SteelyKid has gone on a big MCU kick over the last week, working through most of the Avengers movies on streaming. The Pip is less committed to this, but not uninterested, so last night we watched Black Panther for Movie Night. Which on one level is perfectly fine as a visual spectacle (I agreed to watch on that basis, despite having seen it before). On another level, though, the Wakanda of the movie exemplifies everything I dislike about the MCU.
A lot of the problem is just the comic-bookery of it all. At one point, the Pip asked “Is that actual science?” (I think regarding the suit storing kinetic energy) and I replied “Anything in these movies that purports to be science is absolute garbage.” That’s a bit harsh– they have famously brought in the occasional Actual Scientist to consult on this or that bit of technobable– but they’re really bad about having any kind of consistent behavior of… anything. Dropping in the occasional vocabulary word doesn’t change the fact that all MCU technology is functionally magic, able to do anything a hero needs at whatever moment the plot requires it.
They don’t even get science as an institution right, in that everything cool is the work of Super Genius individuals. Shuri is what, 22? And she’s personally responsible for the Black Panther suit, and the magic car-stopping beads, and the giant network of glowing maglev trains that whoosh around under Wakanda City for no clear reason? I know it’s a dramatic convention to put a single face on what in reality would be a massive engineering project involving dozens if not hundreds of people, but it’s a dramatic convention that always sets my eyes to rolling.
There’s also a kind of problem of plot ethics that’s characteristic of the MCU, in that the Deep Issues that it attempts to raise about history and kingship and all the rest are basically resolved by T’Challa being a Good Person. He never seems to be personally conflicted about much of anything, but has an unerring sense of Right that guides him, and the movie basically endorses all his choices. They have the same problem with Steve Rogers in the Captain America thread of the MCU, which I guess makes it natural that by the last couple of movies he’s set up shop in Wakanda.
The biggest source of my dissatisfaction with the MCU in general, which is particularly illustrated by this movie, is a matter of genre positioning. That is, they’ve chosen to make it an alternative history, and that’s a speculative subgenre that almost never fails to rub me the wrong way.
This really starts with the Captain America movies, where they push his origin back to WWII. Which, you know, is fine as a tribute to the original comics, but that early a departure point, featuring a weird Nazi faction running around blasting things with energy bolts, should change… basically everything. And yet, other than some fairly superficial differences, the early 21st century in the MCU looks pretty much like the early 21st century of the people who buy tickets for MCU movies.
Wakanda takes this to an extreme, with the departure point being millennia in the past. And yet, despite having been closed off to outsiders for centuries, and evolving a whole complicated system of magical technology beyond anything known to the rest of the world, everything looks… pretty normal. They’re even taking their cultural cues from the normal world– Shuri flips off T’Challa in one early scene, which is a pretty characteristically American gesture, but… why? Other than, you know, that it got a chuckle from The Pip and the millions of characteristically American kids that they’re trying to sell tickets and merch.
Wakanda ought to be dramatically… different, if it’s been operating entirely independently for centuries. But instead it’s just like the (movie version of) real-world Africa, except rich.
Roll all that together, and I just… can’t. I can’t take it seriously without starting to ask questions about how it all works, questions that don’t have good answers because it’s ultimately all rooted in comic books from fifty years ago. It’s an aesthetic, not a created world with any depth in the places that its presentation makes me want to poke at. And that means that the story doesn’t have any real stakes, so when it comes down to two dudes punching each other in front of a green screen, it’s a great big shrug from me.
And, as with many of my negative reviews of things, I fully recognize that this is mostly a Me Thing. Obviously, millions upon millions of people don’t have these issues with the MCU and, you know, good for them. The whole structure is just fatally flawed for me, though. It doesn’t stop me from watching (obviously), but it does make it next to impossible for me to take it seriously.