Black Panther

LC and I went out to see the latest Marvel film last night. And it's good.

The recent Marvel films have tended to go one of two ways - either they take a very offbeat tack (Guardians 2, Thor 3), or they tell a fairly straightforward story in an unusual way (Dr Strange). "Black Panther" falls into the latter category - at its heart is a story of family drama, set in a fictional African kindgom where natural resources have given them super-tech.

And Wakanda is pretty cool, but where the film really shines is in the cast - Chadwick Boseman had a key part to play in the success of "Civil War" (providing the emotional heart of that film while Cap and Tony are busy tearing each other apart), and he's great here too. I would say he carries this film, but that would be unfair on the others.

Opposite Boseman, we have Michael B. Jordan playing another grieving son. He was great in "Creed" (itself far better than it has any right to be), and he's good here, filling the character with a great deal of menace and danger, and yet still not being entirely one-dimensional.

(Edit: When I wrote this post I hadn't yet realised that Ryan Coogler was the director of both "Creed" and "Black Panther", which explains a great deal. That's a name I'll have to look out for in future.)

And then there are the women: the bodyguard, the spy, and the scientist (Dania Gurira, Lupita Nyong'o, and Letitia Wright, respectively). Very varied roles, very varied characters, and all great. Plus Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker in small but significant roles.

(Even Martin Freeman did well. I really didn't like his character in CW, but they did a good job of turning him around here. He's not a good guy, as such, and he's not a bad guy either. He's somewhere in the middle, which is cool.)

Looking past the cast, there's the set design which is new and unique (at least in the MCU), and the sound, which again isn't quite like anything else in Marvel films to date. Good stuff.

I do have two slight quibbles. The first is that, again, we have the big CGI battle to end the film - the trappings are different, but it's still just pretty cartoons going against one another. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how you get around this - they did a pretty good job of setting up the competing agendas that led to the big fight (again, as in CW), but once you get there it's still a lot of sound and fury.

The other was that at times I found the fight scenes hard to follow - the camera seemed to do a twisty-zoomy motion that gave things a somewhat dreamlike feel, but also made it hard to keep track. It wasn't as bad as "Transformers", probably because nothing is, but it was still far from ideal... especially when there were a lot of characters wearing very similar uniforms running around.

But those are quibbles - the strengths of this film are very strong. Chalk up another winner for Marvel.