After
the death of his father, T'Challa returns home to the African nation of
Wakanda to take his rightful place as king. When a powerful enemy
suddenly reappears, T'Challa's mettle as king -- and as Black Panther --
gets tested when he's drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of
Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with
treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release
the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety
of his people.
Release date: February 14, 2018 (Indonesia)
Box office: 476.6 million USD Trending
Director: Ryan Coogler
Budget: 200 million USD
Producers: Kevin Feige, David J. Grant
If
you start in the center of Africa and head southeast, you arrive at
Wakanda. According to one map, it lies somewhere near Uganda—below South
Sudan, above Rwanda, and abutting the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Unlike those nations, however, which have been scalded by strife,
Wakanda is a model of serenity. It is a kingdom, wisely ruled, and rich
in a precious natural resource, vibranium, which is used for
hyper-technology. Foreign marauders have never pillaged that wealth,
because they know nothing about it. In short, Wakanda is blessed among
nations, and there’s only one thing wrong with the place. It doesn’t
exist.
The map appears in “Black Panther,” most
of which is set in present-day Wakanda, at a pivotal point. The old
king is dead; long live the new king, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a
princely sort who comes with many advantages. His mother is played by
Angela Bassett, who rocks a ruff better than any queen since
Elizabeth I. His most trusted combatant, should trouble loom, is the
shaven-headed Okoye (Danai Gurira), who can fell an aircraft with the
toss of a spear. He has a thing going with the wondrous Nakia (Lupita
Nyong’o). Oh, and I almost forgot: he’s a superhero. Unlike Peter
Parker, whose teasing, could-it-be-me act has worn thin, T’Challa is
super and proud, turning at will into Black Panther. His suit, at once
bulletproof and clingy, makes Tony Stark’s outfit look like a deep-sea
diver’s. Sure, Bruce Wayne has the Batmobile, but T’Challa has a whole
country to drive. The king is the man.
We have already met him, in “Captain America: Civil War”
(2016), but there he was merely a part of the Avengers gang, and he
made no more impact, to be honest, than the one with the bow and arrow
whose name I can never remember. Hence the pressing need for this new
film. There have been black superheroes before, and Will Smith’s
character in “Hancock”
(2008) was an unusual blend of potency and dysfunction, but none have
been given dominion over a blockbuster. (The one who merits it best is
Frozone, from “The Incredibles,”
who has to miss dinner to save the world. “We are talking about the
greater good!” he cries. Back comes the reply: “Greater good? I am your wife. I’m the greatest good you are ever
going to get.”) Nor has the genre, until now, allowed black identity to
be the ground bass of a single tale. There are white actors in “Black
Panther,” including Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman, but their roles are
minor ones—the types of role, that is, to which black performers, in
this patch of the movie business, have grown wearily accustomed.
The
director is Ryan Coogler, and those of us who admire his work will be
stirred to find that “Black Panther” is bracketed by short scenes in
Oakland, California. That is where his début feature, “Fruitvale Station”
(2013), began, with genuine cell-phone footage from an incident in
2009, when an unarmed African-American, Oscar Grant, was shot and killed
by police. The rest of the movie traced the arc of Oscar’s final day,
and what struck you was how normal and how plotless it felt—a mild
domestic tiff, a trip to the store to buy shrimp, phone calls to his
mom. The only special thing about that day was how it ended, and the
tension in “Black Panther” springs from Coogler’s instinctive urge to
relay the rough textures of non-heroic experience while also striving to
meet the demands of Marvel, by offering a gadget-packed dogfight in the
skies, say, or a ride on an armored rhino.
The fact that he mainly succeeds is no surprise, since his previous movie, “Creed”
(2015), a late but meaty addition to the “Rocky” saga, with Sylvester
Stallone as a coach, proved that Coogler could hold his nerve in a
franchise. On the one hand, “Creed,” like “Black Panther,” keeps
reminding us that a major studio has money in the game; the musical
score, in both cases, is grimly insistent, as if to insure that the
emotional content of each scene is packaged and delivered on cue. On the
other hand, every Coogler movie features Michael B. Jordan, who is
hardly someone to be hemmed in. He ought to have won an Oscar for his
Oscar, in “Fruitvale Station”; he was the bullish young boxer in
“Creed”; and now, in the latest film, he shows up as T’Challa’s nemesis,
Killmonger, who believes that he has a claim to the Wakandan throne.
While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so
relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up
rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has
swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of
charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of
Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.
Few
recent movies have been more keenly anticipated than this one, in
regard both to its box-office potential and to the force of its
mythmaking. With its vision of an unplundered homeland, blooming from
liberty rather than from bondage, “Black Panther” is, in the fullest
sense, an African-American work, and Carvell Wallace was rightly moved
to ask, in a Times essay, “Can films like these significantly change things for black people in America?” We shall
see. My only qualm concerns not so much the mission of Coogler’s movie
as its form; I wonder what weight of political responsibility can, or
should, be laid upon anything that is accompanied by buttered popcorn.
Vibranium is no more real than the philosopher’s stone. More Americans
will presumably watch “Black Panther” than have ever read “Black Boy” or “Invisible Man,”
but do numbers alone make the difference? Are 3-D spectacles any more
reliable than rose-tinted ones, when we seek to imagine an ideal
society?
The
opportunity to see a warthog playing the harp doesn’t come along nearly
as often as it should. All the more reason, then, to welcome “Early
Man,” although whether the harpist in question is technically a warthog
is open to dispute. He’s piggy enough in snout and trotter, and lavishly
tusked, and he answers to the name of Hognob, yet he barks and bays
like a wolf. Hognob is the sidekick of Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne),
and Dug, being in possession of a bucktoothed grin and oodles of true
grit, is the hero.
“Early Man” is the latest
film from Aardman Animations, and the director is Nick Park, the sultan
of stop-motion, to whom we are eternally indebted for Wallace, Gromit,
and other gems of superpliability. As the title suggests, the setting is
prehistory. (No date is given, although we are helpfully told that the
opening sequence occurs “around lunchtime.”) Dug belongs to a minor
tribe, dwelling peaceably in the lush glades of an extinct volcano. This
demi-paradise is invaded by a more advanced people, brought there by a
lust for metal ore, and led—or bossed around—by the vainglorious Lord
Nooth (Tom Hiddleston). “The age of stone is over,” he declares,
speaking in a heavy but unexplained French accent. “Long live the age of
bronze.
