The very first moments of Black Panther are the moments wherein two children—cousins, separated by geography, culture, and time—experience the same tragedy at different stages in their lives and in radically distinct circumstances. They both lose their fathers. One, a young man, gets to lay claim to the leadership of an entire nation in response—to have access to political, economic, and physical power the likes of which few have ever known.
The other, a child left fatherless and dispossessed of his birthright, gets to keep only his rage.
Ryan Coogler is responsible for a masterpiece in Black Panther in part because he is really good at making movies that encompass many things at once—sleek anticolonial afropunk, intense diasporic dialogue, high-octane action movie, cool-as-ice spy movie—in a franchise that has gotten very good at being sharply composed single things called “Superhero flicks.” This is not to say other Marvel movies are bad. With few, if any, exceptions, all of them are—pun not intended—marvelous films.
Black Panther, however, is a revolution. Not merely in the sense that “it is revolutionary to see blackness this way,” though it is. But also in the sense that this movie is a revolutionary dialogue.
[“Sword and Soul is our name. Steamfunk is our name. Afrofuturism is our name. Afropunk is our name.”]
