He was supposedly going to wear a leotard, so may have dodged a bullet, there.
I just saw it and as a white woman, felt underrepresented. (Kidding - it was noticeable to see “almost no one like me on screen,” but it didn’t bother me. I noticed what you did.)
Oh, and it was good. It wasn’t awesome in that blockbuster sort of way. But it was well constructed, well acted, had its moments of both charm and suspense - as well as political relevance. And it had some very easy to look at people in it.
As a white guy (arguably), I wasn’t insulted by the white characters at all. There were two main white guys in the film - the secondary bad guy who mocks the hero and kills people with glee, and the comic relief sidekick who’s out of his depth but comes through at the end. Both did a good job, but they were clearly supporting roles.
Anyway, a good, solid movie - maybe not the best of the Marvel films, but certainly in the upper third. Intelligent script, good acting, great action, wonderful design. Could have stood to be a bit longer, in fact. I would have liked to spend more time in its world.
I find this mentality bizarre in the extreme. The villain of every comic book movie I have seen has been a white guy with the exception of Daredevil, and I have never felt the least bit uncomfortable or challenged. Why would anyone feel associated with a comic book villain just because they are the same race?
Saw it last night. I thought it was excellent! Easily one of, if not the best, Marvel films. I’m really not into the whole MCU/characters from everywhere getting stuck together-stuff, so I very much appreciated that this had (almost?) nothing do to with any other film.
I guess? I don’t know, I didn’t really notice or think of it like that? There are only what, two white characters? One of whom, Martin Freeman, seemed to me like he was a recurring character from another film that people already know (I haven’t seen all the recent Marvel movies) and the other, Andy Serkis, seemed like a typical Marvel villain you’d find in every other film.
One thing I thought was really cool
Andy Serkis’s villain is dispatched pretty early on and NOT by the hero! And the actual “bad guy” of the film, Warmonger, isn’t really even a bad guy! His death does *not *inspire cheers from the audience.
Serkis was first in Avengers 2, he gets dehanded by Ultron. Freeman was in Civil War. As I understand it Everett Ross is really buffoonish in the comics.
I wasn’t insulted by them either but their treatment caused me a little discomfort and a lot of self awareness. The white minorities in the film were:
(1) The criminal. He starts off as a comic book villain who whose background and motives are basically unknown. We just know he is bad and wants to do bad things.
[spoiler]And the movie dispatched him unceremoniously and demotes him to “MacGuffin,” a mere physical object used by others to advance the plot so so we can focus on the characters that really matter. He wasn’t even important enough to be killed by our hero./spoiler the bumbling sidekick who embarrasses himself essentially every time he speaks due to his failure to recognize the depths of his ignorance, and
(3) the white museum curator who was corrected in her area of expertise by the black guy who walked in off the street. This suggests that every white person is basically intellectually inferior to every black person in the film.
These three people are almost every depiction of a black person in mainstream cinema before roughly 1995. You could be a criminal, a hapless sidekick, or a stereotype of stupidity. This leaves out other stock black characters including “love object whose relationship with the white protagonist is opposed by society,” “magical negro,” and “helpless person who needs to be rescued by white savior.”
Except, Martin Freeman is a two-fer, because he was also the helpless person who needed to be saved by the black heroes.
Nearly every other movie gave you a white hero to associate with so you could choose to associate reflexively with the white hero as an alternative to the white villain. In this discussion at least, you seem to be associating with the white people I’ve mentioned rather than all the black people who lead the film.
In your earlier response, you ask why filmmakers would want to “insult their audience like that.” I can take this two ways - charitably, because you mean why would filmmakers insult their audience by having any dimensionless characters. But, that’s a problem with essentially all superhero movies, not this just one. If that were your objection, you wouldn’t be avoiding this movie because of my warning; you would avoid essentially all comic book movies.
Or I can your comment it the way that I believe that you meant it - why would filmmakers insult white people by depicting white people this way on screen? (1) The audience for this film, or for any film, isn’t limited to white people. Why are you assuming that the audience is only white people who would be offended by the depiction? (2) This is exactly the question that black people have been asking for decades. Why do white filmmakers insult their minority audiences with the cheap minority characters I describe above?
I didn’t know Martin Freeman’s character was recurring. Like I said, I really just know what I saw in this film. I’m glad you didn’t pick up on the racial undertones. It shows that it can be enjoyed like any popcorn film without paying attention to the racial aspects. But I think paying attention to it adds to my appreciation of the film.
And I agree with your spoilered comment that Warmonger isn’t a bad guy.It’s much more interesting to have a bad guy with depth and human motives we can understand even if we disagree with them. That’s a lot more like real life and helps us to understand other people’s viewpoints. Movies have been described as empathy machines. We need empathetic antagonists for those machines to work.
Why is 23 years ago the standard?
I was hoping for a Samuel L Jackson cameo.
I was thinking of major studio releases of Spike Lee and John Singleton films and trying to remember off the top of my head when those films came out. Those films represented the start of black characters in major releases that weren’t the stock figures I described above. Unfortunately, black stereotypes didn’t disappear from Hollywood releases all at once.
Just back from seeing it.
You mean the guy who threw himself in front of the bullet, and stayed piloting the plane when it seemed that doing so was again likely to be sacrificing himself? They took the bumbling comic book character and made him heroic, informative about information the Wakendans were ignorant of, quick to recognize that there was more to Wakenda than it appeared, and appropriately deferential to those who knew more and were more capable than him. He was not the hero but there was nothing about him that was bumbling.
Killmonger was just “the black guy who walked off the street”?
White characters were simply not characters of focus or particular interest in this film. That’s not insulting. White guy here, and someone would really have to work at being insulted by this movie.
My take on the movie:
Black Panther himself is just not an extremely interesting character. Excuse the choice of words, but pretty white bread, at least as played. Killmonger was of more interest though. Pretty much all the female characters were more intriguing.
As mentioned already, many Wonder Woman parallels, mostly along the lines of how the superhero emerges from an insular utopia of those superior to the rest of the world to becoming engaged with the fate of humanity as a whole, pushed to some degree by a strong relative that they had not previously known of who sees humanity (or at least current civilizations) as … not worthwhile.
It takes itself a bit too seriously for my tastes, could use a bit more humor. But I did like how the “another broken white boy for me to fix” made sense at the end.
Trumpistas, reading online about the 13 Mueller Russian indictments: “Thank god all the libtards are out watching the schvoogie superhero movie.”
Well, not long after you got the best movies of Denzel Washington’s career and he certainly doesn’t match any of those stereotypes. You also got Wesley Snipes and Will Smith as action hero leads shortly after that. I don’t think the stereotypes you’re talking about have been the rule in mainstream films for quite a while.
Just saw it, and I thought it was terrific! The only thing that wasn’t among the best in the MCU was the action scenes – I thought those were pretty generic. But the design, performances, characters, setting, style, etc., were all at the top of the MCU movies.
Killmonger.
Huh, I just realised, with “Ironmonger” in Iron Man, that’s two XXXMonger villains in the MCU. I can’t wait for Fruitmonger in the next phase…
Also in comics, Hate Monger, an boy from Brazil Hitler clone. And apparently someone called Peace Monger on a Google.
My only complaint was that the character of Killmonger [spoiler]died basically just to have a nice neat ending.
I don’t know about how the character is in the comic books but Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger, Ryan Coogler’s Killmonger, was redeemable. Especially since the hero recognized that this was a “monster of our own making”.
Once T’Challa incapacitated him in battle with a not immediately fatal wound, he could have rushed him directly to the infirmary and then there would have been many Wakandan sunsets for him to witness.
To get the nice neatly packaged ending, they have Killmonger say that he’d rather die than live in bondage which, although the sentiment was in character, didn’t have to be his only options. His direct adversary was the damned King! As King, T’Challa easily could have said, “Yeah, you did some really bad shit, but we failed you in the first place.”
Going forward, he would have been a great Ally-But-Not-Ideologically-Aligned kind of a character, actually, I think he would have had the potential to be one of the all time best of that kind of character. He definitely had a lot more to offer going forward. I could totally understand him dying in the original script but once the character was fully realized someone should have said, “Hey, waitaminute, let’s keep this character around!”[/spoiler]
That’s my only complaint about the film.
Loved it.
Oh! And a P.S. shout-out to Academy Award Nominee Rachel Morrison as the Director of Photography! This was a beautiful looking film!
Super hero movies aren’t my favorite thing in the world, but I’m kinda stoked about the whole thing. I’m going to try to see it today.