There's no place like this to call home

[sovay]

And later in the afternoon, I combined the prevailing concerns of the last twenty-four hours and saw Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) at the Capitol Theatre with gaudior and rushthatspeaks. I can't write about it right now, but it's a gorgeous film: worldbuilding, performances, music, myth, serious and beautifully realized Afrofuturism. The thing where if you get enough women in the same cast together, they have conversations about honor and technology, not just men. I want my toolkit-loving niece to be old enough to show her this film for Shuri. Casino shootouts and war rhinos. Maybe the next time Nabiyah Be's on film, she'll get to sing. Once upon a time the most familiar way into this story would have been through the eyes of Ross of the CIA, and this is not his movie.

Comments

[sovay]

Ross is also a corrupter though -- he knows Erik through the CIA work, and IIRC he's the only one in the film who calls him "Killmonger."

I don't remember him directly calling Erik by that name, but he does explain how Erik earned it.

He's helping out Wakanda but he already hurt Erik.

Yes. I was surprised that he got a redemption arc and I really enjoyed it—it felt earned—precisely because it was so secondary and so low-key. Because he takes a bullet for Nakia, because T'Challa breaks his non-interventionist rule to save him, because he does fight for Wakanda instead of destabilizing the country as his government trained Erik to do (and as Ross himself, if so ordered, might have done), it would have been almost inadvertently easy to make him a white savior, the modest, canny, important American heroically taking his place of pride in the mysterious African utopia where almost no white man has gone blah blah etc. Instead, he's a guy who helps some and doesn't screw up too much. He's not superfluous, but he's not central. And that's all right.

[kore]

He really is not central! It's like, if we had to have a white guy in the film, that was the way to do it.

I don't think anyone calls Erik that in the film, no, but I could be wrong-- I was shutting out most of Klaue's dialogue because Andy Serkis irks me immensely. ("OI MAAIIDE IT RAYYIIN HA HA HA HA!") Which has led to distress on AO3 as the character is being tagged as "Erik Killmonger" which is wrong on a couple of counts. It might be how he's referred to in the comics, tho (you really don't want the backstory of M'Baku in the comics).