Still looks whiter than the real Jesus must have been.
I think the monobrow makes up for it. 
I think the monobrow makes up for it.
I don’t recall it ever being established that vibranium stops the Mind Stone from working. I also don’t recall ever seeing vibranium store electricity and then release it on command. (T’Challa’s suit can store and release kinetic energy in the new movie, but that’s explicitly a new technology Shuri had just developed, not a basic property of the metal.) Lastly, I don’t think “stabilize energy” is a property assigned to either Stark’s new element or vibranium. The stuff Stark made was a non-toxic replacement for the palladium that was powering his old reactor. The fix wasn’t to “stabilize” anything, it was to get it to stop leeching poison into Tony’s body.
FWIW, according to the Marvel Cinematic wiki, the original novelization of Iron Man 2 explicitly said the new element was vibranium, but the first Captain America movie retconned this out by presenting vibranium as a known element in the 1940s. A later comic tie-in (specifically tied into the movie universe, not the comic book universe) explicitly differentiated the two, with Stark attempting to patent his new element as “badassium.”
Although it had first struck me from female-focused movies that got heat (the Ghostbusters remake and Wonder Woman) it seems to be happening to no great surprise with this movie too. People can accept a white man who pushes around planets and can toss people into the sun, but a sci-fi advanced African nation? A superstrong woman? That’s just silly! :smack:
Vibranium is said to absorb and dampen vibration which is the equivalent to storing enegh, and the function of the “new element” was to replace palladium which was used to stabilize and mediate nuclear fusion in Stark’s ARC reactor technology. Howard Stark knew of vibranium and also knew precise details of the nuclear structure of the “new element” but didn’t have the technology to synthesize it.
The big problem with Ghostbusters is that it was mostly unfunny, with the only real humor coming from Kate McKinnon’s improvisation and ironically from the white male comic relief of Chris Hemsworth, who stole every scene is was in. Wonder Woman was a mediocre script that seemed to be drawn from pages rejected by Marvel that was elevated mostly by Gal Gadot’s performance and the early scenes on Themyscira. But Black Panther is a legitimately great movie, and if it isn’t objectively the absolute best in the MCU (which is some permutation of Iron Man, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians of the Galaxy) it ranks just very slightly below, and has created a unique visual style that rivals James Gunn’s reimagingng of what fantastical space opera should look like.
Stranger
I…I mean I just…I think you were watching different movies maybe, with the same name? 
Given that he was watching Marvel’s Wonder Woman… apparently.
I don’t recall it ever being established that vibranium stops the Mind Stone from working. I also don’t recall ever seeing vibranium store electricity and then release it on command. (T’Challa’s suit can store and release kinetic energy in the new movie, but that’s explicitly a new technology Shuri had just developed, not a basic property of the metal.) Lastly, I don’t think “stabilize energy” is a property assigned to either Stark’s new element or vibranium. The stuff Stark made was a non-toxic replacement for the palladium that was powering his old reactor. The fix wasn’t to “stabilize” anything, it was to get it to stop leeching poison into Tony’s body.
FWIW, according to the Marvel Cinematic wiki, the original novelization of Iron Man 2 explicitly said the new element was vibranium, but the first Captain America movie retconned this out by presenting vibranium as a known element in the 1940s. A later comic tie-in (specifically tied into the movie universe, not the comic book universe) explicitly differentiated the two, with Stark attempting to patent his new element as “badassium.”
That’s not what he said.
shrug I really wanted to like the new Ghostbusters, and I felt it came with the promise of a talented cast and the opportunity to pitch some of the now-blatant sexism of the original movie on its head, but the only scenes that I really enjoyed were Kate McKinnon doing Kate McKinnon stuff (never wrong) and Chris Hemsworth playing a clueless bimbo, which was great but did not a story make. It felt like Kristin Wiig was trying to play straight woman to McCarthy and Jones when I really felt like McCarthy needed to tone back the broad humor and Jones needs to develop a new schtick rather than the loud black woman trope, which is just kind of embarrassing at this point. Great that they cast all women but did they need to make the one black character the token non-scientist who is just there to fill out the ranks? There are so many great funny black women comediennes who could make rain of that kind of role; I would kill to see Aisha Tyler headline a big setpiece movie like that as a confident, slightly exasperated scientist even if I would be waiting for her to scream, “Archer!” every time she appeared on screen.
Wonder Woman was an okay film but it felt like cut-rate Captain America: The First Avenger set in WWI down to essentially the same unit of misfit veteran soldiers who win every fight through guile and special talents. I was actually somewhat dubious about Gal Gadot just because of her limited acting resume (not like anyone is really going to shine in a FF movie) but I’m a convert after seeing her performance. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is pretty obvious foreshadowing, and I’ll just say that Chris Pine is no Hayley Atwell. (Okay, the roles aren’t exactly analogous, but their presumed nascent romance felt completely forced; I didn’t for a moment get the idea that ‘Diana Prince’ held anything but slightly bemused affection for him that you’d lavish on a favored pet.) Lucy Davis was almost completely wasted, and the “Wait, the dead villain wasn’t really the main villain” was such a weak feint that it actually disrupted the pace of the film knowing that the ‘final’ battle was just a ruse rather punctuating an unexpected twist.
Don’t misunderstand; I want to see more women- and minority-oriented big budget films because it is just so tiresome to see the cinema filled up with Mission Impossible sequels featuring Tom Cruise and some other people, one of whom is a woman who will probably but maybe not betray him, and also Ving Rhames because that seems to be his only gig, and yet-more-terrible Star Trek reboots that feature women in such trivial roles that they might as well just bring back Gates McFadden so they can shove her off the side of a holographic frigate and then have her disappear for the rest of the movie. But I also want them to match the same standards as the best films in general so that they are really enjoyable to watch. Black Panther met and exceeded that expectation, I felt, and if there was any weakness in it it was that the main character was somewhat overshadowed by all of the other great characters (and actors) in the film, which is just about the best criticism a film can have. “Your movie was so good I didn’t know where on the screen to look next.”
Stranger
I meant to focus on the idea that a woman or a black person as the protagonist doing the absurd, sci-fi/fantasy things was the problem for some people. Obviously, certain movies are better than others, and I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of the female-focused Ghostbusters, but the sheer amount of anger and people sending seizure-inducing images to one of the actresses with a seizure issue made me think there was more going on than just feeling it wasn’t the best remake. There have been a lot of remakes, not all great, but I can’t recall another getting that kind of backlash. Particularly backlash meant to cause serious physical harm to actors for daring to do it.
Wonder Woman took forever just to be produced because her character premise was dubbed too “silly,” until Marvel made a hit out of a movie featuring a racoon with a machine gun. I do still think that the success of other movies with non-white male protagonists helped with the release of Black Panther. And I still think that absurdities tend to be more accepted in films that feature more traditional white, male protagonists.
Yeah, SoaT’s capsule film reviews, while perfectly okay in their own right, are pretty much irrelevant to the point that Trafalgar Laura was making about the shit caught by Ghostbusters and Wonder Woman specifically for daring to cast women in iconic/heroic roles.
But if we’re doing capsule film reviews, I liked Ghostbusters quite a bit and didn’t see Wonder Woman.
Oh, yeah, misogynists were definitely shitting on those films just because they featured women; no question about that. I just want women- or minority-led films to be really good, because, well, I like watching good films, and I thought Gal Gadot deserved better dialogue than to have to work so hard to sell a flatly written script. And I’ll watch Kate McKinnon doing pretty much anything. If I was on a lifeboat with only room for two people and I had to choose between Kate McKinnon or Tracey Ullman…I guess I’d have to take a swim.
Stranger
Just for the heck of it, what if you made the exact same movie only instead of the fictional landlocked Wakanda, it was set on an isolationist and seemingly-impoverished island nation that turned out to be Atlantis, and who was equally adept at hiding the advanced tech they’d enjoyed for thousands of years, and which was populated by people who looked like typical movie portrayals of ancient Romans or Greeks, i.e. maybe a bit swarthy but overall pretty generically white?
I don’t think I’d view the movie differently myself - I didn’t really like it all that much, but that most of the characters were black seemed of little import.
But the essential conflict is tied to how Wakanda has failed to act to protect other Africans, and particularly in the United States, hence the serpiece in Oakland where Wakanda ends up setting up an ‘Outreach Center’, which is a particularly pertinent twist on Western ‘aid’ to African nations that is most often just self-serving back patting masquerading as charity. That a blighted city like Oakland would need external aid from a vastly more technologically advanced nation is a nice stab at American exceptionalism.
The one thing that bothered me about the film was the ‘combat to death’ challenge for the kingship. It’s a throwback to a more primitive age that should be purely ceremonial in Wakanda if not completely deprecated. It turns out serving the plot in multiple ways but it demonstates the signifiant influence of tribalism in an otherwise advanced culture that is discordant with the notions of an egalitarian meritocracy.
Stranger
Well, you could make the generic case that the Atlantans have failed to act to protect other human beings. Why would Wakanda owe anything to other Africans and the Atlantans not to other people in general? “Atlantis” in this case is just a placeholder, it could as easily be a fictional landlocked nation somewhere in the Balkans that has concealed its tech while centuries of war raged all around it. Would the residents of that nation have a duty to protect other southeastern Europeans?
I’m not sure how to reconcile that with what is implied to be a generally and highly educated population.
Now if it was tied into some kinda sexual thing, like Pon Farr… 
Well, technically combat to death or yield.
? What “egalitarian meritocracy”? It’s a hereditary kingship, FFS. Sure, the rest of Wakandan society may be egalitarian and meritocratic but the head-of-state setup sure ain’t.
If anything, the combat-challenge system makes the hereditary kingship somewhat more egalitarian (although not much, since apparently only those of royal blood can issue a combat challenge to the king-in-waiting).
Also, I don’t see how a ritual combat would be obsolete or “primitive” as a challenge to a rising leader one of whose chief responsibilities is to be a physically powerful superhero. If I were Wakandan I would like to feel confident that my Black Panther can outfight the rest of the warrior-ruler elite, thankyouverymuch.
And a bit more metaphysically, I think you’re perhaps conflating “advancement” with “modernism” as a social development. Yes, the history of Western society saw the emergence of technological advancement hand-in-hand with a “modernist” worldview (secular, individualist, democratic, commerce-focused, etc.). But there’s no guarantee that technological advancement had to happen in that kind of social framework. One of the most interesting things IMHO about the addition of Wakanda to the MCU is the space it opens up for situating superscience and supertech in a civilization that isn’t identical to the very samey global environment of capitalist hi-tech where all the rest of the action happens.
Well, others have pointed out to me that the King and the Panther obviously need not be the same person, else the murder of T’Challa’s father and T’Challa’s near-immediate panther-suited vengeance search wouldn’t work, but if the goal is to have the Panther be the best possible Wakandan combatant, then why de-panther the current Panther before a challenge? Better to let all challengers try the herb, get panthered up as best their bodies can handle, and then fight to the death.
It’d be kind of a shame if you de-panther the current Panther, that Panther gets killed by a challenger, the victor then takes the panther herb… and only then you discover that he’s violently allergic to it, like peanut butter.
Now maybe if there was some indication that the Wakandan population in general was given small doses of the herb, and marriages were formed in an effort to selectively breed a population who responded to the herb especially well, and maybe there’s a Y-Chromosome lampshaded reason that only men can benefit from the effect… anyway…
It’s not just males. In the comics, Shuri becomes Black Panther eventually.