Right, but I’m saying that he didn’t to intend to do the whole business with finding Bucky and then breaking him out. He only did that to have Bucky tell him where the tape was.
The use of Bucky was not in the original plan.
That unhappy combination is quite enough for me to consider someone a villain. No, he wouldn’t consider himself a villain, but that’s hardly a useful metric, since almost no villains consider themselves villains.
Now, if his plan were just to peacefully support blacks around the world, and his plan required him to be King of Wakanda to do that, and he was only interested in killing T’Challa (and only T’Challa) because ritual combat is the way you become King of Wakanda, then he would still be an antagonist, but I would agree that he wouldn’t be a villain. But “Conquer the world for good” and “kill your henchman once he’s no longer useful” and “shoot your girlfriend just because she’s in the way” and “kill hundreds of random people, even those you consider Your People, just for practice” all constitute villainy.
Even petty things like burning all the flowers. Like I said, I find it disturbing that so many people consider him not a villain (I’ve seen this take even more in other places like Twitter or even professional critic movie reviews) or suggest that T’Challa didn’t need to imprison him after healing him.
I gathered his plan, such as it was, was to dump crates of sci-fi weaponry with groups he considered downtrodden with the advice to overthrow their oppressors. The movie was pretty vague on this point, I note. Are inner-city black gang members oppressed? Is Al-Qaida oppressed? The Palestinians? Boko Haram? I’m sure they all think so. In any case, it was reasonable to expect a fair amount of chaos for the sake of chaos, something I could picture Killmonger seeking if he was all embittered about the pointlessness of his career as a pawn of the imperialist U.S. government or whatever.
I was also distracted by his doofy hairstyle.
And don’t forget that his motivation came from the death of his father. The father that was a traitor to his country, who betrayed the people and caused many deaths with Klaw, and then tried to kill the king. He was a typical villain with basic villain motivation, revenge and conquest. It would have been more interesting if his endgame looked more like what the BP ended up doing.
Zuri makes it clear, once he’s persuaded to tell T’Challa about what happened, that T’Chaka killed his brother because he was going to kill ZURI, not T’Chaka himself.
Y’know, I was thinking about vibranium and all its wondrous properties, and it occurred to me: What would iron look like, to a society that didn’t have ready access to it? I mean, you can make it into an alloy stronger than bronze, yet still flexible enough to make springs out of, and think of all of the things we’re able to do thanks to that. But that’s only the start: You can also make it produce a mysterious force, that can affect things it isn’t even touching. And you can use that force to make devices that can turn motion here into motion there, or light, or other effects, with nothing in between but thin strands of wire. Even a tiny sliver of this wonder-metal can be used to tell you which direction your ship is heading. And yet, we use it for such trivial matters as holding up our children’s artwork.
Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Throw in some guns and germs and you can conquer the Americas.
Or so Jared Diamond would have us believe.
Nothing new of my own to add, but I just read what is definitely my favorite complaint about the movie.
A friend complained about this on Facebook and I laughed out loud. She posted after having come back from her second screening of the film, confirming that she loved it… except for one part that she absolutely hated. Her complaint is too beautiful not to share:
His father was a trained secret agent who switched loyalties because he came to believe his nation was morally bankrupt: rather than owing allegiance to Wakanda, he decided he owed it to the black diaspora that Wakanda ignored.
That’s not a typical villain motivation.
Killmonger was a trained special forces agent, but he was something of an infiltrator: his loyalty also was to the black diaspora, and he was using the tools he gained from a nation he considered an enemy nation in order to set phase two of his plan in effect. Phase two was to take over another enemy nation (the one that killed his father for idealism, in his view). Phase three was to liberate his people.
Did he kill people along the way? Sure–but a lot of them he killed on behalf of the United States government. Is he a villain for those kills? What about for the kills he did on behalf of oppressed black people–is he a villain for those kills?
Mind you, I think he’s a villain, but his justification was a lot more interesting than that of most supervillains, IMO.
My thinking is that when Killmonger asked, “Is this all of the plant?” and the gardener said “Yes,” she was speaking roughly. When he said “burn all that shit,” she almost said, “You know we’re gardeners, we have a stock of seeds,” but then decided she didn’t need to mention that.
He says himself that a lot of the kills he made on behalf of oppressed black people, were themselves the oppressed black people that he’s supposedly saving. That’s classic villain material, there.
So, I know we’re not supposed to get political here, but his character motivations are fundamentally political. I’m hoping that by talking about how I think he sees it I’m in the clear.
Yeah, he says something like that. A lot of the folks he killed in this manner, I suspect, were kills made through his role as a special service soldier. It is inconceivable that a character with his view of colonialism would consider US military policy to be justified, so he’d see many of the folks he was ordered to kill (or ended up killing as collateral damage) as members of oppressed classes. Is he a villain for those kills?
Every nation’s military policy includes allowances for killing civilians: it’s regarded as a tragic but unavoidable cost of engaging in warfare. Killmonger seems to have internalized that idea and to have applied it to his own personal ware waged on behalf of oppressed people. Is he a villain for killing civilians in his drive to win that war?
Mind you, I’d say yes, but in order to avoid politicking, I’m just gonna say I’ve got a minority view of military policy :).
One could also say that he’s villainous for deliberately signing up with a military he considers fundamentally evil. He didn’t consider any of his US military kills to be justified, and yet he made those kills anyway.
[Moderating]
And you’re well on the safe side of the line, on politics in CS.
Yeah, that’s for me a big piece of his villainy–but I’d take it further than that.
There’s a book that shaped my views: The Crooked Timber of Humanity. I recommend it every chance I get. In it, Isaiah Berlin says something like, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette–and in order to make the ultimate omelette, there’s no end to the number of eggs you’ll be willing to make.” He’s talking here about the propensity for ideologues to engage in mass murder, whether it’s Stalin or Hitler or Pinochet or Mao; and he’s talking about how deeply suspicious we should be of ideologues, and indeed how deeply suspicious we should be of the “break a few eggs” philosophy.
Killmonger made those kills because he thought it was the only way to achieve his dream of a revolution of the oppressed. He was willing to break a helluva lot of eggs to make his omelette.
It’s a common philosophy, and one that I consider pretty villainous.
Besides the whole Keyser Soze “kill your girlfriend rather than let her be leverage against you” move. Coogler clearly wanted Killmonger to be seen as bad, poisoned by the his family flaw/legacy. But his basic point - Wakanda/empowered Black people should engage - is what swayed T’Challa.
That whole ambiguity is what elevates the conversation about this “superhero” movie.
In the comics, yes. In real life, that’s real life.
I did love having Q be an African woman. John Cleese can step aside now. 
Something I loved and what I’m sure was completely deliberate was the different styles of talking between the Wakandans and Killmonger. Everyone associated with the African nation spoke with the heavy African accent and said “cannot” instead of “can’t” and stuff like that. Killmonger, on the other hand, was raised on the streets in Oakland and spoke like it. He had an American accent and spoke way more street. It shows good attention to detail.