A lot of the hype of The Black Panther is that it is a black hero with a primarily black cast. And this is said to be good because black kids now have a super hero to relate to. I dunno…I realize I’m a shut in, but it’s 2018 is this still an issue? Kids don’t think about color. They think about the costume and the powers. When I was a kid I pretended I was Luke Cage all the time. It wasn’t any issue to me that he was black.
“uhm…hasn’t, after becoming an adult, almost every woman you’ve had any meaningful relationship with been black?”
…hmm…that’s a fair point. You saying it was because of the comics I read? I shoulda maybe pretended I was Reed Richards, some of those women really made my life hell.
anyways…If it’s that important, can I remind everyone that the Falcon exists? He’s an Avenger. Hold on…I understand he hasn’t had his own movie, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that HE..SHOULD have gotten his own movie. In the MCU he’s a fleshed out character, with a personality, an interesting background, and charisma, who we’ve seen develop over several movies. Why skip him and make a movie about a character we’ve seen for a total of about 15 minutes?
And the actor who plays the Falcon, steals every scene he’s in, where as the guy playing the Panther…what does he add? He just looks pretty and talks in a fake accent.
“That’s all the Scarlet Witch does and you won’t shut up about her”
SHUT YOUR FILTHY MOUTH! YOU LEAVE HER ALONE!
…back to my point…
Make no mistake here, The Black Panther was one of my all time favorites as a kid. I even made a paper mache mask of him , when I was like 9 or 10 (it itched like hell…I didn’t care). LOVED the Black Panther…bought every comic I could find him in. And yet…this movie has almost zero chance of me liking it. Because if they don’t follow the comics, it’ll suck. and if they DO follow the comics, it’ll suck. Because, looking back, he kinda sucked in the comics. He was made up in the 60’s by a white guy who probably watched what was going on int the news and decided “hey..black people exist, let’s make a black super hero…he’ll be from Africa, and he’ll get bit by a radioactive Panther! or maybe got in a scientific experiment with radiation and panthers…hmm…let’s just have him take some drugs that give him powers. #notcoolman #stereotype #theCIAmadecrack #thatswhatIheard ” Or maybe Kirby just missed drawing jungles, who knows…it was a half baked idea then, and it’ll be a half baked movie.
The movie’s going to have one of my beloved childhood characters, and it looks to be loaded with hot black women…and yet…I’m gonna hate it. It looks like a CGI sh*tfest. Half the scenes on the trailer look like glorified clips from a video game. I’m sure they are going to have some pseudo science lame reason why no one could find his kingdom of Wakanda with any spy planes or satellites but …I’m not going to be able to deal with that…because I don’t have 60 i.q. or the ability to drop my i.q. to 60 for the sake of enjoying a movie. It’s a skill many of you have and I envy it. You can go through life as a reasonably intelligent adult and drop down a few gears when you walk into a movie theater. Even being able to do that…the premise is that he lives the “hidden” country of Wakanda…
How the F*CK do you hide a country? How can any of you look forward to a movie with as dumb an idea as that for a foundation? how? HOW?
Everyone is going to shrug and go “it’s just a comic book movie”…great…“you have to suspend disbelief”…sure. I guess. I guess that’s gold standard now, just ignore what’s stupid. There WERE some super hero movies that were actually great movies, by anyone’s standard. Tim Burton’s Batman, Sin City, Winter solder, Guardians of the Galaxy…movies that defined the abstract reality in which they existed early on and stuck to that. But those are just crests of the tide, that quickly rolls back into nonsensical schlock full of contradictory premises, motivations, and whatever passes for literary devices now. Fine…but HIDING A F*CKING COUNTRY FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD? IN 2018? What? WHHAAATTTT????
Do you all understand how many single individuals the CIA, and KGB hunted down during the cold war…who had a head start and the entire planet to hide on? And this place has a mineral that is more valuable than gold…and no one can find it? There is no comic book science aside from needing to travel through a portal that can explain this even to the most naive 3rd grader.
I could could find this place for you in a day, without the help of the CIA, Interpol, spy satellites, Drones, or even the internet. Here…get yourself a map of Africa and some crayons. Color in everywhere we know IS a country…that uncolored area that is left…that’s Wakanda.
WTF.
And where has this country been the whole time as far as the world stage and history? The British Empire and the rest of Europe ran up and down that continent for like 400 years and mined the sh*t out of it. They left no stone unturned looking for precious metals. Where do you think we got all these diamonds? all the rubber we have? where do you think all those white people in South Africa came from? Did you think there was some tribe of albinos? Back before airplanes if you wanted to transport goods you needed a water way…do you understand how few waterways there are in …ah…f8ck it…you’re all just bemoaning me nit picking something, I can feel the vibes through the internet…
NO…NO! I just realized…They piggy back an important plot point onto this RIDICULOUS IDEA…Wakanda has a seat in the UN…how the f*ck do you get a seat in the UN if no one knows where your country is? How do you even prove you have a country?? Hey UN…I want a seat at the table, I’m the president of lowlifeistan, it’s secret and hidden.
Wakanda is important because they have all sorts of advance technology…that requires things like…oh…copper wires, and plastic and micro chips, and steel and all sorts of things you’d need to import. How the f*ck do you do that without anyone knowing where you are?
How the fu…
Not that it has any chance of being good anyway. It’s just going to be another “okay” MCU movie following the standard template.
It’s going to have the same problem as just about every MCU movie…a lame uninteresting villian that is just an evil carbon copy of the hero. A lot of the marvel characters, that’s how it was in the comic…Iron man – Iron Monger, Captain America- the Red Skull…and so on. The Black Panther had two rivals. First the Man-Ape…which is every bit at lame as it sounds. It’s some guy who wanted the throne who got some ape drugs and gave himself an ape suit and ape powers to fight the panther in his panther suit with panther powers from panther drugs.
It was upon reading my first Man-ape vs Panther story as a child that I started questioning why I liked him in the first place. In a NY based super hero world …his powers are pretty lame compared to the Vision or Iron Man. and in his Kingdom…they are pointless. He’s the KING, why would he need to fight anyone hand to hand? He’s got people for that, yes? and an all black costume in the scorching heat of Africa? wha? (the paper mache mask lead me to the realization that this was a questionable choice of costume, I might have gotten heat stroke that summer) Yeah, Panthers are black…but during the day they just lay around in the shade..because it’s really f*cking hot.
His other rival was the Klaw…who was somehow made of sound…and had a sound gun, that made solid sound creatures that attacked people. I couldn’t get my head around that then, and I can’t now.
And these movies are NOT going to age well. Iron Man 1-3 already look like piles of crap, so does the first Thor. Captain America 1 looks like a lame knock off of the Wonder Woman script ( yeah..I know Cap came first, but in ten years people won’t remember that) Dr.Strange is going to have the next generation laughing out loud at the outdated and pointless special effects. And why does Dr.Strange’s magic mumbo jumbo look EXACTLY the same as Tony Stark technological hologram stuff? It’s all sh*t. I mean, it’s fine…but it’s not going to hold up. Age of Ultron and the CGI robots are going to look ridiculous and I can only hope the notion of raising an entire city off the ground is going to be recognized and sheer schlock.
Civil War…the entire premise…is everybody is fighting over the Slokovia Accord/whether or not the UN should be in charge of the Avengers. Then the side that thinks they should…immediately breaks all the rules in the accord. Spider-Man isn’t old enough to sign the document so Tony Stark broke the rule…and then broke it again to help Cap. The Panther broke the rule to follow Iron Man, the Black widow broke the rule to slow down the Panther, and General Ross ( the guy who put the rule out there in the first f*cking place) broke the rule by letting Iron Man try to bring in Cap. He didn’t run that idea by anyone, did he? He just unilaterally said “okay you have 36 hours”. He didn’t have authority to do that. So HE broke his own f*cking rule..why the F*ck where they fighting over a rule no one is going to follow anyway?
I can all but guarantee that the Black Panther is going to have all the same problems. An absurd premise, a plot that contradicts itself, soon to be outdated special affects, and a really lame villain. In their defense…they are working with stories and characters created for comics to entertain ten year olds in the 1960’s…and if they stray too far all of geekdom will sh*t all over it.
Ant-man was the only MCU movie that had a CHANCE of being great. It didn’t need to overextend itself with CGI (put the actor in front of a blue screen so everything looks bigger than him), and shrinking a guy to steal something isn’t a complicated plot. ORIGINALLY Antman had one of the greatest of all Marvel Villains-Egghead ( okay..the name is stupid). Egghead wasn’t a carbon copy villain. He didn’t have any super powers at all, or a heavy handed nonsensical motivation/hate for that particular hero. He was a scientist who was hired by the mob to eliminate Antman. And he’d try to do so…with science. He’d do cool interesting stuff like tap into Pym’s ant to antman signals and the get ants to attack him or give him false information. If super powers were needed, he’d go hire someone with super powers. he didn’t risk his own neck if he didn’t need to.
He was more of a sci-fi type villian, and he had a lot of personality. He had a dry wit, quoted Shakespeare, and did practical things…like use a gun when the situation called for it rather than make some elaborate James Bond slow death machine. he was smart and pragmatic and funny. (spoiler alert, Hawkeye kills him on accident).
But instead of using him…they made up some guy who’s motivation is that he’s crazy, and made him an evil copy of antman. Thanks.
So..in a few days I’ll go see a movie about a King of some magical kingdom that no spy satellite, drone, 3rd grader with a map and a crayon, or tracking device planted on any number of cargo ships delivering goods and materials to it, could find. Who wears a black suit in Africa in the summer, and is clearly CGI 50% of the time, who either fights a guy in an Ape suit, or in an Ape suit that has elements of BMX biking pads, or maybe is just a CGI ape, or maybe they leave the Man-Ape out, because it’s too silly. Too silly…in a movie where you can hide an entire f*cking country. And probably at the end Wakanda is revealed to the world…in which case I hope they have fake clips of people on CNN asking the richest nation on earth why they haven’t bothered to do anything about the millions of people starving to death in neighboring countries. Where ever in Africa it is…it’s a short drive away from some celebrity next to a starving child with flies on him filming a commercial asking for help. Time to reboot those commercials, y’know target the audience a little “hey man…nice panther suit, cool flying car!…think you can maybe SEND SOME F8CKING RICE?”
Or maybe at the end the last infinity stone is one of the eyes of a giant Panther statue they have.
Who the f*ck knows…they have to lead into the Infinity war, where at least anything absurd will be explained by the infinity stones ability to warp reality.
I can only hope there is enough eye candy to keep me looking at the screen and not getting annoyed to the point of starting a fist fight with some a-hole using his/her cell phone.
And when I get home, I will see the whole world thought it was the second coming of Citizen King and I will feel very much alone.
YEARS from now…many decades perhaps. A new generation of movie goers will watch these and laugh out loud, and consider them camp somewhere equal to the batman TV show, and I from my wheelchair, will pull back my oxygen mask and wheeze ” I trieddd to telll them all *cough* that these were piles of craaappp *cough*“
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When Douglas is not complaining, he and his work can be found here
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