Weekly Film: Black Panther

Marvel's Black Panther
Black Panther is an Action Superhero film directed by Ryan Coogler (Creed). It stars Chadwick Boseman reprising his role as T'Challa/Black Panther from Captain America: Civil War. Black Panther makes history as it is the first ever superhero movie to have a predominantly black cast. Coogler is also the first black director to work on a Marvel film.

The film is mostly based in Africa in the fictional techno-advanced country of Wakanda. The film consists of a lot of panning wide shots in order to show how large the nation is. The outside scenery is also very bright and colourful with many settings standing out such as the African plains and the waterfalls. The mise-en-scene is also very vibrant and the film tries its best not to be too westernised with their clothing. Many of the characters wear traditional African clothing and have traditional tribal symbols.

Each member of the cast stands out yet blends together strongly. As well as having a strong black lead, it also contains a large amount of strong black women. Letitia Wright plays T'Challa's younger sister Shuri. She is seen as an extremely intelligent teenage figure who also provides a lot of the humour in the film. Danai Gurira plays Okoye: an "extremely proud" Wakandan and traditionalist from the Border Tribe, who is the head of the Dora Milaje- an all female royal force who all serve as T'Challa's bodyguards. I would also praise the films main villain Erik Killmonger played by Michael B. Jordan. He has the ability to make an audience love to hate him whilst also side with some of his points. It is clear that the director used his character to throw in a few political viewpoints mainly regarding slavery, colonisation and the mistreatment of black people over the years.

The soundtrack for Black Panther was produced by rapper Kendrick Lamar. 3 songs were released beforehand and the whole album was released on February 9th. It received great reviews and wide critical acclaim.

 The budget is estimated at around $200 million which is quite larger than what is normally spent on this genre of film. This shows that Marvel and Disney had very high hopes for the film and believed that it had a chance of earning the money back The American ticket monitoring service Fandango reported that within its first 24 hours, ticket pre-sales for the film were the largest ever for a Marvel film. At the moment it has a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes making it higher than any Superhero film this past decade.

Comments

  1. Coulsdon A Level Film and Media21 February 2018 at 22:01

    Madachi try and stay away from the format of a review and stay in analysis mode.
    CCCEO!

    Where is your contextuality, comparison and examples?

    Why is this film important at this time?
    Why has it not happened before?
    What are the KEY themes?

    What has Coogler previously Directed? How successful was it? Who starred in it. What is he doing next?

    Strip out the FANBOY and give us a little More depth more analysis please.

    ReplyDelete

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