#PATHER BLACK MOVIE#

Among his Wakandan countrymen and retinue are a number of remarkably fleshed-out characters with complex relationships, and a veritable who’s who of black actors, including Letitia Wright as his sister Shuri Lupita Nyong’o as his ex-flame Nakia Danai Gurira as Okoye, the head of his all-women bodyguard and Daniel Kaluuya as his best friend W’Kabi.īut as is the way of these stories, T’Challa is not king long before the troubles that began brewing under his father boil over. (Mild spoilers ahead.) T’Challa is finding his footing as the new king in the aftermath of his father’s death. And he also has very sharp claws.īlack Panther picks up where Civil War leaves off. He is, in layman’s terms, a superhero with a bulletproof suit made from vibranium, the strongest substance in the Marvel universe and the stuff that Captain America’s shield is made of. T’Challa is also the holder of the hereditary role of “Black Panther,” a post empowered by a combination of divine blessing, biological enhancement, and cutting-edge technology. In that film, Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the aforementioned supersuit-wearing royal, takes on the mantle of Wakanda’s king after his father, T’Chaka, is killed in a bombing. Director Ryan Coogler begins Black Panther in the aftermath of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, a story that introduced Wakanda into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe.

#PATHER BLACK MOVIE#

The broad strokes of the newest Marvel movie are likely familiar. And like all variations on that archetypal story, Black Panther is a fantasy about black power.ĭo Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’ Allie Conti But, on a deeper level, the fictional African nation of Wakanda is the same Atlantean archetype that has always haunted this diaspora. The basic premise of a superpowered king fighting crime in a futuristic feline-themed suit is the kind of fresh-off-the-panel action absurdity that marks today’s comic-book movies. These are the questions that vibrate beneath the vibranium bedrock of Marvel’s Black Panther, due out in theaters this week. What if European enslavers and colonizers had never ventured into the African continent? More intriguing yet: What if African nations and peoples had successfully rebuffed generations of plunder and theft? What if the Zulu had won the wars against the Voortrekkers and the British, and a confederation of Bantu people had risen up and smashed Belgian rule? What if the Transatlantic children of the mother continent had been allowed to remain, building their empires with the bounties of the cradle of civilization? The very idea of a global African diaspora creates the most fertile of grounds for a field of what-ifs.

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