Rise of the ‘Black Panther’
Radical Marvel superhero muscles in on the act to give Afrofuturism a boost
SOMETIMES you have to see a thing in all its glory before you realise it’s been missing all this time.
Black Panther, the 18th instalment in the Marvel saga, is far from the first black comic-book star to get a film of his own: that would be Spawn in 1997, followed by Wesley Snipes’s Blade the following year, both of whom landed long before the genre mushroomed.
Yet he is the first to lean heavily into an ethos known as Afrofuturism – very roughly speaking, an approach to science fiction and fantasy grounded in black experience and the cultures of the African continent.
In music, it’s been thriving for 60 years plus, thanks to acts from Sun Ra to George Clinton and Janelle Monaé.
But in film it never emerged from its niche. Epic visions tend to demand budgets to match, and the expensive end of the business has always been monomaniacally white. Perhaps, that is, until now. It has taken perhaps the safest commercial bet in cinema today – a new Marvel film – to finally give Afrofuturism its blockbuster due.
Directed by Ryan Coogler with serious muscle and style, and magisterially imagined by production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E Carter,
Black Panther makes you rue that it took this long for a studio to try it.
The shimmering towers, bustling streets and sprawling grasslands of Wakanda, the fictional east African country presided over by our hero King T’Challa (a suitably regal Chadwick Boseman), look almost nothing like Star Wars or Blade Runner – and in the current Hollywood sci-fi canon, that makes its sights virtually unique. A dream-savannah sparkles under rainbow starlight. Holographic read-outs hang in the air like three-dimensional sand paintings. Pilots steer their hover-ships in a meditation pose straight from an old papyrus scroll. Costumes and weapons are tribal finery with a space disco edge.
That all this Willy Wonka-calibre eye confectionery is in the service of a conventional three-act, fall-and-rise superhero adventure can feel a little deflating at times: the sticking points are mostly the same ones as always, including an overly familiar story shape and a final duel.
But in a sense that’s the point of the exercise. Black Panther isn’t a novelty but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is. For one thing, an entire subset of younger cinema-goers are only just about to experience the dizzy uplift of watching a title character in a superhero movie who looks like them under the costume. For another, more voices means better art – pop art included. The plot bridges the gap between 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and the forthcoming Avengers:
Infinity War, and takes in T’Challa’s coronation and a dormant threat to his kingdom that’s consequently shaken awake. This takes the form of Michael B Jordan’s Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, a vengeful Wakandan exile with his own eye on the throne, and Ulysses Klaue – pronounced claw – a brawny arms dealer played by Andy Serkis who speaks in a spicy bark, and whose attentions are turned on the country’s vast deposits of vibranium, an indestructible metal that often comes in useful in films like this.
Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole are attuned to the echoes of real-world colonialism and plunder, and use a little politics to salt the pot. There is a tart exchange at the Museum of Great Britain, when a curator objects to the evil duo stealing some Wakandan relics. “How do you think your ancestors got them?” Killmonger asks.
It’s one of many nicely judged moments of performance here from a wildly appealing ensemble cast without a weak link. Foremost among them is Lupita Nyong’o, who takes to the genre with silken ease as the Wakandan spy Nakia, and in one of the film’s more surprisingly spiky gambits, is introduced rescuing Nigerian girls from a Boko Haram-like militia. Then there’s Danai Gurira’s no-nonsense warrior woman Okoye, and T’Challa’s younger sister Shuri – winningly played by the young British actress Letitia Wright.
Another Brit, Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya, pops up as a Wakandan courtier tending to what can only be described as a Chekhov’s rhinoceros, while a third, Martin Freeman, returns as the US agent Everett K Ross, who ends up swathed in local fabrics, immersed in the culture and generally on the superhero movie equivalent of a gap year. – The Telegraph