The Problems With Black Panther

The movie Black Panther has made a phenomenal amount of money and scored high on critic's sites like Rotten Tomatoes but, let's face it, it was graded on a curve. It was fine but I'd rank it as middle of the pack. It had a number of problems, some in the content and some in the execution.

First of all, the movie was too long. The opening act was overstuffed with two raids by the Wakandans, a challenge match for the crown, a heist a meeting between the panther and his father and a shoot-out between Klaue and Kilmonger. And that was all just setting up for the main plot. Before the movie was finished we had two more challenge matches and both the Panther and Killmonger met with their fathers in visions. Plus a civil war among the Wakandans.

The next problem was that too much was going on in the final battle. We had the Panther fighting Kilmonger, a fight between the royal guard and the rest of the cast plus a CIA agent shooting down some transport drones before a drone killed him. There was too much going on to keep track of and too many people to really be invested in any of them. This has been a problem in Marvel movies since Iron Man.

Wakanda is presented as an African paradise but it's actually pretty messed up. Income inequality is terrible. You see a gleaming, futuristic city with street vendors. Newsflash - it's really hard to make ends meet selling things from a stall on the street. Plus other parts of the country have farmers and herders living in primitive huts.

Then there's the monarchy. The country has an absolute ruler. Kilmonger's first order after becoming king is to order the patch of heart-shaped herbs to be burned. This is central to their culture but they do it without question. Then Kilmonger declares war on the rest of the world and the Wakandans go along with it with only token objections.

The challenge by combat is pretty strange, too. It's bad enough having someone who rules because of an accident of birth. It's worse when he can be replaced by anyone from the right family who can beat him in hand-to-hand combat.

The pressures of the monarchy show. By the end of the movie the Wakandan elite are engaged in a civil war.

The Wakandans are jerks. In the opening sequence we see a strike team lead by the Panther take a convoy that is obviously Christian girls who were kidnapped by Islamic extremists. But it turns out that they couldn't care less about the innocent girls. They were just there to invite the Panther's ex-girlfriend to the coronation. The girlfriend is the only one who actually cares about helping people in the outside world.

The final problem a delicate one and I'll probably offend people by bringing it up but let's face it, the movie has racism at its core. I know there is a school of thought that says that only the culture in power can be racist but, in this case, the Wakandans are the dominant culture. There is only one white actor among the leads. The Panther's sister calls him a "colonizer" which is meant as a racial insult. After all, he's American and the US never colonized Africa and Wakanda was never colonized so the term is being used as a slur against all whites. Later he's told to shut up or he'll be fed to the gorilla tribe leader's children (Just a joke since they're vegetarians). That's how minorities were treated in movies from the 30s and 40s. 

The basic conflict in the movie is between two viewpoints. Kilmonger echos the Nation of Islam in believing that white are the devil and Wakanda must conquer them. Opposing him is the traditional view that white are the devil and Wakanda must hide from them.

These problems aren't fatal to the movie but I was aware of them, especially the running time.