Black Panther (2018)

At this point – a week after its release and eighteen films deep into the reliable Marvel Cinematic Universe – you probably don’t need me to tell you that Black Panther is great. I can’t say it’s the best superhero film ever, and indeed it’s hard to say if it’s the best film of Phase Three, which includes first-rate features like Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming. But I will go out on a limb and say that it’s the best first entry in a Marvel sub-franchise since Iron Man, doing the work of building out the larger franchise’s world, distinguishing itself as a story in its own right, and managing to entertain the dickens out of a diverse audience who are helping it to shatter records.

After the death of his father, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) assumes the mantle of King of Wakanda, a secretive nation in Africa guarding technological advances and a massive cache of vibranium, a rare indestructible metal. T’Challa also takes on the identity of his nation’s defender, the Black Panther, who is called to action when Erik Stevens – the Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) – and arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, upping the mania from Age of Ultron) steal a vibranium artifact from a London museum. All the while, T’Challa wrestles with his father’s legacy, wondering whether Wakanda should remain hidden from the world.

Marvel has not really made a bad movie since the inception of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008. Your mileage may vary, as in the case of The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World (which I liked but have never felt compelled to rewatch), but by and large the MCU has been a case study in crowdpleasing. When introducing new characters to the universe, though, Marvel has struggled to break out of the mold set by Iron Man. With its scientific macguffin, Ant-Man is largely (no pun intended) “Tiny Iron Man”; when Doctor Strange has to set his ego aside to embrace a higher calling, it’s difficult not to see him as “Magic Iron Man.”

Black Panther is not, however, the story of a Tony Stark type who takes the throne and learns humility; it’s about a prince coming into his own, grappling with the weight of history and some very compelling arguments from his enemies. It might be Marvel’s most philosophical movie, and it’s certainly the most political (such is bound to happen when your protagonist is a king), but moreover it’s one of the more unique, giving audiences something we’ve truly never seen before in a superhero movie – a fully-realized alternate world which is entirely plausible and rousingly engaging. Wakanda is unlike anything in recent memory (though parts do feel as though it’s a pilot launch for a new Disney theme park, which I’d happily attend), and director Ryan Coogler is wise to give us Wakanda such as it is without the crutch of a point-of-view character; we’re dropped into the world, which displays a consistent internal logic without being overly explained. Even the film’s introductory history lesson, though expositional, gives weight to the film as we begin to wonder to whom the story was being told.

After seeing the film twice, I was glad to see that Black Panther really holds up, and that two different audiences had a consistent baseline of reactions to the film’s twists, punchlines, and triumphs. Black Panther contains a number of surprising reveals, each well-executed without the need for an explanatory pause. Perhaps the greatest surprise, though, is that the film’s ostensible villain, Killmonger, actually makes a lot of sense (surprising, I know, for a man whose name might as well be Murderman). “Where were you?” he asks of the isolationist Wakanda after recounting a litany of history’s horrors. Killmonger is a welcome relief from the generic world-conquerors Marvel has been known to give us, distinctive and fantastically performed by Jordan (proving that Marvel continues to be the rehabilitation clinic for former Human Torches). That he poses both a physical and philosophical challenge to T’Challa is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Really, though, Black Panther is so full of good performances that it’s tough to single one out. Jordan has rightly gotten his fair share of critical accolades, and we knew from Civil War that Boseman had the kingly presence required for the Black Panther. As T’Challa’s sister Shuri, Letitia Wright steals her every scene; whether it’s playing Q to T’Challa’s 007 or testing out her sonic wrist cannons, with her infectious charm and rebellious streak, Wright is the next face to watch in the Marvel movies because she ought to be in every one of them going forward. (Can you imagine her bonding with Rocket Raccoon or Peter Parker?) I would say she steals nearly every scene because Winston Duke, as rival tribe leader M’Baku the Man-Ape, is an unexpected hoot, with an intimidating presence and a gregarious sense of humor to match. Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira are just two of the many badass women in T’Challa’s life and by his side, and it’s remarkably refreshing to see a film so full of women who are always working together, never devalued by the male protagonist or by each other. (And yes, the film passes the Bechdel test.)

Look, I could go on and on, running down the cast list and finding something to praise. There’s not a bad performance in the bunch, and there’s not a single sequence that wastes time in the film’s 130+-minute runtime. I had worried that Black Panther might feel like a holding pattern before May’s Infinity War (to which, we’re told, this whole universe has been building), but instead it feels heroically fresh, such that I’m almost more excited to hear about Black Panther II. It’s equally gratifying that, as Marvel approaches their ostensible endgame, they’re loosening the reins on their house style and letting some fresh voices like Taika Waititi, James Gunn, and Ryan Coogler do their thing in the Marvel sandbox. It gives one the idea that Infinity War might not be an ending but rather a beginning, a prismatic expansion point from which the Marvel Cinematic Universe can spread out, diversify, and challenge our ideas of what a superhero movie can be. Wakanda forever, indeed.

Black Panther is rated PG-13 for “prolonged sequences of action violence, and a brief rude gesture.” Directed by Ryan Coogler. Written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Forest Whitaker, and Andy Serkis.

Rogue One (2016)

It’s Disney’s galaxy, folks; we just live in it. But as I’ve said over and over, now is the best time to be alive. We’ve got comic book superheroes on film and television, engaging as ever, and we’ve got a new Star Wars film coming out every year. And if they continue to be as good as Rogue One is, that’s reason enough to hold onto the planet for another rotation around the sun.

As the Empire nears completion of its mammoth Death Star weapon just before the events of the original Star Wars film, a band of Rebels led by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his droid co-pilot K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) seeks out Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the weapon’s chief engineer. While the Death Star’s military director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) grapples for power by proving the strength of his facility, Jyn bristles at the notion of joining the Rebellion but finds herself drawn into the struggle as she searches for her father.

If you’ve been around this long, you know I’m something of a shill when it comes to the genres I love. It’s not that these movies can do no wrong – I took Suicide Squad to task for biting off more than it could chew and for being “more than a little strangely crafted” – but maybe I’m a little more forgiving just because these are “my” genres, movies that feel made for me. But Rogue One is, I think, a great Star Wars movie that does everything a Star Wars movie ought to do. Since buying Lucasfilm lock, stock, and Greedo-shot-first barrel, Disney has been quite enamored of the Original Trilogy era, setting its television shows, comic books, novels, and now spin-off films in that period. But they’ve been equally keen on butting up against our sense of what Star Wars can be – that is, led by someone who isn’t a whiny blond dude, with next-to-no lightsaber combat.

Rogue One is both of those things, and more, depicting the run-up to A New Hope in a way that will forever color the way we look at the original film (answering in the process a question fans have had for about forty years in the process). But it does so in a way that deepens our understanding of the Star Wars mythos – at least, the post-Disney purge canon. Rogue One unites disparate elements from the Prequels, the Original Trilogy, Clone Wars and Rebels, from tie-in books like James Luceno’s Catalyst to what I’m pretty sure are a few weapons from the Lego Star Wars video games. We even, finally, get references to the mysterious Whills, referenced in early drafts of the screenplay and novelization to Star Wars. All of this, thankfully, is never beholden to an audience’s preexisting knowledge, serving instead like bonus frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum for those of us who have eyes trained to see them.

Because at its core, Rogue One is a film about a girl, her father, and the galaxy that finds itself depending quite unexpectedly on them. If you always thought the galaxy revolved around the Skywalkers, Rogue One asks you to look again; there’s only one Skywalker here, but as I predicted last week he’s treated like an ominous specter at the periphery of this story, the armor-plated embodiment of fury waiting for an excuse to unleash his hate. By and large, though, Rogue One is more interested in its scrappy band of Rebels, new characters all, some of whom are bound to become new fan favorites. K-2SO’s deadpan cynicism recalls a kind of killer Baymax, while the warrior duo of Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen, my personal fave) and Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) shed light on the Force from the vantage point of someone who isn’t a Jedi.

Amid all the fresh new characters who I’d gladly follow into spin-offs of their own, though, Rogue One is thoroughly Felicity Jones’s show. Although some have drawn superficial lines between Jyn Erso and Daisy Ridley’s Rey, Jones does a fabulous job differentiating her character from the one found in The Force Awakens. There’s an unexpected emotional depth to Jyn, which Jones lets us see Jyn has repressed for so very long. She lets it burble over every so often, to great effect, and we never have a hard time believing that the tough persona she puts on in front of the other Rebels is just a defensive mechanism.

On the subject of the film’s villains, I will say that my first impression of Orson Krennic is that he’s a little undercooked. I have the disadvantage of having read the prequel novel before the film, so I know him a little better than most filmgoers, but his motivations and rank in the Empire might have been made clearer. Mendelsohn does a good job turning Krennic into a snarling power-hungry Imperial middleman, but as it is, Krennic takes a backseat to the Empire at large. Here the Empire is a giant and well-oiled machine, whose hold over the galaxy is more intimidating than any one figure could be. Then again, how daunting can an Imperial be in a film with Darth Vader? As the trailers have hinted, Krennic has a very memorable scene with Vader which puts Krennic in perspective relative to the Imperial machine he serves. Still, there’s a more personal story to be told, considering Krennic’s long history with the Erso family.

It wouldn’t be a Cinema King review without a wild comparison or two, and so I offer that Rogue One is very much akin to Captain America: The First Avenger. We knew where both films would end up – Darth Vader tells us as much in Star Wars, while we knew Cap was going to end up on ice, only to be thawed out in time for The Avengers. But just because the ending is a foregone conclusion, an accidental spoiler forty years in the making, that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along the way, in a movie that feels more heartfelt than you might expect, given that at least a few of our heroes might have a tragic fate bearing down on them. There’s room for a few surprises along the way, but more importantly Rogue One clicks up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in its personification of the quintessentially human emotion of hope. Both films, even as things look quite grim, find room for optimism, for persistence in the face of adversity because “men are still good” and “rebellions are built on hope.” It’s always darkest before the dawn, we recall from an earlier Batman film, but the dawn – or in this case, the new hope – is coming.

And for moviegoers, it isn’t all that essential to hope that the Star Wars franchise continues to thrive under the gloved thumb of the Mouse. Mickey’s two-for-two. The Force is truly with us.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of sci-fi violence and action. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Chris Weitz & Tony Gilroy and John Knoll & Gary Whitta. Starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, and James Earl Jones.

Arrival (2016)

You may have noticed that I have this tendency to compare compelling science fiction to Inception. In fact, in the case of Big Hero 6, Looper, and Transcendence, I usually draw a straight line back to 2010. This inclination, I admit, is somewhere between hagiography and tracking cultural influence, for few will deny that I am a disciple of Christopher Nolan and that the post-2010 science-fiction line-up does have a lot in common with Inception.

However, I’m not going to say that Arrival has much to do with Inception. (Nor am I going to spoil anything, promise.) Instead, I’m going to draw the connective tissue a little closer to the present, toward Nolan’s most recent film. Arrival is essentially a moody, Kubrickian Interstellar, without much in common with Inception beyond the same pleasant mental gymnastics as we follow along with the film’s very smart plot.

Amy Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistic professor whose loose affiliation with the United States government puts her at the top of the list when twelve alien spacecraft arrive on earth. Drafted to help translate an alien language in order to understand the spacecrafts’ purpose on our planet, Dr. Banks works with a theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner) and a wary colonel (Forest Whitaker) to piece together the mystery of the arrival.

Not just because both films utilize Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” to great effect (and affect), there are parts of Arrival that feel very much like Martin Scorsese’s underrated Shutter Island (perhaps not coincidentally, also 2010, a real important year for me as a filmgoer). Somewhere between Arrival’s fog-bound aesthetic and its depiction of resilient optimism in the face of a crumbling world, a belief that ultimately things will make sense if we study them hard enough, I was reminded of Shutter Island and its similarly determined worldview. In both films, we have a “detective” of sorts, whose dogged pursuit of a graspable truth – in whose existence very few of the other characters actually believe – plays out amid dreary weather and mournful violin solos which suggest the intangibility of truth and the inherent sorrow therein. However, in Arrival as in Shutter Island, the truth is out there, if only we had eyes to see it.

In Arrival, those eyes belong to Louise Banks, and thank heavens we have Amy Adams to play the part. In a just world, Adams would be in the running for Best Actress, because her portrayal of the linguist is stunning and powerful, conveying much with a frown or a furrowed brow, and her earnest desire to understand the aliens is something that comes through even as we see just how scared she is of the possibilities presented by life beyond our little blue world. We have all these other dudes in the film – and yes, Adams is pretty much the only woman in the film, which can’t be accidental – but they take a backseat to Adams’s performance.

For as small and intimate as the film’s focus is on Louise Banks, the film has a simultaneous grandeur to it that recalls Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The twelve alien ships, several stories high and hovering above the ground, recall Kubrick’s black monolith, suggesting perhaps shared common ground in both films’ treatment of mankind’s future and our place among the stars. There are moments in Arrival that feel a bit as though Stanley Kubrick is directing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff is an immense being at which we can only marvel, slack-jawed, while we attempt to comprehend. But where Brontë left Heathcliff somewhat inscrutable, where Kubrick might have left him to the dimension of the metaphorical, Arrival takes the occasion of immensity as a moment of contemplation. Louise begins in fear of the aliens, but track her evolution throughout the film.

Arrival isn’t a puzzle box like Inception, where we have to struggle mightily to keep up. Rather, it’s more akin to the scientific affect of Interstellar, in which mystery elements fit together thematically, not solely by virtue of their ability to clear up the plot. Rather than comprehend, we understand; we feel it. Arrival has a depth to it, a sense of truth and a very valuable point about geopolitics and the need for a utopian perspective. Louise Banks has that utopian vision, that belief that her work has purpose, direction, and possibility, where others see only futility and predetermination. It’s to the film’s credit that it convinces us to see things her way, and in a brilliant third-act reveal, teaches us how to do it, too.

Director Denis Villenueve – we at The Cinema King remember him fondly from Prisoners – is slated to direct the forthcoming Blade Runner 2049, and while I’ve never thought that film needed a sequel, seeing Villenueve at the helm of a compelling and grand science fiction film has me rethinking my tune.

Arrival is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.” Directed by Denis Villenueve. Written by Eric Heisserer. Based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma.

Taken 3 (2015)

If I were the kind of reviewer who did video or audio reviews, my write-up of Taken 3 would begin with a very clear and audible sigh of disappointment.  I’m not sure with whom or what I’m most disappointed – the film itself, the people who created it without much regard for it actually being a proper Taken film, or myself for possessing expectations some would consider to be unreasonable for a film bearing the alternative title Tak3n.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), he of the “particular set of skills,” is framed for the murder of his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen).  Pursued by a police inspector (Forest Whitaker) who doesn’t take his skills for granted, Bryan works to clear his name, identify those responsible, and protect his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).

As repetitive it was, though not as offensively so as the brutally unnecessary The Hangover 2, Taken 2 established a formula for this sort of thing – someone goes to Europe, said someone gets “taken,” and Liam Neeson has to save them, usually with some artificial time constraint, and dismantle an unprecedented amount of foreigners to do so.  As patently silly as that premise sounds on paper, there’s something alchemical about the first Taken which made it solidly one of my favorite action movies of all time.

What we have here is a film that doesn’t do any of those things.  Instead, Taken 3 is formulaic in another direction, aligning it more closely with a very generic action film premise, the wrongfully accused protagonist against all the odds.  Aside from the fact that Bryan buys his daughter a large and not-age-appropriate gift at the beginning, there’s little in this character that resembles the man we met in the first film.  Even his special skills are supplanted by an overemphasis on technological research and a “secret hideout” in which Bryan’s friends do most of the skilled labor.

Taken 3 swaps out all of what made the franchise distinct with a script that could be substituted for any action hero at all.  Even the architecture of the film – man being framed – doesn’t fit with the Taken persona.  Forest Whitaker’s cop character seems out of place, too; he walks around reminding us how good Bryan was in the first two films, but he’s still two steps behind while running what appears to be his own parallel investigation into Lenore’s murder which revolves around, bizarrely of all, eating bagels found as evidence at the crime scene.

The film also does a dismal job of stepping all over the character of Kim.  Where Taken 2 had done a nice bit of character development by having Kim more actively involved in the action sequences and rescue mission, Taken 3 reduces her to bystander and then, as the film draws to a close, a sort of obligatory hostage.  To top it all off, she’s pregnant, a plot point which has nothing to do other than invoke paternalistic feelings of protectiveness, a very retrograde approach to female characters.  Much of the film feels dated, including its soundtrack and action editing, but the inability to do something at least a little creative/progressive with Kim is discouraging.

Taken 3 steps away from its immediate predecessor in another dispiriting way when it completely fails to follow up on what I felt was the best part of Taken 2, the beat in which Bryan wearily admitted, “I am tired of it all.”  I loved the idea of a man drawn begrudgingly into an endless cycle of violence and bloodshed, a man who just wanted to settle down with what was left of his family.  Instead, when the plot of Taken 3 really ramps up, Bryan doesn’t show any of that fatigue.  His revenge-o-meter goes from zero to sixty without hesitation, an inconsistency all the more surprising since Olivier Megaton directed both Taken 2 and 3 yet seems to have overlooked what could have made this film stand apart from all the other generic action outings. 

Then there’s the litany of actual film offenses, those moments of flawed logic and absurdities that stretch the boundaries of even the most suspended of beliefs.  The film includes, among other scenes that got me to laugh but not in a good way, a corpse whose wounds do not bleed and indeed which manage to heal postmortem, the collection of evidence that has no material value for the plot, and a Porsche which can outrun a small aircraft on takeoff.  Granted, the first film gave Bryan Mills near-superheroic abilities, but that’s something intrinsic to the character and, I’d argue, somewhat essential in the genre.  Don’t even get me started on the headscratcher of the plot, which is unnecessarily complex in a way that manages to be both predictable and borderline incomprehensible.

Taken 3 isn’t actually bad – it’s engaging enough and Neeson is still enjoyably gruff – but it is preposterous and, I think, ultimately unnecessary.  The real joy of Taken was that it felt fresh and brisk, and stretching it out over the course of two more films just doesn’t add enough to the equation to justify more movies.  My final analysis is that I want to run into the arms of the original Taken and hope that it hasn’t been sullied in the stretching.

Taken 3 is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and for brief strong language.”  The same standard of bloodless but very physical violence continues here, with gunshots, stabbings, and visceral punches.  Taken 3 has more car chases than the other films, as well as one F-word.

Friends, 2015 is not off to a good start.