If you start in the center of Africa and head southeast, you arrive at Wakanda. According to one map, it lies somewhere near Uganda—below South Sudan, above Rwanda, and abutting the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unlike those nations, however, which have been scalded by strife, Wakanda is a model of serenity. It is a kingdom, wisely ruled, and rich in a precious natural resource, vibranium, which is used for hyper-technology. Foreign marauders have never pillaged that wealth, because they know nothing about it. In short, Wakanda is blessed among nations, and there’s only one thing wrong with the place. It doesn’t exist.
The map appears in “Black Panther,” most of which is set in present-day Wakanda, at a pivotal point. The old king is dead; long live the new king, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a princely sort who comes with many advantages. His mother is played by Angela Bassett, who rocks a ruff better than any queen since Elizabeth I. His most trusted combatant, should trouble loom, is the shaven-headed Okoye (Danai Gurira), who can fell an aircraft with the toss of a spear. He has a thing going with the wondrous Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Oh, and I almost forgot: he’s a superhero. Unlike Peter Parker, whose teasing, could-it-be-me act has worn thin, T’Challa is super and proud, turning at will into Black Panther. His suit, at once bulletproof and clingy, makes Tony Stark’s outfit look like a deep-sea diver’s. Sure, Bruce Wayne has the Batmobile, but T’Challa has a whole country to drive. The king is the man.
We have already met him, in “Captain America: Civil War” (2016), but there he was merely a part of the Avengers gang, and he made no more impact, to be honest, than the one with the bow and arrow whose name I can never remember. Hence the pressing need for this new film. There have been black superheroes before, and Will Smith’s character in “Hancock” (2008) was an unusual blend of potency and dysfunction, but none have been given dominion over a blockbuster. (The one who merits it best is Frozone, from “The Incredibles,” who has to miss dinner to save the world. “We are talking about the greater good!” he cries. Back comes the reply: “Greater good? I am your wife. I’m the greatest good you are ever going to get.”) Nor has the genre, until now, allowed black identity to be the ground bass of a single tale. There are white actors in “Black Panther,” including Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman, but their roles are minor ones—the types of role, that is, to which black performers, in this patch of the movie business, have grown wearily accustomed.
The director is Ryan Coogler, and those of us who admire his work will be stirred to find that “Black Panther” is bracketed by short scenes in Oakland, California. That is where his début feature, “Fruitvale Station” (2013), began, with genuine cell-phone footage from an incident in 2009, when an unarmed African-American, Oscar Grant, was shot and killed by police. The rest of the movie traced the arc of Oscar’s final day, and what struck you was how normal and how plotless it felt—a mild domestic tiff, a trip to the store to buy shrimp, phone calls to his mom. The only special thing about that day was how it ended, and the tension in “Black Panther” springs from Coogler’s instinctive urge to relay the rough textures of non-heroic experience while also striving to meet the demands of Marvel, by offering a gadget-packed dogfight in the skies, say, or a ride on an armored rhino.
The fact that he mainly succeeds is no surprise, since his previous movie, “Creed” (2015), a late but meaty addition to the “Rocky” saga, with Sylvester Stallone as a coach, proved that Coogler could hold his nerve in a franchise. On the one hand, “Creed,” like “Black Panther,” keeps reminding us that a major studio has money in the game; the musical score, in both cases, is grimly insistent, as if to insure that the emotional content of each scene is packaged and delivered on cue. On the other hand, every Coogler movie features Michael B. Jordan, who is hardly someone to be hemmed in. He ought to have won an Oscar for his Oscar, in “Fruitvale Station”; he was the bullish young boxer in “Creed”; and now, in the latest film, he shows up as T’Challa’s nemesis, Killmonger, who believes that he has a claim to the Wakandan throne. While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.
Few recent movies have been more keenly anticipated than this one, in regard both to its box-office potential and to the force of its mythmaking. With its vision of an unplundered homeland, blooming from liberty rather than from bondage, “Black Panther” is, in the fullest sense, an African-American work, and Carvell Wallace was rightly moved to ask, in a Times essay, “Can films like these significantly change things for black people in America?” We shall see. My only qualm concerns not so much the mission of Coogler’s movie as its form; I wonder what weight of political responsibility can, or should, be laid upon anything that is accompanied by buttered popcorn. Vibranium is no more real than the philosopher’s stone. More Americans will presumably watch “Black Panther” than have ever read “Black Boy” or “Invisible Man,” but do numbers alone make the difference? Are 3-D spectacles any more reliable than rose-tinted ones, when we seek to imagine an ideal society?
The opportunity to see a warthog playing the harp doesn’t come along nearly as often as it should. All the more reason, then, to welcome “Early Man,” although whether the harpist in question is technically a warthog is open to dispute. He’s piggy enough in snout and trotter, and lavishly tusked, and he answers to the name of Hognob, yet he barks and bays like a wolf. Hognob is the sidekick of Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne), and Dug, being in possession of a bucktoothed grin and oodles of true grit, is the hero.
“Early Man” is the latest film from Aardman Animations, and the director is Nick Park, the sultan of stop-motion, to whom we are eternally indebted for Wallace, Gromit, and other gems of superpliability. As the title suggests, the setting is prehistory. (No date is given, although we are helpfully told that the opening sequence occurs “around lunchtime.”) Dug belongs to a minor tribe, dwelling peaceably in the lush glades of an extinct volcano. This demi-paradise is invaded by a more advanced people, brought there by a lust for metal ore, and led—or bossed around—by the vainglorious Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston). “The age of stone is over,” he declares, speaking in a heavy but unexplained French accent. “Long live the age of bronze.”
Dug, as dauntless as ever, travels to the stronghold of his foes. The entrance is shielded by one gate after another, each shunting into position with a mighty clang, and finally, in the movie’s best gag, by a little sliding bolt, such as you might find on a garden shed. Such attention not just to detail but to the unforeseen and deliciously unnecessary detail is an Aardman hallmark; in “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005), the climactic chase had to pause while the villain, a beefy mutt, produced a tiny flowered purse, took out a coin, and fed it into the slot of a fairground ride. As a rule, Aardman scripts are unabashed by puns—“You haven’t eaten your primordial soup!” somebody exclaims in “Early Man”—but it’s the visual treats, too homely for surrealism but too wacky to be cute, that anchor the films and transfigure the whole world, ancient and modern, into a potential joke shop. Why not use mini-crocodiles as clothespins, when you need to clip your washing to the line?
If “Early Man” slips below the studio’s highest standards, that may be due to its length. In “A Grand Day Out” (1989), Park managed to rocket Wallace and Gromit—one man and his dog—to the moon and back in twenty-three minutes, whereas the new movie takes more than an hour longer to tell a plainer tale, topped with a lighter scattering of laughs. Dug and company confront the enemy in a soccer match; should they win, they will return to their beloved woods. The whole thing feels challengingly British, right down to the sports commentators and the munificent arrival of a queen (Miriam Margolyes), and it’s also too Gromitless for comfort. Aardman is a haven for the humanish: for creatures that hail from other species but match us or even, in Gromit’s case, outstrip us in proficiency and grace. The stage of “Early Man,” though, is stuffed with men and women—on the Neanderthal spectrum, it’s true, but propelled by needs and greeds much like our own—whereas the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air are reduced to the role of extras. It pains me to say so, but Hognob is not enough. ♦
