There was a time when I used to watch a lot of movies, but that’s increasingly far away, now. I do try to keep vaguely in touch with pop culture, though, so I continue to read articles and listen to podcasts about movies, in order to have at least some idea of what’s going on.

I didn’t see Black Panther when it was in theaters, because in addition to the “no time to watch movies” thing, I’m generally down on superhero movies. We’re getting a renewed batch of hype for it, though, as we head into movie-awards season, with lots of talk about how it needs to be in consideration for Best Picture and the like. By coincidence, I found myself in need of some relaxation yesterday, so I punched it up from the on-demand movie service of our cable company.

And… it’s a superhero movie. It’s a well-done example of the form, to be sure, but it’s got all the same “this premise is dopey” problems of, well, every other superhero movie. It is at least isolated from the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (during the main action, anyway), which works to its advantage because trying to fit it into that larger continuity adds a bunch of other problems.

As noted above, I’ve hardly watched any other movies this year, so I can’t meaningfully compare this to much, but I’m just not seeing the awesomeness, here. Admittedly, a lot of the problems I have are things that might be skipped past if I were more charitably disposed toward superhero movies in general, but then again, if this is a revolutionary example that transcends the form to be great art, I’d expect something more. Instead, the characters felt underdeveloped, the political message was delivered ham-handedly, and the story beats were painfully obvious.

I probably should’ve tried to see this months ago, when it was just a hot new release, because it’s perfectly fine spectacle (a few cheesy CGI rhinos aside). Seeing it after months of talk about what an amazing, award-worthy movie it is, though, set some unreasonable expectations that no superhero movie was likely to live up to.