I think the best parallel for Killmonger is Magneto (and unlike my previous post, I’m serious here). You have the same dynamic between Killmonger and T’Challa that you have between Magneto and Charles Xavier. Two men who generally agree on a goal but disagree on the means to get to that goal. One man wants to work within the system for slow and steady progress by changing attitudes; the other man wants to overthrow the system, eliminate anyone who challenges him, and impose his ideals by force.
There’s the further parallel of the differing backgrounds of the two characters explaining their different methods. One character in each pair grew up in a wealthy and protected environment while the other character grew up in an impoverished environment surrounded by violence.
I love the Godfather parallels, but I have a movie question.
Were there pilots and crew in the Wakandan transports that Ross shot down? (Or were they remotely piloted?) If so, doesn’t anyone care about all their deaths?
Quite sure. Those are nothing at all like the mountains depicted in the movie as the home of the Gorilla tribe. It takes more than snow to make mountains like that. Take it from someone who grew up near the Sierra Nevada crest.
The Rwenzori Mountains, however, do seem to be a close fit. So I am no longer upset by that depiction, since Uganda is roughly in the area covered by the fictional Wakanda.
Well, just a single battle, but yes, despite the bloodless appearance there must certainly have been casualties on both sides which is a problem the MCU has struggled with. It was actually embraced in the beginning of Civil War, forming the impetus for “The Sokovian Accords”, only for the heroes to later face off at the airport, blasting each other with particle cannons, throwing cars and exploding fuel trucks at one another, and then somehow shocked when Rhodes falls out of the sky and suffers an actual critical injury. There must certainly have been hundreds if not thousands dead in The Battle of New York in The Avengers, and going back to at least Thor the various movies have destory entire towns, had destructive fights in the middle of cities, not to mention all of the uncontained radiation and toxic materials that certainly must be strewn across the planet by now. And from what we’ve seen of the larger cosmic MCU from the Guardians of the Galaxy films and Thor: Ragnarok, the greater world beyond Earth is a lawless and violent place where death and slavery are common and largely unrestricted. The MCU is actually a pretty chaotic and cruel place, all things considered.
Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, or serious, or just riffing on the MCU (or MU, in general) and how they ignore the implications of everything.
If T’Challa was willing to not kill Erik, to try to bring him back into the fold, then maybe the people manning the transports deserved a second chance. When you start killing the ones you’re fighting for, then maybe you might be in the wrong. It was the lesson that Erik missed, and I was wondering if the movie missed it, too.
I was kind of struck by how bloodless the battle was. Killmonger describes a vibranium spear as equivalent of an anti-tank weapon. You’ve got hundreds of infantry attacking eachother on foot with anti-tank weapons, you expect people are going to end up dismembered left and right. Mostly what I remember seeing is lots of people being knocked in the air semi-comically, and not a lot of corpses on the battlefield at the end.
T’Challa offered to save Killmonger after his plans were defeated and he was personally incapacitated. The transports, on the other hand, had to be shot down, or Killmonger’s plan would succeed. The pilots deserved a second chance as much as Killmonger, but there was no way to give them that second chance without letting Killmonger win, and letting a bunch of assholes who were on-board with starting a global war get a do-over is less important than making sure that global war never happens in the first place.
I agree. I found it off-putting. I get in the big battle the two sides going all out-- but T’Challa takes out that first transport just to make a dramatic entrance–it would have been more powerful for him to down the transport and pull the pilot out to safety and then walk up with his “The challenge isn’t over yet.”
It’s a tricky balance. NPR’s Glen Weldon, a specialist in comics who has written books about Batman, believes that it’s an ironclad rule that superheroes don’t kill (a reason he didn’t like the movie Man of Steel), but that can easily get silly, like the A-Team or G.I. Joe firing military weapons everywhere but never killing anyone.
You’re probably thinking, “My boyfriend said this was a superhero movie but that guy in the suit just turned that other guy into a fucking kabab!” Well, I may be super, but I’m no hero. And yeah, technically, this is a murder. But some of the best love stories start with a murder. And that’s exactly what this is, a love story. And to tell it right… I gotta take you back to long before I squeezed this ass into red spandex.[RIGHT]— Wade ‘Deadpool’ Wilson[/RIGHT]
I wasn’t just talking about the snow, but also the chain nature, altitude and general peakiness. Perhaps you had a more specific geological feature in mind - I don’t recall any particular foldedness or volcanism on display in BP, so am now unsure what you meant by “geology”.
The Drakensberg Mountains *were *some of the mountains actually used in the film for aerial shots (in addition to a local canyon) but as far as I know, only for that intro flight.