Black Panther

We saw Black Panther tonight. I liked the cast, as there were many actors and actresses from other shows and movies I like. I particularly like Danai Gurira as a general (of course, since I'm a TWD fan), Angela Bassett was a gorgeous and regal choice for the mother, and Forrest Whitaker, Daniel Kaluuya, Michael B. Jordan, and Andy Serkis were all great familiar faces in new roles. The oddest choice, though, was Martin Freeman as an American. I like Martin Freeman, but even with an American accent, he doesn't act or look particularly American. Anyway, it was great to see a predominantly African American cast carry a movie a mainstream Marvel movie, with only two white token (or in this case, Tolkien, since they were both from the LOTR movies!) characters. I'm not that big of a comic book/super hero movie fan, other than the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, so it was nice to see Marvel do something different from their usual formula. 

Apparently the African accents were all over the map, which bothered lots of people, but since I am too ignorant to discern the difference between a lot of them, I didn't dwell on it. The only one I noticed was Andy Serkis sounding South African, which seemed to make sense to enough to me.

One thing I thought that was contradictory was that the Wakanda people are this advanced and intelligent society that would rarely resort to violence, and yet the way they confirm their new leader is with hand-to-hand combat. Huh? Why?

There was a lot of interesting social commentary in the film, some of it I'm sure went over my head as someone who is neither African nor African American. The main theme I got most from it was the general dialogue about whether or not those that are well off have a responsibility to help those that are not, and how it creates inner conflict for individuals, and outer conflict between groups. I'm sure someone of a different background would read differently into the conflicts between characters and cultures, so it would be interesting to talk about it with a diverse group of people.