If you’ve been following my blog or my Twitter page recently you will know that I LOVE Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I was already excited about the movie but when I actually sat in my local IMAX theater and watched it I was blown away by its profound storytelling and awe-inspiring moments. Shuri commanded the screen as the film’s lead and Namor pierced my heart with his searing performance, instantly joining my personal pantheon of favorite Marvel characters.
The movie, now having received five Academy Award nominations including Best Supporting Actress for Angela Basset, is filled with layers upon layers of details that make the film all the more rewarding. But a striking detail that I actually discovered several months ago but have only now decided to share is the fascinating parallels between T’Challa and Shuri’s journeys as the Black Panther. Let’s dive deeper.
It’s very hard for actors to be taken seriously in blockbusters but Angela Bassett’s incredible portrayal of Queen Ramonda in Wakanda Forever was an exception. She has now become the first actor to be nominated for an Academy Award in a Marvel movie which is beyond exciting. The Black Panther franchise is still the template of the superhero genre at its finest. Ryan Coogler not only beat the sequel curse, but he also showed that his stories truly are, pun intended, marvel-ous.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day.
It’s taken a while but finally, the first looks at Thor, Mighty Thor, and Valkyrie are here ahead of Thor: Love and Thunder later on this year and they look ridiculously awesome.
Um…whoa. First off, Natalie Portman’s Mighty Thor looks perfect. To think she’s gone from playing Padme to this. Ah, I’m freaking out a little. I absolutely cannot wait to see her being a fierce warrior goddess onscreen as the Mighty Thor.
The list of female-led superhero movies isn’t long. There’s Catwoman and Electra, two mid-2000s’ films that featured attractive ladies (Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner) in tight outfits that left mid-riffs and breasts heavily exposed as they fought bad guys. Then there was Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, and Captain Marvel, three late-2010s’ movies that sought to portray the female comic book character in a way that was both empowering and entertaining. They mostly failed. And last year’s Wonder Woman 1984 was filled with all sorts of pockmarks that led it to have a dismal 5.4/10 rating on IMDb and a Rotten 59% score.
Yes, female-led comic book movies have had more downs than ups. For some reason, writers haven’t been able to separate the woman from the character, resulting in stories that often felt lazily composed or as if the writers were trying too hard to make a statement.
Of these past six female-led comic book movies, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel stand tall above the rest but even then those films are among the weaker entries of comic book movies in the last decade.
Wonder Woman had every chance to be a remarkable origin story for the Amazonian warrior and while it has one of the greatest sequences in any comic book film–No Man’s Land–the movie is just a bit mundane.
Gal Gadot knows how to embody that gorgeous Amazonian goddess persona on the big screen and the film’s action sequences are pretty good (they would’ve been better if there was less slow-mo breaking the flow of the fight scenes) but what bugs me is the level of attention on Steve Trevor’s side of the story. He’s such an imposing presence on the movie’s narrative that the film almost should be called Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor.
This is a problem we seem to never have to deal with when male superheroes get their origin stories told. Female characters in those movies are either the doting love interest/damsel in distress or an afterthought to the man’s ascent to superhero awesomeness. But Diana Prince is hampered by Wonder Woman‘s male writers (Zack Snyder, Allen Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs) as they make sure to always have Steve Trevor as her equal in the movie. They even commit to the narrative that Diana discovers her inner power because of Trevor’s death, thus reiterating that narrative that a woman is nothing without a man, a turning point in the story that has grated on my nerves since I saw the film for the first time in theaters four years ago.
Black Widow was a movie Marvel fans had been asking for for years but we ultimately thought we would never get it. We finally did get it…but it was after already knowing that Natasha Romanoff dies in Endgame, souring the prospect of her film because we knew the outcome wouldn’t lead to more movies featuring her. Her movie was only going to be a puzzle piece to her overall story.
So did I expect the movie to be good, yeah, but did I expect it to be great, not really. To my elation, it was great.
It’s three days until I will get the chance to see Black Widow, the first Marvel movie I will have seen in theaters since Endgame over two years ago, and I am ecstatic.
In preparation for the movie I did a Marvel movie marathon where I watched every film that featured Black Widow. It took two days to complete and it was pretty fun but what was most fascinating is watching the writers evolve Natasha Romanoff from this flirty eye-candy broad in a tight black suit to a bad*** leader and a true hero.
In Iron Man 2 she, of course, was sexualized the most as Tony ogled at her and she flirted with him in turn. In The Avengers while she thankfully wasn’t forced to have a romance with anyone, namely Hawkeye, she was still forced to be sexualized at the beginning of the movie. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier she’s practically flirting with Steve Rogers the whole movie, even kissing him when they have to evade HYDRA which is warranted but wasn’t totally necessary. And in Avengers: Age of Ultron Whedon came out of left field and bombarded Black Widow with this romance with Bruce Banner that nobody saw coming but kind of made sense? The movie gives us the best idea of her haunting past in the Red Room, including letting us know that she was sterilized. It’s a terrible piece of information that gives her character so much more depth but Whedon ruins the moment by comparing her sterilization to being a monster. Ugh.
And so, that’s her story in those four films. Then she returns in Captain America: Civil War and suddenly she’s a totally different person.
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