Marvel Studios created the modern big-budget superhero paradigm. If the reviews for Black Panther are anything to go by, they’ve successfully and incredibly subverted their own formula. Again.
Black Panther has received an instant 100% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, speaking to the near-universal consensus that the latest addition to Marvel’s cinematic canon is an absolute bloody triumph.
Chadwick Boseman, who plays the titular hero and prince of fictional African nation-state Wakanda, is one of many key factors to that success. For Rolling Stone, Peter Travers praises Boseman’s emotional range – an attribute not always explored in Marvel blockbusters. Citing his ability to portray a royal, a reluctant international statesman, and a cat-suited brawler, labels Boseman “a stunningly versatile actor” who “digs so deep into [Prince] T’Challa that you can feel his nerve endings.”
Director Ryan Coogler’s go-to guy Michael B. Jordan also receives his own share of praise for villain Erik Killmonger. For Variety, Peter DrBruge writes the unsubtly-named Killmonger “emerges as the most satisfying comic-book adversary since Heath Ledger’s Joker.” That appreciation stems from Killmonger’s own political motivations, which, by extension, flesh out the struggle of Wakanda and the world at large.
Discussing Wakanda as a futuristic vision of an Africa that avoided centuries of plundering by the Western world, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writes “the film allows us to register the difference between T’Challa and Erik as an African and an African American – Erik being burdened by the traumas and injustices of American history in a way T’Challa is not.”
In this way, the film has been praised for expressing a conflict far more familiar and believable than yet another apocalyptic alien invasion; Travers writes “Coogler makes black identity invincible, but avoids simplification by turning Wakanda into a society of different tribes, each with its own customs, goals and political agendas that reflect a conflicted world very much like our own.”
The women of Wakanda have been celebrated too; reviewers have gawped at the power, leadership, and guile of the Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s elite female warriors, portrayed by Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyongo’o. As T’Challa’s sister Shuri, Letitia Wright has been praised by The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis for acting as the kingdom’s most cunning scientist and Black Panther’s essential partner “à la Bond’s gadget guy.”
That’s not the only James Bond comparison here, as reviewers have likened the film to one of this decade’s most stunning action series. Wakanda is gorgeous, writes Robbie Collins in The Telegraph. He states it looks nothing like its biggest sci-fi contemporaries, and “in the current Hollywood sci-fi canon, that makes its sights virtually unique.
“Holographic read-outs hang in the air like three-dimensional sand paintings. Pilots steer their hover-ships in a Kemetic meditation pose straight from an old papyrus scroll. Costumes and weapons are tribal finery with a space disco edge.”
The phrase “space disco edge” would likely be worthy of a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score on its own, but hey. You can check out more reviews HERE.
