Black Panther movie review & film summary (2018)

For all its action sequences (they’re refreshingly uncluttered, focusing on smaller battles than usual) and talk of metals that exist only in the mind of Stan Lee, “Black Panther” is still Marvel’s most mature offering to date. It’s also its most political, a film completely unafraid to alienate certain factions of the Marvel base. It’s doing a great job upsetting folks infected with the Fear of a Black Planet on Twitter, to be sure. To wit, Wakanda has never been colonized by White settlers, it’s the most advanced place in the universe and, in a move that seems timely though it’s been canon since 1967, Wakanda masquerades as what certain presidents would refer to as a “shithole nation.” Coogler really twists the knife on that one: In the first of two post-credits sequences, he ends with a very sharp response about what immigrants from those nations can bring to the rest of the world.

Speaking of endings, Coogler is a man who knows how to end a movie. His last shot in “Creed” is a tearjerking thing of beauty, and the last scene (pre-credits that is) in “Black Panther” made me cry even harder. As in “Creed,” Coogler depicted young brown faces looking in awe at a hero, something we never see in mainstream cinema. “Black Panther”’s last scene is a repeat of the scene I described in my opening paragraph: In the present day, a little Black kid on a makeshift basketball court in Oakland, California disrupts his game to glance up at the sky. Figuratively, he’s about to gain some hope, an addition represented by a humanitarian hero with much to teach him and his fellow basketball players. The young man stares in awe, realizing that his life, and the lives of those around him will be changed.

It’s an ending rife with meta, symbolic meaning. Starting this weekend, a lot of brown kids are going to be staring at this movie with a similar sense of awe and perception-changing wonder. Because the main superhero, and almost everyone else, looks just like them. It was a long time coming, and it was worth the wait. 

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