Having now seen the movie, I can point out that the isolationist guy who doesn’t want to accept refugees because “they bring their troubles with them” is the same jerk who’s only too happy to join the “let’s conquer the whole world” side. Because yeah, the best way to end refugee situations is by having - a bigger war! The biggest!
slow clap
Why is there controversy associated with this movie?
Or is there controversy associated with this movie?
Controversy? It’s a movie with black people in it, so of course there’s a controversy.
Stark made it in a basement with parts ordered off of Amazon.com. Once he learned that the element was stable, and presumbly whatever properties it has, making it was just a matter of building a pretty small scale cyclotron and aligning the beam with a monkey wrench to produce a visible quantity of it, as implausible as that seems to every physicist who has ever seen the film. Wakanda has no need to create tiny quantities of vibranium; they have a whole large meteorite worth of it that came from…where? Anyway, they’ve clearly gone beyond anything Stark has done with it.
It seems to have all of the properties of vibranium (absorbing and stabilizing energy, preventing the Mind Stone in Loki’s Scepter from working, et cetera). It is never explicitly stated to be anything but “a new element” but the fan speculation is pretty solidly that it is vibranium, and assuming that it has similar chemicall properties should fall in the Group 10 elements below Damstadtium as a hypertransactinide element, but somehow far more stable. And I guarantee that the above is far more thinking about the chemistry and nucleosynthesis than anyone at Marvel Studios has done.
”I spent thirty years protecting that technology from a Stark, I sure as hell don’t intend to give it to another! This isn’t cute technology like the Iron Man suit! This could change the texture of reality!”
Well, that’s hardly the largest problem we have today, but I’m morally certain that Trump would think that Thanos was the real hero of the Avengers saga. (Not Ultron, who is a big loser and basically the Ted Cruz of villians.) Such big hands! And he’s all about winning and impressing Death, yet he doesn’t actually get off his ass to actually do anything, encourages his ‘children’ to fight amongst themselves, and blames his minions when things go wrong. It wouldn’t suprise me at all if Thanos ran a few intergalactic casinos into the ground or supported a now-defunct hyperstellar arena orbball league that nobody wanted to go see. #MakeAnnihilationGreatAgain!
Stranger
Because a handful of vocal racists can’t accept the notion that magical supertechnology drawn from a comic book could be developed by even fictional Africans. Only (white) Americans like Stark or Pym and maybe a few select Asians can do that.
Captain America would like to have a few words with them, BTW.
Stranger
Seri-fucking-ously?
How fucked is that?
I will toss in that dude has trauma- he’s the one whose parents died in the whole Klaw Escapes Wakanda With The Vibranium And Shit Goes Down pre-story. And he was pro-going out and kicking some ass even before Erik walked up and tossed his greatest enemy’s corpse at his feet. I’m not disagreeing with you - it’s not at all logical, but it isn’t an unrealistic or even an unusual response.
I always assumed that the reactor blocked the Scepter’s effect just by serving as a physical barrier. Loki’s trying to poke people in the heart, but he can’t poke Stark in the heart because there’s this chunk of metal in the way. tink tink
And both Starks clearly knew what vibranium was; if that were the new element, they’d have called it that. Besides which, if Tony can make a few grams, he can make more: Why didn’t he make his whole suit out of it?
Well, check upthread and let me know.
The scepter works fine throuh ballistic armor, and in The Avengers during the “Not A Great Plan” scene, the scepter’s emissions are clearly absorbed by Stark’s ARC reactor. Earlier, it absorbs Thor’s hammer lightning and supercharges the suit. So if it isn’t vibranium, is seems to have many of the same qualities.
Ultron makes it clear that he views the Starks’ use of vibranium trivial: “The most versatile substance on the planet, and they used it to make a frisbee.” It may be that Tony Stark cannot make enough of it to armor a suit, or perhaps it has to be alloyed or processed to fix it in some way to make it stable. Cap’s shield certainly doesn’t glow or behave in an unstable manner as the raw vibranium is shown to do. Stark may be able to produce vibranium but not know how to stabilize and use it.
Stranger
Are people boycotting the movie? Rooting in the streets? What the hell?
Most of the “concerted action”, such as it is, seems to emanate from the same general population of alt-right trollolols that tried to game audience ratings for movies like Last Jedi last year. They seem to have been pretty ineffectual all round.
There is apparently an attempt at a “Christian” boycott that seems to be more anti-Disney than anything else.
There also seems to have been a racist fake-news campaign on social media using fake images to claim that non-black moviegoers were getting assaulted by “thuggish” Black Panther fans.
It’s a kind of insecurity, usually paired in my experience with a reasonably high intellect but a lack of compassion and restraint.
What I mean is that they see in this movie what is kind of inarguable: that this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for black people and especially for black women. An all-black country in Africa is actually the most intellectually and technologically advanced society in the world. Not only that, but its warrior elite is made up of women, and its most prominent scientist is barely more than a girl.
When I take note of those things, my reaction might be called condescending (basically, “Awww”), but I’m not filled with rage. The kind of racists who freak out and denounce this movie can’t stand for anyone to deny for a moment, even in a cinematic daydream, that men are stronger fighters than women, or that modern technological advancement has come predominantly from men working in the West and Far East.
This is a churlish, extremely ungenerous worldview. And if anything, you see it more often directed at white female characters. There’s a certain kind of immature, insecure guy who can’t stand to see women on screen portrayed as being tough enough to outfight large, muscular men. They will jump up and down and scream about how this just isn’t physically possible (talking here about regular human characters, not superheroes or aliens).
My attitude is to let women enjoy this power fantasy, since they have to suffer through the daily reality that (as Louis CK so insightfully observed before he became a nonperson) being a woman around men is basically like being a man hanging out with uncaged bears who have hopefully been trained not to hurt you—but no guarantees, good luck to you.
Especially considering how many action movies serve as wish-fulfilment fantasies for average white men. The brilliant nerdy boy whose genius invention or accidental supermutation wins him the entree into some prestigious powerful group, the schlubby ordinary joe who gets recruited by the underappreciated mad scientist, even the trained secret agent who takes out a half-dozen baddies in a single dramatic punchfest—none of this is significantly more realistic than a hardbitten black female Praetorian Guard leader kicking a villain off a cliff.
A good choice, particularly since women for the most part have been letting the vast majority of white male movie viewers who aren’t especially impressive or powerful, either physically or mentally, go on enjoying their own unrealistic action-movie power fantasies pretty much since movies were invented.
Wasn’t this explanation attempted recently by the Orangutan in Chief with the term ‘shithole’?
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I hadn’t thought of that angle, but you make a really great point. For that matter, the same is true of a lot of insufferably stupid, unsubtle beer commercials.
Yeah, it is hilarious how many guys who happily suspend disbelief for the adventures of James Bond or Luke Skywalker suddenly get all concerned about realism when some woman in such a movie is shown whupping some guy’s butt. “That couldn’t possibly happen in real life! This movie is SEXIST AGAINST MEN!!”
I did wonder why no one bothered to point out to him that Erik’s dad, whom he was avenging, was the one responsible for “the whole Klaw Escapes Wakanda With The Vibranium And Shit Goes Down pre-story” in the first place. Hey, how do you like him now?
Why would you assume he’d judge a son for his father’s actions?
Because the son supported the father’s actions. Erik didn’t kill Klaw to avenge Wakanda; he did so to get himself onto the throne. If Erik had cared about Wakanda, he wouldn’t have attacked the team in Korea in the first place (something which T’Challa also spectacularly failed to mention).