Action

When two foes conspire to destroy Wakanda, the hero known as Black Panther must team up with C.I.A. agent Everett K. Ross and members of the Dora Milaje, Wakanadan special forces, to prevent Wakanda from being dragged into a world war.

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.

Even more significant is that Black Panther features an almost exclusively black cast, and leans very heavily into the African roots of its characters and their world. Conventional Hollywood wisdom doesn’t allow for this—it’s generally assumed, wrongly, that movies with black casts and that focus on the black experience don’t sell. This has already been proven not to be true, but Black Panther cannot possibly be ignored.

Judging by the box office, you’ve either already seen this movie or you plan to, so I won’t recount the plot here. I will say that if you’re someone who’s dismissing Black Panther because you’re just not into superhero movies, I’d advise you to reconsider. Of course, there are super powers and plenty of battle scenes, but the ideas presented in the movie are far more complex than you typically see, tackling themes of empathy, repression, imperialism, and empowerment, just to name a very few.

The world our characters inhabit, the fictional African country of Wakanda, is made of elements that are so deeply researched it’s frankly astonishing, and it’s an extraordinary visual achievement: This movie will be winning Oscars. And it was an incredibly welcome surprise to learn that many of the strongest characters in the movie are women. And then there’s our villain, Erik Killmonger, a man with such a complicated past and worldview that there’s currently a running argument about whether or not he’s actually a villain at all.

All this, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. There’s so much to celebrate about Black Panther. I sincerely hope people continue to throw wads of cash at it—the movie deserves everything it gets.

This review was sourced from KMUW Wichita 89.1