This might be part of that headcanon that you don’t like, but to me, Killmonger decided to challenge T’Challa after he had just become king because he wanted to do to him (T’Challa) what had been done to him (Killmonger). Killmonger wanted to strip T’Challa of everything he held of value and leave him without his heritage (or dead). Killmonger couldn’t kill T’Chaka, so he went after his surrogate, T’Chaka’s son.
Edited to add: T’Challa was everything that Killmonger wanted and didn’t have: royalty, a loving family, respect, a homeland and a place he belonged to. Killmonger didn’t just want to be king, he wanted to get revenge for himself and his father by taking all that away from his father’s killer’s son.
Yeah, the “You’re everything I was denied” and “I want to do to you what they did to me” are both pretty long-standing tropes for villains in films, especially hero(not just superhero) films.
Having not seen the movie, I can say that underwear pervert comic villains don’t often do things that make sense. They are crazy, nuts, disturbed, etc. They lash out angrily and irrationally. The villains that aren’t that way are rare, extra special, and extra awesome. They are the BIG bads. Hannibal Lecter, Thrawn, Dr. Doom, Lex Luthor (sometimes), etc.
Right. I get that Killmonger might be crazy, nuts, disturbed, etc. But that makes it all the more weird that the way for some such person to become absolute monarch had so many loopholes, and once he did become king, all but three people went along with the crazy nuts new king to the point of leading your soldiers into battle against another army from your own country which is lead by your own husband or wife.
Sure, but none of this motivation was revealed in the movie. It was 100% “Wakanda should help out downtrodden black people”, which is cool, because that is the same motivation for lots of other more moderate characters. The reasons stated for T’Challa to be deposed was all about him being weak and not following this foreign policy.
That’s kinda par for the course though. Like the mary poppins movie downplays how “my way or the highway/authoritarian” she was in the books. just a spoonfull of sugar helps the medicine go down They LITERALLY sugarcoated it. I’d say the Wakandans got off comparably mildly
I don’t think Black Panther is much worse than any other MCU movie in having dodgy motivations for it’s main protagonist, just that in this movie it bothered me much more than usual.
Just like all the moments where they would say a line, and Juliane and I rolled our eyes at each other knowing what was coming later. “Former airforce pilot now in the CIA” sure so we’ll see him do some ace piloting in the final sequence. “We didn’t find his body” sure as if he doesn’t turn up again in 5 minutes. “I won’t lend you my army” oh until most of the other armies have already died and then he can sweep in and save the day. I don’t normally roll my eyes quite so hard, but I felt myself ticking off the inartful forshadowings way more than usual.
Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. But I was hype for this movie, so I’m not sure that’s it.
It might be because the movie allows the evil to happen because technically Killmonger is doing everything through the correct traditional means. (He’s of royal blood, he defeated T’Challa in combat) Wakanda valuing tradition over what’s right is the crux of this movie philosophically. Your problem just feels very specific of the timing when Killmonger starts to act, but T’Challa is already stuck by the timely machinations of the other movies like Civil War that affected him coming into this film. Everything with Klaue was just the buildup for his attention and why W’Kabe would be willing to listen to an outsider, after all W’Kabe wants Klaue dead because Klaue killed his parents. I feel a lot of these problems are valid but are par for the course for other superhero films.
Right. I’m sure it all makes sense in various ways.
I think I’ve worked out my issue with this one though. I mentioned when discussing Thor: Ragnarok that I had issues with the villain and that I thought it wasn’t a great movie… and yet I let it all slide as I was constantly laughing and mainly entertained. With Black Panther I was mainly entertained, but wasn’t laughing much. There were two or three moments of levity, but overall there wasn’t a lot of humour compared to other MCU movies. Without the constant laughs such a movie can either succeed by great action and a fun plot with interesting twists and turns (like Winter Soldier) or fall flat (like Hulk). Black Panther fell between the two.
A good movie, but one that didn’t keep me entertained enough to stop noticing and/or minding the plot questions.
I also quoted the wrong person. I had your post highlighted instead of Jabram’s when I hit reply, and didn’t check. I’ve fixed it now, but the part of your post that got quoted gave it quite a different context than I intended.
Interesting take on Black Panther and on Killmonger:
“And this is the true tragedy of Killmonger — in his trauma-fueled quest for dominance, he does not represent black liberation — rather, he symbolizes the internalization of white patriarchy — which manifests in his external violence against black women.”
When people told me Alien Covenant was good I thought…this is so nuts. I mean, listen…listen to what you’re saying. It’s paranoid delusion. How- It’s really sad. It’s pathetic.
It was the least enjoyable, least good, most annoying, worst made movie that I saw last year. A year that also included me watching Suicide Squad. And walking out on Lala Land after paying for a ticket at the cinema, the first time I’ve ever done that.
It is by far the worst movie out of all Alien movies, and all Predator movies, and all Alien Vs Predator movies.
I still haven’t seen it. The trailer didn’t seem that bad. How bad could it possibly be?
I rewatched Escape from NY, which I haven’t seen since… the '90s?
Two thoughts.
One is Isaac Hayes. How did such a bad mother become a nutty Scientologist?
Two is there’s this cliche where the second in command to the #1 bad guy is a dangerous nut. TVTropes calls it “The Dragon”
But I’m talking about a specific scenario where the dragon is portrayed as a Clockwork Orange-style lunatic who loves a bit of the old ultraviolence. I’ve seen this in anime like Escaflowne, lots of martial arts films, etc. Even Starscream sort of qualifies.
That made me really curious. Where and when did this trope originate? It clearly spread around the world in the pre-Internet era, so which influential works caused that to happen? Which ones were originators of the concept and which were paying homage?
Part of the problem with Black Panther is that the first hour of the movie is non-essential to the second half of the movie. The reason that Andy Serrakis’ character exists script-wise is that his death is a necessary vehicle for Killmonger to win over the blue clothes tribes, however Killmonger has no prior knowledge that blue clothes tribe would have been swayed by Serrakis’ corpse.
I think the strength of the film is that it certainly pushed Black liberation far stronger than I expected it to. Lines like calling the CIA agent “colonizer” or the monkey tribe leader refusing to listen to him went further than I expected.
There is a lot of debate over Killmonger’s morality and how it relates to Pan-Africanism, African vs. African American, violent struggle vs integration, humanitarian intervention vs. isolationism, etc that I don’t have the energy to write up but while I do appreciate what scenes exist in the movie; I think it could have spent even more time on it.
Particularly, I was hoping for the movie to acknowledge something that superhero movies never acknowledge, that might does not make right. That fights are often up to chance and winning does not mean T’Challa or Killmonger were morally correct. Some slower scenes where the characters talk about these ideology differences would have been nice. A missed opportunity for example was the finale train scene which should have had more pauses between the train going by for them to talk.
The best scene in the movie was Killmonger seeing his father again in the apartment where he died. Overall I’d say it was a good movie but could have been much better, 7/10.
just a spoonfull of sugar helps the medicine go down