Marvel movies get a bad rap for their cheesy dialogue, disjointed plots, and truly absurd, CGI-crowded battle scenes. But you never know when they’ll drop a gem. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is one huuuge gem, and comes closer to achieving truth and realness in its story than any Marvel film has before. Fully embracing its Blackness, the film smartly toes the line between history and fantasy.
Black Panther kicks off with a short explainer on Wakanda, a secretive African nation whose mountains contain a super-powerful metal, vibranium. The substance is key to all of Wakanda’s technological advancements—it’s laced into their clothes, weapons, and vehicles. But even as vibranium enabled Wakanda to become a techtropolis, it also led the country to isolate itself.
Then the film really kicks off, beginning in 1992 Oakland, where a Wakandan spy (Sterling K. Brown) concludes his nation’s isolationist ways are allowing other African descendants to suffer from poverty, over-policing, and high incarceration rates: “Our people suffer,” he says, “because they don’t have the tools to fight back.”
