Linguistic pedant joke alert - in isiXhosa (the real-world language used for Wakandan), Q is the tongue-click version of Q :D.
You win the thread. That’s pretty cool.
Well, I only mentioned it because some people seem to think that white people won’t watch movies without white people in them. Given the number of children’s films I seem to watch that don’t involve humans at all (e.g. Trolls, Zootopia) I can’t really get that worked up about this. Give me a decent story and the odd explosion and I’m good.
Clearly it’s east of Bulungi and Equatorial Kundu, north of Birani and Nambia, and is bordered by Zamunda. This should help you find it.
Oooh cool! I’d wondered if the language used was real, nice to know!
If you’re familiar with isiXhosa, do the actors sound natural to you, or more along the lines of “oooooowne bee-eeer puh-leeeze”?
Gyrate, I often wonder how many of the things that are taken for granted in marketing were taken out of somebody’s nethers and just believed by everybody who came after. Such as, case in point: that people can’t be interested in a character they don’t identify with and that we can’t identify with a character unless they match our census profile. If that were true, nobody would have hired Perrault to tell his tales at court, the compilations of the brothers Grimm wouldn’t have gone beyond a scholarly curiosity and Aesop would never have been more than a beggar in a corner.
I’m not a Xhosa speaker, so I couldn’t really judge, and I haven’t seen the movie yet. But both Kanis (T’Chaka young and old) are native speakers,which would have helped a lot. Certainly Boseman sounded authentic enough the little bit he spoke with John Kani in Civil War.
I’m also told Serkis has a spot-on South African accent in this one, which would be an improvement over his Age of Ultron one, which was good but not great.
I’ve seen Serkis’s character repeatedly described as British, which is not only a bad job in terms of interpreting accents, it misses a whole important subtext of his character.
I don’t think that anyone is arguing that Killmonger was a hero, or that he was redeemed, or anything like that. He was a villain through and through, and remained one right up to the last scene. But he was a sympathetic villain, who did what he did based on an ideology that he stayed true to, and the ideology was based on a real, valid grievance. We can respect that without actually agreeing with him.
As to his plan being overly-simplistic, we were only given the summary of it. I can easily imagine that there were a lot more details behind the scenes that they didn’t bother with in the movie because they’d be boring.
And I didn’t know that they used a real African language for Wakandan. Even without understanding a word of it myself, I can appreciate that level of attention to detail. I could tell that they had put at least some thought into it, though, by the fact that “baba” meant “father”, because words like that tend to end up meaning “father” in human language (compare “dada” and “abba”).
Wow. No, Serkis’s accent in this is very heavily South African (Afrikaans), although his whole performance is so OTT I suppose one could be distracted from the accent.
Saw it last night with the Small One.
It was about a 7/10 for me up to the last 15 minutes, upon which is devolved into the usual Marvel “everyone punch” finale, featuring a boring, undifferentiated final battle between T’Challa and Killmonger.
It was certainly better than wildly illogical Marvel entries like Civil War, but not quite top notch. The unapologetic love of Africa and black people, though, was great and refreshing.
There was nothing wildly illogical about Civil War.
That sheild does not follow the laws of Physics!
I would argue that he’s not a villain. He’s more the antagonist. He’s the guy who’s set up for the protagonist to oppose. He doesn’t have to be a bad guy to fill that role.
In a more charitable interpretation he could even be described as a rival to T’Challa. A competing worldview that tries to gain the Maguffin for itself instead of for the protagonist.
I don’t think anyone can argue that he doesn’t have a series of nested and valid grievances. He certainly has one against the royal family of Wakanda. The king killed his dad and abandoned him in Oakland, for heaven’s sake. But he also has the grievances of all the poor and oppressed black people around the world on his shoulders because he sees the suffering like someone raised in Wakanda can’t. From his point of view, Wakanda standing down is evil and he’s moving to deal with it. That he intends to use evil means to do so is irrelevant from his perspective.
He’s definitely a man who believes in a combination of ‘The Ends Justify the Means’ and ‘Payback’s a bitch’. Not a happy combination.
The villain’s plan is a pretty big part of a movie, and it made no sense at all.
I’m just really excited for the Musical version.
The summary of the plan was to set the avengers against each other - he used Bucky as that catalyst - while I agree that some of his timing was ‘god like’ - all he really needed to do was set a few events in motion and the fallout was going to be obvious.
I can sympathize with the desire to help people of African descent all over the world with Wakanda’s resources. What I can’t consider a good thing is the “we have to conquer and rule all” that goes along with it. I do think that a détente could have been forged between the cousins, but Killmonger’s pride stood in the way.
And it wasn’t even his original plan. He only got Bucky involved because he couldn’t get the tape from the old Hydra guy.
No, the tape was always intended to turn Tony against Cap.
And that makes him tragic and misled, in narrative terms. I agree that there’s a space between Killmonger and T’Challa where something could have been forged. But stubborn pride is a nasty thing in a man. It leads him to decide to die rather than change. T’Challa earns his victory through his ability to see the other side, acknowledge his own limitations and adapt while moving forward.
Killmonger’s actions and plan were certainly evil - and he may even acknowledge that - but the fact is it’s coming in his mind as a response to what might be the single greatest evil in human history.