Marvel Entertainment has released the first trailer for Black Panther, revealing the Afrofuturist awesomeness of Wakanda and introducing a badass cast of characters to join T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman).
Seriously, look at Danai Gurira as Okoye and Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia and tell us that villain Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) stands any sort of chance.
The official synopsis:
Black Panther follows T’Challa who, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king. But when a powerful old enemy reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king—and Black Panther—is tested when he is drawn into a formidable conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people and their way of life.
Black Panther comes to theaters February 16, 2018.
Looks mindblowingly awesome :O
AAAH This gives me chills! I wish I could have worked this one. The Panther crew says it was amazing, and I believe them! It looks so stunning.
Oh my goodness yes I will watch this movie. I would even go twice, to let the studio know how much we want people of color in their films.
I love the look of all things Wakanda and the fighting scenes. The trailer looks a bit too Fast & Furious, so I hope the actual movie isn’t that much like that.
Will the movie feature Wakanda deciding to withhold the cure for cancer, like the comics do?
*inaudible squee*
This gets me in all my tingly bits. Thanks!
Meredith @@@@@ 3 – right!? Maybe I’ll go three times. I’m exciteddd!!
Whoa. I wasn’t too interested at first, but this looks incredible. Looking forward to it.
Very interesting song choice for the trailer. Will the movie be as political and controversial as the song suggests? Anyway, it is pretty awesome seeing full-bore Afrofuturism in a big-budget, mainstream Hollywood blockbuster.
@5/random22: To be fair, if you consider how horribly the rest of the world has treated Africa over the past few centuries, it’s hard to blame the Wakandans for feeling, one, that they needed to stay hidden from the rest of the world for their own survival, and two, that they didn’t owe the rest of the world a damned thing. Sure, with their tech, maybe they could’ve fought off the colonizers and helped the rest of Africa do the same, but it’s more likely that they would’ve eventually been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. After all, there’s a lot more coal and oil in the world than there is vibranium.
@10 Anything with Gil Scott Heron becomes 10x more awesome.
There is a difference between not sharing tech and not sharing a cure for cancer, a disease one of the Avengers in the comics is currently very actually dying from. The former is selfish but understandable, the latter makes you a out and out villain.
@12/random22: I don’t know about the comics, I just know about history. Wanting to help is nice, but if reaching out to help would be all but certain to attract the attention of people who would kill you and your family and steal everything you own, then that makes it pretty hard to act on an altruistic impulse.
Not hoarding a cure for cancer is not being altruistic, it is being human. Doing the right thing often comes with horrible consequences, but with great power comes great…I forget how the rest of that goes. Anyway, the last guy in Marvel comics who hoarded a cure for cancer was a(n admittedly entertaining) nutcase who wanted to turn people into dinosaurs without their consent. So, that is the bar. At best you can say Wakanda is not as bad as a guy who wants to inflict bodyhorrors on the world. Yay good guys.
The trailer nailed it; I really want to see more. I was trying to remember where the song was from; not surprised it is Gil Scott Heron. Interesting but compelling musical choice. The visuals look fantastic.
@14
Come on, if you read superheroes comics, you know this has nothing to do with Wakanda and all to do with the need to keep these superheroes universes as closely aligned to our universe, despite how ridiculous it is. That’s why most of the people in Marvel or DC still react like its the first time they get invaded by aliens, despite it happening all the time, while alien or future-tech never gets mass produced (same with Stark tech) and so on. Giving away the cure for cancer and mass-producing it would mean the universe would, in an important aspect, completely diverge from our own, which neither Marvel nor DC will ever allow. Painting Wakanda as the bad guys is either you being oblivious to something utterly basic about these comics universes or you do it out of malicious intent.
@14/random22: Even paramedics and EMTs aren’t expected to go into a scene with an active shooter unless they get an all-clear from police, or at least a police escort. That’s not because the paramedics are shirking their responsibilities, it’s because someone else’s violence is preventing them from exercising their responsibilities. In this case — and again, I’m not talking about the comics, but about what we know of the movie universe’s version of Wakanda in the context of real history — it would’ve been the brutality of the Scramble for Africa, the horrors that white colonialism inflicted on the continent, that forced Wakanda into a position where they couldn’t help, where they had to hide to avoid destruction. So it’s Europe you should blame, not Wakanda. Maybe they’ve stayed hidden too long, but it’s understandable why they felt they had to. The scars colonialism inflicted are deep and most are still unhealed even after generations.
@10/CLB
“Will the movie be as political and controversial as the song suggests?”
Since Ta-Nehisi Coates is currently writing the Black Panther comics, I suspect it will be very political.
@10 ChristopherLBennett
“The rest of the world” is bigger than Europe or America. I don’t believe that any Tibetans or Native Americans have ever done anything to Africans, yet they’re missing out on a cure to cancer just the same. For that matter, there are plenty of Africans dying of cancer who might appreciate a cure.
Weak rationalizations aside, there’s really no excuse for discovering a cure for a disease and not immediately sharing it with the rest of the world. If Wakanda wanted to avoid danger, they could simply leak the information through the Internet anonymously, so that no one could ever discover the source.
@13 ChristopherLBennett
Wakanda is not a poor, defenseless nation. They are a more technologically advanced version of Switzerland.
@16 Scotoma
That’s entirely true. The need a fictional world that closely resembles the real one is the actual reason why there aren’t civilian flying cars and cures for cancer in comics. I don’t object to this happening, and I’m fine with aggressively suspending my disbelief; that’s what superhero comics are all about. I just object to the idea that there might be a legitimate reason (besides Comics Logic) for Wakanda to not share a cancer cure with the rest of the planet.
@17 ChristopherLBennett
Even if that was true in the past, there’s no excuse for present-day Wakanda to withhold the cancer cure. While @16 Scotoma is right about the folly of expecting the Marvel universe to make logical sense, it’s better just to offer no explanation at all. Reed Richards never tries to explain why he hasn’t provided the secrets of safe teleportation to emergency workers, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives.
As long as the author simply ignores it, so can the reader; once they try to justify it, we start asking whether the justification makes sense. Since there is no possible reason for a world with aliens, teleportation, and flying cars to so closely resemble our own, the only reasonable solution is to simply roll with it and ignore the part of your brain that points out the gaping plot holes.
@18 wiredog
The comics were both political and excellent. This may be the first time that I’ve ever read a superhero comics that legitimately examined the problems of an entire system relying on a single hero figure to make all of the decisions.
@17″ and again, I’m not talking about the comics, but about what we know of the movie universe’s version of Wakanda in the context of real history — it would’ve been the brutality of the Scramble for Africa, the horrors that white colonialism inflicted on the continent, that forced Wakanda into a position where they couldn’thelp, where they had to hide to avoid destruction.”
In the comics, Wakanda’s policy of isolationism predates European contact by centuries……
Coming to America with superheroes. Got it.
@19/dptullos: I’m not saying the Wakandans are entirely in the right, I’m just saying that the history of how other nations have treated Africa over the past couple of centuries make it understandable why an African power would be slow to trust other nations or feel it owed anything to outsiders.
Colonialism left many scars. It’s basically the geopolitical equivalent of an abusive relationship. Wakanda may not have been abused as directly as the rest of Africa, but it was clearly frightened, forced to adopt a siege mentality and a profound distrust and fear of outsiders, and I’d call that being traumatized. If someone is traumatized by abuse and ends up being paranoid and standoffish toward others, that’s not exactly admirable behavior, but it’s hard to condemn them for it when you understand the circumstances that made them so afraid.
And, again, the “cure for cancer” thing is from the comics. That’s a separate continuity from the movies. They share concepts but do their own things with them. So story points from the comics’ version of Wakanda should not be held against the movie’s version, unless the movie reuses them, and we don’t know yet if they’ll use this one. Same answer to @20/trajan23. Blaming the movies’ Wakanda for what the comics’ version has done makes no more sense than, say, blaming the movies’ Hank Pym for creating Ultron. He did that in the comics, but in the movies it was Tony Stark and Bruce Banner who did it. Different universes, different stories.
As for Wakanda’s ability to defend itself, I already addressed that in comment #10.
@22 ChristopherLBennett
Colonialism left scars on the people who were actually colonized. Wakanda wasn’t in the abusive relationship, wasn’t traumatized or hurt directly. And when the people who were attacked needed their help, they weren’t available because it might have endangered them. They aren’t just being paranoid and standoffish towards the people who did the abuse, but towards those who were abused.
I’ll judge the movie on its own merits (the trailer looked interesting), but the decision in the comics is purely indefensible. There will never be a time when any nation is perfectly safe, but Wakanda is about as close as it gets. This isn’t the colonial era anymore, and Wakanda has a modern military to defend itself from outside aggression. At this point, the “siege mentality” is an excuse for distrusting outsiders and ignoring the rest of the world, not a legitimate justification.
@23/dptullos: I already addressed that. No, they weren’t hurt directly, but they were clearly frightened into withdrawal. There are many ways people can be affected by proximity to an abusive relationship even if they aren’t the primary victim.
To put it another way: Imagine how the world looks from Africa’s point of view. Imagine watching for centuries as the rest of the world does nothing but enslave, invade, rob, and slaughter your neighbors, and then later on just tend to ignore the massive wars and famines and crises the continent faces, largely due to the aftereffects of the outsiders’ earlier depredations. You probably wouldn’t see the rest of the world as all that nice or deserving of your help.
@24 ChristopherLBennett
@20 trajan23 says that Wakanda’s history of isolationism predates European colonialism by hundreds of years. I haven’t read that many of the comics, but if he’s right, then they literally have no excuse for their awfulness.
It’s true that there are many ways people can be affected by proximity to an abusive relationship. Some people offer help and sanctuary to the people being abused, while others systematically ignore their neighbors, even when they desperately need help and it might be safe to offer it. Wakanda is basically Switzerland during WWII, turning away foreign refugees because they don’t want to endanger their nice little fortress.
@25/dptullos: You keep making arguments I’ve already refuted. I’ve said three or four times now that I’m only talking about the movie universe, which is a different reality from the comics. We don’t know the specifics of the movie’s Wakandan history yet.
And I’m not saying I agree with Wakanda’s choices. I’m saying I can understand why they’re mistrustful and wary of outsiders. You don’t have to agree with someone to empathize with them. You can think someone’s actions are inappropriate but still understand why they do it and not just hate and condemn them. We have forgotten that. We have forgotten how to empathize, how to forgive, to walk in the other’s shoes. I’m not saying you have to agree with them, I’m just saying, try to have some empathy. Try to see how someone else sees things instead of just assuming the worst.
So, right after he said, “I never freeze,” my video froze for a second. Had to rewatch to make sure it wasn’t part of the trailer.