Over the weekend Black Panther grossed an astonishing $218 million at the box office in spite of the fact—or perhaps because—it is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant, but I can’t tell you what they are really, and the movie is delightfully uninterested in exploring them. What’s more important is that T’Challa presides over an African country called Wakanda that secretly possesses the most advanced technology in the world. A meteorite made of an alien element called vibranium landed there in prehistoric times and the Wakandans figured out how to use it in wondrous ways. To keep themselves safe from slavers and colonial powers, they have made it seem as though Wakanda is one of the poorest countries in the world rather than the richest.
Wakanda is the true superhero of Black Panther, not T’Challa—and the movie is really about whether its cultural isolationism can survive in the 21st century and whether it ought to. This was an inspired storytelling decision by cowriter-director Ryan Coogler that makes Black Panther an entirely fresh take on the Genre That Has Swallowed the Movies.
Even better, Coogler and his collaborator, Joe Robert Cole, have created the best Marvel villain. He’s a mysterious smuggler called Erik Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan (the star of Coogler’s previous hit, Creed). Killmonger turns out to have a hidden connection to Wakanda. The smuggler’s motive in taking on T’Challa is both personal and ideological—and for Killmonger, extremism in pursuit of black power is no vice. I doubt that Coogler and Cole had George Bernard Shaw in their thoughts as they wrote the screenplay, but they have followed his brilliant example in putting the most powerful arguments in the mouth of their most ethically questionable character.
Kevin Feige, the producer who supervises the Marvel empire, may be the most creative motion-picture executive since Irving Thalberg—whose stewardship of MGM in the 1930s turned that studio into the dominant moviemaking machine of Hollywood’s Golden Age before his untimely death at the age of 37. Thalberg helped define the storytelling tropes of the talking picture and the ways in which elements as disparate as photography and costume design and music could be brought together into a seamless glossy object of fantasy wish fulfillment. Feige has overseen the construction of a self-contained “universe” through 18 movies thus far by getting writers and directors to combine Marvel comic-book characters with stale Hollywood genres and then repurpose both: Ant-Man is a comic heist picture straight out of the 1970s. The Avengers is a friendship-and-conflict-in-combat war picture, a genre that dates back to 1926’s What Price Glory. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a paranoid anti-government thriller. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a John Hughes high-school saga.
For its part, Black Panther is a James Bond movie. T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) is its Q, the person who invents all the cool gadgets. Lupita Nyong’o is T’Challa’s highly competent spy sidekick. They go to South Korea to take down a South African arms dealer (a hugely entertaining Andy Serkis) who has got his hands on some Wakandan vibranium. They encounter a friendly CIA agent on the model of Bond’s Felix Leiter. The good guys and bad guys have a classic Bond confrontation in a casino and then take it to the colorful streets of Busan in a beautifully staged car chase.
But what gives Black Panther its surprising resonance is the conflict T’Challa faces after his father’s death, when he assumes the crown of Wakanda. What moral compromises have his father and the previous kings made by keeping Wakanda hidden from the world? Could they have prevented the slave trade centuries earlier? Might they have used their technology to empower the poor and oppressed in the world rather than protecting themselves? Boseman, an actor I’ve previously found kind of dull, embodies T’Challa’s dilemma with a quiet grandeur that serves to anchor the movie and make you overlook its essential silliness.
Of course the Marvel movie has its own ironclad genre rules: By the time its third act rolls around, there has to be a 20-minute battle scene of some kind that is so ponderous it makes your eyes roll back into your head. Feige and his people must know from marketing research that the audience wants and needs this, so who am I to object? At least this one features some rhinoceroses.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
