of African cultures into the fabric of the film with the help of collaborators both new (veteran costume designer Ruth E. Carter) and familiar (production designer Hannah Beachler, cinematographer Rachel Morrison). But it’s within the fraught dynamic between the hero and his primary adversary where Black Panther deftly explores subversive and probing concerns around race, history, heritage and identity.
Building off T’Challa’s introduction in Captain America: Civil War, Boseman steps fully into the hero’s suit with stately gravitas as the newly crowned king wavers between his late father’s isolationist principles and the impulse to open Wakanda to the world. In the process, he encounters a new threat in the form of a mysterious American dubbed Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, who has starred in each of Coogler’s films).
Back in 2013, Boseman was overseas in Zurich promoting 42 when he got the career-changing call from Marvel’s head honchos. Boseman admits he weighed the pros of taking on the role against the only con, in his mind — “that Marvel might not be as committed as they should be to making a Black Panther movie on par with the other movies that they make, that it would be some kind of secondclass citizen, a second-class superhero movie for black people.”
Walking into his first meeting with Marvel’s cinematic brain trust, including studio head Kevin Feige and executive producers Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso and Nate Moore, put him at ease.
“I went in and I met with them — and I saw that Nate was black,” he said with a laugh, “which was important because as a minority you can have this viewpoint of how it looks inside the corporation and inside the building — this view that it’s a table full of white men, because we’ve had to deal with tables full of white men a lot. To walk in there and see that there were women and that one of the shot-callers was black made me feel more comfortable with what was going on.”
The battle to realize Black Panther in the right ways began before Coogler came onboard, as Boseman shaped the character for his Captain America: Civil War debut. One of his hardest-fought victories was keeping T’Challa’s accent grounded in his African roots, for which the actor travelled to South Africa chose a South African dialect coach.
The people of Wakanda had never been conquered by British or other colonists, but unnamed parties behind the scenes suggested T’Challa should have a British accent, an American one or even one just a few shades more European, said Boseman.
“Well, why would he have gone to study anywhere? Who could educate him outside of Wakanda?” he argued, opening the door for the Black Panther cast to use a range of authentic accents — including the South African tongue Xhosa, the canonical official language of Wakanda. “That makes no sense. As wealthy and advanced as Wakanda is, he must speak to his people in his language and in their sound.”
Perhaps surprisingly for an expected blockbuster, Black Panther proudly represents not only a wide swath of heritage, history and celebratory black identity, but touches openly on the ripple effect their presence and absence can have across generations.
“The truth of the matter is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the whole Marvel bullpen created Wakanda and created T’Challa and created Black Panther, and made him a smarter, more accomplished character than any of the other white characters, in the mid-1960s,” Feige told journalists after the film’s première.
“They had the guts to do that in the mid-1960s. The least we could do is live up to that and allow this story to be told in the way it needed to be told, and not shy away from things that the Marvel founders didn’t shy away from in the height of the Civil Rights Era.”
Black Panther Where: Capitol 6, Cineplex Odeon Westshore, Landmark Cinemas University Heights, SilverCity Imax Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Martin Freeman Directed by: Ryan Coogler Parental advisory: PG Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of four NEW YORK — The supposedly cosmically vast Marvel Cinematic Universe spans planets peppered throughout the galaxy, but Ryan Coogler’s Earth-bound Black Panther, glittering and galvanizing, stands worlds apart.
For those of us who have sometimes felt pummelled by the parade of previous Marvel movies, the sheer richness of Coogler’s film is almost disorienting. Can superhero films, so often a dull mash of effects, be this dazzlingly colourful? Are genuine cultural connections allowed in modern-day comic-book blockbuster-making?
Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, Black Panther has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. As the most earnest and bigbudget attempt yet at a black superhero film, Black Panther is assured of being an overdue cinematic landmark. But it’s also simply ravishing, grand-scale filmmaking. There are familiar Marvel beats here. Just as he did in the surprisingly sensational Rocky reboot Creed, Coogler hasn’t reinvented the genre so much as electrified it with a new perspective and a rare talent for marrying naturalistic character development with spectacle muscle.
“Tell them who you are” is the encouragement shouted at the title character, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) prince of the African nation Wakanda. But it could just as well serve as the overarching rally cry of a film that for many symbolizes a bigscreen affirmation of AfricanAmerican identity. Black Panther stands for everything that’s been missing from Marvel’s — and Hollywood’s — universe.
Coogler opens with exposition on Wakanda, a mighty African country that appears from the outside, as one Westerner sneers, as Third World. But hidden from sight is a shimmering, technologically advanced metropolis whose stealthy growth has been fuelled by vibranium, a cosmic mineral deposited deep in its mountains by a meteorite thousands of years earlier.
Vibranium makes up the suit that T’Challa dons as Black Panther, and its power is much guarded. An early flashback, to 1992 Oakland, California, shows one Wakandan’s failed efforts to smuggle Vibranium in order to empower struggling AfricanAmericans.
When the king of Wakanda dies, T’Challa returns home to take the throne, where he finds the country’s five tribes — each with their own distinct colour and attire — are beginning to bubble with discord.
W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) of the Border Tribe, in particular, would like to see the historically isolationist Wakanda give more in foreign aid and to refugees.
The issue is brought to the fore by an unknown Wakandan exile, Erik (Killmonger) Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), an Americanmade soldier who aspires to take Wakanda’s power to rebalance black power around the globe. “The world’s going to start over and this time we’re on top,” he vows in the film’s climactic moments.
But his mission isn’t initially so clear, as he and a band of rogues, led by Andy Serkis’ black-market arms dealer Ulysses Klaue, begin causing havoc for T’Challa. Boseman’s Panther is a politician at heart who’s virtually always flanked by a trio of powerful women: Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, part of Wakanda’s all-female special forces, the Dora Milaje; the special forces leader Okoye (Danai Gurira); and his younger sister Shuri (a terrific Letitia Wright, who supplies most of the film’s comic moments).
There are the expected special effects set-pieces and a very Bond-like trip to a South Korean casino. But the conflict at the heart of Black Panther is between separate factions of an African diaspora in a mythological realm filled with colonizers and racists who curse the Wakandan as “savages.” It’s powerful mythmaking, not just for its obvious timeliness, but for the film’s sincere grappling with heritage and destiny.
The traditional-meetsfuturistic costumes and jewelry, by Ruth E. Carter, are ravishingly detailed. T’Challa’s mystical visit to his ancestors is gloriously rendered on a twilight plain beneath a pink-hued sky and the glowing eyes of panthers in a tree. Most of all, Jordan’s bitter, wounded warrior is uncommonly tender. He is a villain only in quotes. His means are extreme, but his cause is just.
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther first appeared in 1966. But the character has sparked the imaginations of many since, including the filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Snipes, who laboured for years to adapt the comic into a movie. (Ironically it was Snipes’ 1998 superhero film Blade that kicked off Marvel’s box-office success.)
It’s easy to lament how long it took to bring Black Panther to the big screen. But at least the wait was worth it.