Ruin Johnson just can’t seem to stay off Twitter, proving once again that he is a child who has utterly failed to grow up. This time he attacked YouTuber Mike Zeroh for merely asking if rumors are true that Johnson’s trilogy has been cancelled.
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Last night the guys at Midnight’s Edge had me on for one of their live shows. I also did a recording for the regular show.
Sorry for the lack of posting; last weekend I was dealing with a death in the family and wasn’t in the mood to try and do an episode of the YouTube webcast, or do any writing.
Anyway, I had opportunity to watch Hereditary, the horror movie written and directed by Ari Aster and starring Toni Collette. I won’t give away too much because I really don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, except to say that if you’re looking for something with a “happy” ending or that pulls punches, you might want to watch something else. But if you’ve the stomach for the cinematic taboos this piece of cinema breaks without so much as flinching, then I recommend you go see it on the big screen in a darkened theater. You really need to do that to get the proper horror film experience.
The story deals with the subjects of inherited mental illness and the cycles of abuse and covering up that go with it. Under the guise of witch-cults and demonic possession, the movie doesn’t let its audience off the hook in condemning the failure of families to address hereditary insanity, warning that as long as we refuse to confront it and take action to get sufferers into effective treatment, the cycle will continue.
As horror movies go, I thought it was fairly good, although there were a few weak spots in the story as there are in any tale told in human history. But the good far outweighed the bad, in my humble opinion. It handles its subject matter on a far more adult level than many might be comfortable with. I was particularly impressed with the creepy performance turned in by Milly Shapiro, who plays daughter Charlie.
But the movie got me thinking of the horror genre more generally and its place in film theory. Having taken it in film school, I saw a lot in Hereditary that really ought to be in other genres, but is instead sorely lacking. Yes, by that I’m specifically calling out the brainless modern iterations of Star Trek and Star Wars.
I have long been a fan of horror (and its twin, science fiction) as a storytelling medium, especially for its ability to tell sociopolitical morality tales. In my last video, with Tom Connors of Midnight’s Edge, we were talking about how much horror has been influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the seminal 1960 flick about a motel owner whose domineering mother drove him to become lost in maintaining the memory of her. John Carpenter’s Halloween famously used the character of Michael Myers to replay Hitchcock’s archetype of the emasculated male driven to slaughter young people, especially women, in an effort to reclaim his masculinity. Further, the character of Laurie Strode, like Norman Bate’s parent, represents the Primal Mother, whose power to dominate or defend against male aggression ultimately prevails. And, of course, in a nod to Psycho, Donald Pleasence’s character Sam Loomis was named after the boyfriend in Hitchcock’s masterpiece.
1980’s Friday the 13th, directed by Sean S. Cunningham, turns the concept of the primal mother dominating her offspring to the point of consuming him, on its ear by reversing it: The trauma of losing a child consumes the mother, who then becomes the child in her own mind in order to both erase the tragedy and get revenge. So powerful is this cinematic concept that Cunningham has been battling it out in court with Friday co-creator Victor Miller in court over ownership, which is a whole story in itself.
And who can forget Wes Craven’s 1984 horror-slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street, wherein Craven successfully pulls off what Hitchcock did decades before by killing off the movie’s opening protagonist part-way through the story?
All these films were much-influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, who was a master of manipulating his audience and who possessed tremendous understanding of the human psyche. Hereditary is no different in owing its story’s concepts to Hitchcock’s use of the Primal Mother to frighten audiences. It is through the matrilineal side of the movie’s family that the evils are passed on, and it is the ever-present domination of the family matriarch even in death that drives the action. To the extent that the male characters factor into the story, it is as victims, the dominated being controlled and ultimately consumed by the females.
Of course, Hereditary borrows as much from Robin Hardy’s 1973 masterpiece, The Wicker Man, as it does from Hitchcock, in misdirecting the audience, although those who’ve seen the earlier film will probably see it coming from a mile away. That, I think, is the only major weak spot in Aster’s narrative, but it’s hardly his fault nor can it really be helped. It still works.
There’s a parallel between Hitchcock’s concept of powerful women emasculating weaker males, and Hardy’s. In The Wicker Man, Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie is tempted by Britt Ekland’s Willow MacGregor in a seductive nighttime dance that leaves the former frustrated and impotent to deal with his own sexual urges, which he continually suppresses. And it is that very suppression, borne of fear of women masked in pseudo-Christian righteousness, that ultimately proves his undoing. One less frightened of women might have given in and saved himself in the process, but his unwillingness to acknowledge his urges as normal and healthy and alter his attitude toward women, dooms him.
The pattern in these films and their imitators is one in which women have far more power over men, for good or for ill, than many are comfortable with, and in the slasher subgenre of horror, the only way for males to reassert their masculinity is to lash out in violence. They are compelled to kill or dominate in their own twisted manner, unable to cope with the control women have over their lives.
As this concept applies to modern horror and slasher movies, and cinema in general, I think there’s something lost in the seemingly endless string of reboots and reimaginings. None of the reboots really capture the spirit of the originals, leaving shallow, empty shells of the stories told far better and with much more informed inspiration by writers and directors who have greater understanding of both cinematic language and human psychology. For all we’re supposed to believe that STD and Disney Star Wars are promoting “strong women,” they’re really not, because the female concepts have nothing beneath the pretty skins of the actresses portraying them. The concepts are poorly written and executed, make goofball mistakes that belie their supposed strength, and are so incompetent and unsympathetic it is difficult to believe proclaimed strength.
Too many of today’s so-called writer-directors have learned only the technical aspects of movie-making, without learning any of the deeper storytelling taught in film theory. It really takes more original projects by people such as Astor to tell the kinds of horror-driven morality tales we need. The blockbuster adventures over-saturating movie theaters just can’t do the job, at least not on the adult level Hereditary and its contemporaries do. For all the social and political subtext in, say, Black Panther, it can’t even begin to compete with lower-budget, more independent films. That’s because a budget of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars generally suppresses true creativity, almost requiring movie-makers to play down or ignore deeper meaning altogether. There’s too much pressure to go for the cheap thrills and laundry-list checkpoints, because something that actually makes people think about the subject matter within the story is considered too risky given the amount of money being spent. Better, the studios think, to take the safer path.
The problem is that this risk aversion provides hit-or-miss results, and as we’re seeing with Star Wars, it’s more miss than hit. But the beauty of having a lower-budget horror story is that the risk might be higher, but so too are the rewards at the box office if it scores a home run with audiences. Consider that Carpenter’s Halloween, made for $320,000, pulled in seventy million dollars worldwide at the box office, far exceeding what was spent to make and market the film. Suppose Marvel Studios and LucasFilm were forced to make smaller films that focus more on character and storytelling, than on a laundry list of stunts and gimmicks? How might cinema change for the better?
Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. If you like what you read here and want to help me improve the webcast, please consider becoming a patron by clicking the link to my Patreon page and subscribing. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon to receive notifications when I upload content.
I wasn’t going to write up another blog entry about Star Wars until the rumors over Kathleen Kennedy’s departure from LucasFilm had been officially confirmed or denied by Disney, but the last few discussions I’ve had with others on social media have driven me to explain my thoughts about the use of identity politics in the franchise, the real reason it’s being exploited, and the impact it’s obviously had.
Now, it’s no secret that establishment media have basically attacked Disney in general and LucasFilm in particular for pushing “liberal” values in the new movies produced under Kennedy’s watch as president of the studio: the “liberal elitists” in Hollywood seem to be waging all-out culture war on “centrists” and conservatives by trying to displace traditionally white male characters and archetypes with females and persons of color.
And to be sure, as The Intercept’s Briahna Gray writes, “many Democrats now bristle at the notion that the Democratic Party should reach out to working class whites all. Understandably fearful that “wooing” white voters might require an appeal to bigotry, it’s now commonly argued that the Democratic Party should concentrate its efforts on nonvoters of color instead.” And we certainly seem to be seeing a similar pattern of pandering to demographics that are predominantly non-white and female, with snarky public statements and remarks appearing to confirm what many critics of the new movies believe.
Gray goes on to write:
Nonwhite and/or female candidates are praised for advancing “identity politics” if they win — regardless of how they campaigned. And efforts to include white voters in one’s coalition are blamed for faltering campaigns — regardless of a candidate’s more substantive failures.
But to subscribe to the notion that Kathleen Kennedy and her merry band of suck-ups are pushing so-called “social justice warriorism” on an unwilling fan base is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of their intentions. Remember that in today’s increasingly corporatized, consolidated media, companies looking to squeeze every last penny out of their product want to sell to as many buyers as possible in order to maximize profits. That means targeting demographics that have been traditionally ignored, or that company executives think have been ignored, so that they can fill as many movie theater seats as they can.
People need to understand that “corporate thinking is short term”: Disney and its subsidiaries are only concerned with making immediate profits. Politics are not immediate; they are long term goals, strategies, tactics, and so on, to be accomplished over a period of years, or even generations. To the extent that corporations and the people who run them have any ideology at all, it’s one of making money. And in that quest to make money, costs have to be cut as much as possible, and product has to be sold to as many consumers as possible.
So you have corporate focus groups trying to figure out how to best pander to various demographic groups, e.g., Millennials. Millennials and later generations are increasingly non-white, and represent many races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and so on. Focus groups try to come up with what they think is the most effective way to play to their wants. “Oh, you don’t think your group was adequately represented in the previous Star Wars trilogies? No problem! Our new, IMPROVED trilogy has something and someone for everybody! We’ve got “strong women”! “Blacks”! “Asians”! “Pansexuals” and “LGBTQ”!
The focus groups decided that the supposedly shrinking white male heterosexual demographic was no longer sufficient to support the Star Wars franchise for Disney, which wants to get a good return on its four billion dollar investment in buying LucasFilm, Ltd. Hence we now have Ma-Rey Sue, Potato Sack Tico, Carrie Poppins, Holdo, Poe, Finn, Pan-do Calrissian, and so on, all created or retooled to have as broad demographic appeal as can be gotten away with.
Of course, it’s a cynical exploitation of identity politics in order to sell toys and movie theater tickets. Why wouldn’t it be? While it is true that politicians, most of whom are either corporate lobbyists or company executives, use corporate talking points to sell themselves on the campaign trail, the reverse is equally as true: corporations exploit politics to their immediate financial gain.
And this, not actually held political beliefs, is what drives the cynical pandering to identity politics. Corporate executives and their stooges are ultimately a nihilistic lot, believing in nothing beyond short term profit. But they are just aware enough to understand that most human beings do have beliefs, and they are not above exploiting those beliefs to sell their product. But the drawback is that people generally know when they’re being pandered to, and they reject it. That’s why Solo: A Star Wars Story has lost money for LucasFilm and Disney. As Gray writes in her article:
Nonwhite and/or female candidates are praised for advancing “identity politics” if they win — regardless of how they campaigned. And efforts to include white voters in one’s coalition are blamed for faltering campaigns — regardless of a candidate’s more substantive failures. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And with a belief that demographics hold the key to unlocking a Democratic victory, Democrats stand poised to ignore the most important lesson of 2016: People turn out for material change.
Thus is explained why Kennedy and her sycophants seem so oblivious to the reasons behind fan reaction to the movies produced under her watch. They don’t want to admit that they screwed up, and so they’re blaming everyone but themselves for having alienated fans to the point that Star Wars has gone from being a property that makes and breaks box office and merchandise sales records, to one that loses money, in just three (really two and a half) short years.
To be sure, the Marvel movies are as guilty of exploiting identity politics to cater to target demographics as much as their sister productions, but not nearly as obviously or as insultingly. And whereas LucasFilm has been either insensitive or outright hostile to the fan base, Marvel understands its own far better and is content to show much more respect, which is why you don’t see much fan anger toward Marvel. It would be one thing if LucasFilm and the people presently running it were properly apologetic and took steps to remedy its mistakes, but instead it is taking the same failed tactic of doubling down on those blunders and them compounding these monumental screw-ups by lashing out, whether directly or through paid media shills (who used to be a lot more reliably honest in critiquing movies).
At the end of the day, LucasFilm needs to publicly acknowledge what it has done, own up to it, apologize, and take corrective measures before it completely destroys Disney’s plans to construct theme parks and hotels based on Star Wars. And maybe Disney will take action where Kennedy will not; after all, over a week has passed since rumors began flying about her impending departure from LucasFilm, and so far there have been no official statements denying them. If she is indeed being pushed out in favor of someone who can handle the franchise far more capably, that is all well and good. But the damage has been done, and if Disney isn’t careful, if it simply replaces one bad egg with another, then Star Wars is pretty much done for at least another generation.
And that would truly be a tragedy.
The rumors are flying over the world wide web that Kathleen Kennedy may be stepping down as head of LucasFilm as early as September. According to Movie Web:
We have to caution right off the bat that this isn’t coming from any official sources, so it should be taken with a massive grain of salt. That said, there are rumors emerging that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy may be stepping down in September. If there is any validity to this at all, it would represent a major shift not just for Kennedy, but for one of the biggest franchises on the planet.
Kennedy has been infamously divisive, and there has been much criticism over her cynical exploitation of identity politics to simultaneously pander to every possible demographic in an effort to fill as many movie theaters seats as possible, and shield the movies made under her watch from public criticism. As well, communication, or rather, lack thereof, has been a serious problem:
While the Star Wars franchise was successfully relaunched under her watch and the four movies released since Disney purchased Lucasfilm have grossed north of $4.5 billion at the box office, there have been issues. Namely, Josh Trank (Boba Fett), Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Solo) and Colin Trevorrow (Star Wars 9) have all been hired and fired on her watch. Kennedy has clearly had issues communicating with directors. The Last Jedi sailed smoothly under Rian Johnson, but that wound up being the most divisive movie in the new batch so far.
This, again, is all speculation because as of this writing Kennedy’s departure from LucasFilm is only a rumor and may ultimately prove untrue. But as I wrote in my last entry, under her watch Star Wars has gone from a record-breaking-and-making profit-generating property, to one that alienates audiences and loses money. You don’t go from one of the biggest relaunches of a franchise in movie history to seriously hurting the company’s bottom line just three years later, and not receive a pink slip. Profits have diminished to the point that it is now extremely difficult to imagine Disney’s plans for exploiting Star Wars continue in present form. Something has to change, and Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger won’t take the fall for Kennedy because none of Disney’s other divisions are experiencing these problems, only LucasFilm, and she’s the one in charge.
I’m going to engage in a bit of baseless speculation here, because right now this is only a rumor and it has yet to be confirmed publicly by Disney. I suspect that Iger has made his decision to replace Kennedy, and the company is trying to prolong the process, both to allow enough time to find a suitable replacement and to save face so that she is not humiliated as badly as she otherwise would be. No one wants to be the one who fired Kathleen Kennedy, who despite her reckless, arrogant incompetence still has a fair amount of pull in Hollywood. Also, firing her publicly would be a tacit admission that Disney screwed up by putting her in charge of LucasFilm in the first place—elites have a curious pathological aversion to admitting error.
Assuming the rumors are true and Kennedy is out at LucasFilm come September, the big question is, who would replace her? Disney needs someone like Marvel’s Kevin Feige, who over ten years has guided the company’s Cinematic Universe to great success. He has the vision and discipline to right the ship if he were to move from Marvel Studios to LucasFilm, but the drawback is that absent his presence, Marvel movies may end up faltering. Gale Anne Hurd, James Cameron’s longtime producer, is another potential replacement, especially with The Walking Dead winding down, but does she want the thankless task of coming in to clean up the mess Kennedy has made of Star Wars, one that might actually be impossible given the level of damage?
So we’ll see if the rumor prove true or not. If it is, and I certainly hope so, it’ll be interesting to see what spin Disney tries to put on it and who will be chosen to take over from Kennedy. Whoever it is will have to be able to alleviate investors’ concerns and restore their confidence in the franchise. That’s a tall order at this point, so it’s important that Iger pick the right person. Otherwise, there likely won’t be another movie after Episode IX and it’ll be at least another generation before we see another attempt to resurrect Star Wars.
The numbers are in for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and they don’t look good. The movie is projected to lose fifty million dollars for Disney. The company won’t, of course, suffer terribly; its Marvel and Pixar divisions are still running strong and are as popular as ever. But LucasFilm is in trouble. To give you an idea of how bad things are, here’s a chart laying it all out:
https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js
The numbers cited in the graph above are not adjusted for inflation, but I found an online inflation calculator and plugged in the box office gross for the very first Star Wars film from 1977. Adjusted for inflation, A New Hope grossed $2,480,653,465.35, more than Episode VII made just three years ago. Even adjusting Episode VII’s box office gross for inflation since 2015, it still doesn’t quite match the gross take for the original film. Remember: These are global, not domestic, figures.
The much-anticipated Episode VII: The Force Awakens, was at best a mediocre retread of George Lucas’ original 1977 film, directed by an uninspired hack whose biggest claim to infamy was dumbing down Star Trek to fit his shallow imbecile’s intellect. I suspect that most of the box office success of The Force Awakens comes primarily from advance ticket sales. Audiences left theaters feeling disappointed, yet hopeful that the next installment would answer the questions set up in the movie.
Those hopes were dashed by the utterly dismal Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, which was nothing more than an exercise in deliberately insulting anyone and everyone who is a Star Wars fan. Idiot Ruin Johnson, whose only major studio credits prior to coming on board the Star Wars franchise include the awful Brick and Looper, was tasked with continuing the story plan set up by Jar Jar Abrams. Instead, he tossed it in the trash and proceeded to use The Last Jedi as a platform to express his hatred for franchise and fans alike. As a result, the movie made only about half what its predecessor took in, and caused all manner of controversy as audiences were divided into people who don’t like having their intelligence insulted, and those who don’t care if they are insulted. LucasFilm head Kathleen Kennedy, with Abrams and Johnson ever playing the part of craven suck-ups, wasted no opportunity to try and shield the movies behind a wall of accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other condescending insults, rather than acknowledge the bad decisions being made.
The troubled production of Solo: A Star Wars Story has been well documented. Co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were removed from the project over creative differences, and veteran director Ron Howard was brought in to complete it. The production budget was roughly doubled as he effectively had to start over from scratch—the scenes shot previously were considered that unusable. Further, lead performer Alden Ehrenreich was reportedly so incapable of acting that a coach had to be brought in to get anything usable out of him. Why he wasn’t recast is a mystery; Anthony Ingruber, who played a young version of Harrison Ford’s character in Age of Adeline, made a demo video nailing the older actor’s lines from A New Hope’s famous cantina scene that quickly went viral. If the movie had to be almost totally reshot, the logical thing to do would have been to do it completely, replace Ehrenreich with Ingruber, and work from a new script. But this did not come to pass.
Instead, LucasFilm doubled down on the script and, unwilling to rethink its annual movie release model, held to its planned May 2018 release date. In order to try and salvage it at the box office, Avengers: Infinity War’s release was moved up so as to offer less competition. That backfired as the Marvel movie remains in cinemas and is still taking in healthy ticket sales. The release of Deadpool 2 also factors in. There is a parallel here to 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which Paramount released against Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Ghostbusters II, all of which were hits the popularity of which took away from Trek and combined with word of mouth to effectively end William Shatner’s directing career.
Compounding the problems for LucasFilm is that merchandise based on the Disney productions is not moving. The toys gather dust on shelves—action figures can’t be sold even at bargain bin prices. This is unprecedented, and may be a significant contributing factor in the closing of Toy ‘R’ Us.
What this means going forward is that now Disney’s plans to open up Star Wars theme parks and hotels are in jeopardy. If merchandise and box office ticket sales are meant to pay for these projects, and those sales are going down with each release in the franchise, that is a major problem for Disney. No sane investor will fund a movie on the pitch that he or she will probably be flushing money down the proverbial toilet, or that even if it comes back, there likely won’t be any interest on the investment.
It would be a different matter if the failure of Solo were a fluke, a one-time thing in an otherwise successful franchise. But it’s not. It’s part of a larger trend of diminishing returns, and this is borne out by the numbers as indicated in the graph above. This cannot be spun as “franchise fatigue”, as Disney is trying to do. If it were that, then the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be suffering a similar crisis, yet it’s not.
Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger has got to be making preparations to replace Kathleen Kennedy as head of LucasFilm as soon as someone suitable—and willing—is identified. Disney bought LucasFilm with the intention of churning out movies every year like on a factory conveyor belt. In order to do that, there must be a new movie released every year, new trilogies and spin-offs going on for as long as Disney can squeeze money out of them. That can’t happen, nor can related projects such as theme parks, hotels, casinos, and so on, as long as Kennedy remains at the helm. Her lack of direction and alienation of fans, without whom there is no Star Wars, has brought things to where they are now. The writing is clearly on the wall that Disney can’t wait to see how Episode IX will fare in theaters—its release date for December 2019 is not that far off, and if the corporation won’t push it back, then this means that Kennedy will have to go soon, so that someone who actually has a vision and a workable plan can salvage what remains of the franchise. Jar Jar Abrams cannot be counted on to fix the mess Ruin Johnson made of the present trilogy. The idea that Johnson will get to keep his announced “outer rim” trilogy is, at this point, laughable. These three have done what was unthinkable even during George Lucas’ prequel saga: they’ve made Star Wars a property that is no longer profitable.
This week Larry Bernard and I talk about the train wreck that is Solo: A Star Wars Story, and where Disney might proceed from this point on now that Star Wars is no longer a guaranteed draw.
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you know how big a hit Marvel’s Black Panther has been, both with audiences and with identity-politics-obsessed activists. The story focuses on T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, and how he is forced to confront his family’s past evils and his country’s isolationist policies. The movie is a brilliant, if flawed entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I’ll get to the reasons why it is flawed, and what it gets right, in this blog post.
Director Ryan Coogler has basically scored a huge win for Marvel and for Disney, not only for a box office success but for deftly pandering to Black identity politics in a way that may be cynical and exploitative, but doesn’t quite feel like it is. The production budget is estimated at about $200 million (roughly $25 million under what it cost to produce Captain America: Civil War), with an estimated box office gross of about $1.325 billion as of this writing (which may change as the movie is still playing in some theaters). Marketing and advertising costs are typically about the same amount as the production budget, sometimes double that, but let’s assume for a moment that $200 million was spent on marketing and advertising because Disney really wanted this to do well and so put in a bigger effort to sell it to moviegoers, for example, plopping down $8.28 million for TV ads on opening weekend alone. Even accounting for merchandising licenses and the cut taken by theaters, Marvel and Disney still made a pretty nice profit here.
So clearly the movie was a hit with audiences, exactly as Disney hoped. I certainly enjoyed it when I went to see it in late February. But I’d be lying if I didn’t spot a number of deficiencies in the story and characters. They aren’t all that many, and what one critic took to task as a deeply conservative depiction of Wakanda and its natives, I think could actually be misinterpreted for reasons I’ll explain. So I’ll start with what I thought the movie got wrong, and then go into what I thought it got right, and why.
What Was Wrong
I’m not a fan of today’s trend of over-saturating every major production with CGI, and Black Panther is as guilty as any other of over-indulging in computer-generated imagery. Especially in the third act, it looked too fake and unbelievable, taking me out of the story somewhat, though not enough to completely spoil my experience. I’m not the only one to have noticed this problem. Today’s big-budget movie-making is far too obsessed with CGI, to the detriment of the final product. CGI is best used to enhance practical effects, as was the case with Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1993, and in James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And really, considering how much went into making Black Panther, there’s simply no excuse for getting lazy with the visual elements.
To be fair, there was a lot of CGI that wasn’t rushed or skimped on, such as when we are treated to the initial views of Wakanda from the viewpoint of the hover UFO used by T’Challa to trek across the globe. And the sight of Wakanda’s capital city, with its blend of African and Art Deco aesthetics, was impressive to say the least. But in far too many instances, the movie looks like it was a green-screen job and that detracted from the movie.
Eric Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, is arguably the real hero of the story, or more accurately, the anti-hero. His backstory is crucial to the crisis within the larger narrative, because without it there is no larger narrative. So why do we only get to see a glimpse of him early on, in the first act, then have him disappear until almost the second half of the movie, when he suddenly reappears to escalate things?
What’s more, for all Killmonger is supposed to embody the chickens of Wakanda’s isolationism coming home to roost, we don’t get to actually see much of what made Killmonger become this monster. His motives are in conflict: revenge competing with a crusade for the African diaspora, with the result being that the latter is subsumed by the former. So much of the action in the first half of Black Panther is taken up by the hunt for Andy Serkis’ character, Ulysses Klaue, that by the time Killmonger pops back up, the tonal shift is just too jarring and feels too contrived and insincere.
In the Marvel comics, Black Panther is the sixth smartest person in the world, at times outwitting Tony Stark. In the movie, however, he relies too much on the high tech devices crafted by his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), who channel’s James Bond’s ‘Q’ as the resident gadget-maker. It is this over-reliance on technology and his inner circle of family and friends, that diminishes the character. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Tony Stark lectures Peter Parker telling him that if he can’t be a hero without his superhero suit, he doesn’t deserve to wear it. Well, T’Challa has a similar conundrum, with the difference being that being a king, no one is going to tell him this. So even though T’Challa displays a fair amount of physical strength and fighting prowess, more often than not he is in the high tech suit instead of using his wits to win.
T’Challa is undeniably a fleshed out character who experiences a crisis of faith and ethics, and is challenged over the course of the narrative to grow and learn as a person. In that regard he is no Gary Stu concept. But he really ought to have doubted himself more, and the central conflict of the story should have put him in a far more vulnerable position spiritually and ethically than we got to see on the screen. His confrontation with the spirit of his father feels insincere, resolved far too quickly. For a movie that clocked in at around two and a half hours, there’s really no excuse for not devoting sufficient time to character development and growth. The movie spent far too much time with big stunt scenes and flashy SFX, that could have been better spent fleshing out the characters more and showing us their flaws and how those flaws are overcome.
Much of the story could—and probably should—have been dealt with over two films instead of being crammed into one, and as a result a lot of what worked best ended up being subsumed by the visual effects, thus heightening the visibility of the flaws within the narrative. I don’t know and can only speculate, but I got the impression watching Black Panther that maybe director Coogler wasn’t sure when or if he’d be able to direct a second movie, and so felt compelled to jam as much in as he could. I’m only guessing here. I could be wrong. But being analytical, it’s often that impressions I get when I watch a film or movie, an instinct or “gut feeling” if you will, come across in the viewing. I know when I’m being entertained or not, when the storyteller is laughing with or at me, when I’m being insulted. So, if your instinct when watching a movie is that there seems to be too much going on, it’s probably because there is.
What Was Right
Now, the above-listed items are not a comprehensive summary of the things I noticed that were wrong with the movie, and later viewings may add to or perhaps even alter my perception. But having mentioned what I thought was gotten wrong with Black Panther, it’s only fair that I now go into what I thought it got right, and I think it got more right than it got wrong. I should also point out that, this being a comic book movie and geared toward families with children than to adults exclusively, there’s only so deep it can be expected to go and still retain a wider audience. In that case, I can forgive the poorer elements of the narrative more easily than I would movies in other genres.
But I digress. Here’s a list of what I felt were Black Panther’s biggest strengths and why.
In my entry on The Last Jedi, I pointed out how there are no characters in it, only concepts, and poorly executed ones at that. This is by no means the case with Black Panther. Here we see fleshed out characters with backstories, flaws, doubts, conflicts, and arcs of evolution. They start off at one level and end up having grown as individuals learning a valuable lesson. This more than anything else is what makes a film or movie work. If your characters are one-dimensional concepts without flaws or anything to learn, they’re not believable or sympathetic, and so you’re unable to invest emotionally in them. So it was refreshing, after being insulted by TLJ, to see actual characters in Black Panther, even if they are under-developed with flawed executions.
Whereas Disney Star Wars, CBS’ STD, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot, and other of today’s movies engage in shameless, cynical Mary-Sue-ism, Black Panther treats its female characters with a measure of respect, portraying them as strong, smart, intelligent, and compassionate, and we know this because the movie shows them having and expressing these qualities. Women hold high positions within Wakanda’s military, and we can believe the things they do in the movie because their society and training require that they have the qualities necessary to be proper warriors capable of defending their nation from outside threats. They’ve been fighting from an early age, and so their skills and intelligence never feel artificial, but earned. THIS is how you write strong female characters. Granted, in Black Panther they are basically butt-kicking eye candy, as opposed to the rude, plainer-looking Ellen Ripley or the plain-looking-and-dressing, pathologically shy Laurie Strode; they certainly are not the stars of this movie, and so they’re basically tropes. But they’re well-executed tropes, and we believe them because they were written as believable.
Michael B. Jordan is obviously quite the Urban Otaku, and nowhere is this more evident than in the design of his mercenary duds.
Michael B. Jordan as Eric Killmonger
Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z
This was an awesome bit of anime fan service, subtly thrown in for kicks, and it actually complemented the character.
T’Challa is forced within the narrative to confront the evils of the past, in this instance, his father’s past. Steven Thrasher, writing for Esquire.com, complains that, “its ending political message [is] far more conservative than the revolutionary possibilities teased by anything with “Black” and “Panther” in the title.” This opinion is shared by Daryl M. Scott, who writes:
Relatively speaking, the conservatism of Wakanda is natural. Black Panther, T’Challa, got his power the old-fashioned way — aristocratic inheritance. His superpower and weaponry derive from the country’s unique heart-shaped herb and the metal vibranium. His powers would hardly be needed for protection against the African tribes surrounding Wakanda. They are for warding off the colonizers, who prey on other Africans and peoples of African descent. Rarely have subjects been so well protected.
The king’s subjects are well treated, too. In Hollywood’s Wakanda, women hold positions of power — the king’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), controls the scientific and technological apparatus, and the fierce and stunningly beautiful female warriors, the Dora Milaje, protect and fight with their king. His male subjects are largely ornamental and ceremonial, leaving them to nurse their desire for one of their tribesmen to become the Black Panther.
This conservative utopia where only one is free could easily be revolutionized into the world’s most powerful democracy. Wakanda possesses the magical metal vibranium and the knowledge of how to grow enough of a heart-shaped herb to transform the king’s subjects into soldier citizens. The Black Panther is brilliant but only so enlightened; he cannot imagine a nation of black panthers to defend all of Africa from earthly and galactic enemies. The power is conserved for one king and one people.
It takes one who grew up in the belly of the colonizer, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), to grasp the true revolutionary power of Wakanda. The offspring of a slave descendant and an unconquered Wakandan prince, Erik grew up nurturing two things: the right he had to claim the throne and his father’s belief that vibranium could be used to aid the struggles of blacks in the African diaspora against global white supremacy. Yet to realize his dreams, he becomes a killer in the army of the colonizers. He becomes known as Killmonger, a testimonial to his rapacious ability and desire to take human life.
This is arguably an accurate interpretation of how T’Challa and Wakanda are depicted in the story, but I think these and similar analyses miss the surprisingly subtle point of that depiction: Killmonger is actually right, though his methods are extreme, and T’Challa is forced to come to acknowledge that Wakanda can no longer hide its technology or its society from the rest of humanity or ignore the plight of Africans in other parts of the world. Wakanda is indeed a highly conservative nation full of contradictions: for all its advanced tech and social progressivism—women hold high positions of power and even lead entire armies—in many ways it is still a fundamentally backward society in which monarchs are often chosen, or defend their power, through fights that devolve into tap-out-or-die; that maintains patriarchal power dynamics; that expresses its greed in jealously guarding its wealth and technology to the point where not even members of the royal family are protected from the death sentence for daring to share any of it with outsiders; and that ignores the colonial predation of white nations against the rest of Africa, with any assistance being given by individuals such as Nakia, T’Challa’s love interest played by Lupita Nyong’o, taking the place of organized national efforts.
These inherent contradictions are not meant to proudly extol the virtues of political “centrism”, or the sort of false liberalism that generally is made to stand in for far right policies of oppression and exploitation hidden behind a mask of sane civility. No, that conservative Wakanda and its power dynamics are the cause of the conflict and misery, and Killmonger is the inevitable consequence of that conservatism. T’Challa is forced to realize that if he does not change and grow, if Wakanda does not change and grow, then there will be more and worse Killmongers down the line. Black Panther’s message is as much a damning critique of conservative/centrist ideology as it is of violent response thereto. T’Challa has to learn a vital lesson here, that Wakanda and its people are part of the world whether they like it or not, and the problems of the world and especially the African diaspora are also Wakanda’s problems, and they will no longer be ignored or allowed to go unaddressed.
Granted, because so much of Black Panther’s story was taken up with dazzling (and unacceptably unsatisfying) special effects and stunt sequences, the handling of this surprisingly potent political message came across as ham-handed, patronizing, and ultimately shallower than it should have been. But it’s there nonetheless, and it’s worth taking to heart, for doesn’t Wakanda also represent the United States under the regime of deeply conservative Democrat and status-quo-supporter Barry Obama? For a comic book movie, this was something I found refreshing, and while some might complain about the presence of politics in cinema, the fact is that cinema has often only ever been about politics in one form or another, with only levels of subtlety differentiating the more obvious ones from the sneakier political morality tales.
The movie’s political messaging, flawed as it is, serves as its biggest strength. I don’t know about you, but considering how utterly shallow far too many of today’s blockbuster movies and TV shows are, Black Panther’s message is a much-needed break and a satisfyingly complex narrative that aspired to greatness but fell short—but NOT for lack of trying.
If you compare the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date to Jar Jar Abrams’ Star Trek reboots, his and Ruin Johnson’s Star Wars demolition derby, Paul Feig’s trashing of Ghostbusters, Steven Moffat’s tenure running Doctor Who, CBS’ STD, and pretty much anything by Michael Bay, you get the sense that Marvel Studios under Kevin Feige has a genuine respect for its source material. Whatever you think of how the movie adaptations have been executed, it comes across on the screen that there is a real love for the comics on which their big screen versions are based. The others I mentioned only display unveiled contempt for the material, and open hostility toward fans thereof.
In Black Panther, you can tell how much love there is for the comic and the movie itself. The actors and actresses were clearly having a great time, and this comes across on the screen. There’s real chemistry there that obviously isn’t faked, or at least it doesn’t feel fake. In The Last Jedi, people are simply showing up and reciting their lines, and the only ones who actually had chemistry were Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in their one and only reunion scene. Everyone else was basically just phoning it in, watching the clock, going through the motions.
Final Analysis
Much of the credit for the success of Black Panther lies with writer-director Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole, both of whom made an honest effort to create something truly great even if that effort came up short in many ways. But a fair degree of credit must be given to producer Kevin Feige, who at the helm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has demonstrated that he has a clear vision for what he wants to do with the larger narrative, what direction he wants it to go in, and a likely end destination that will wrap everything up in a satisfying manner.
For all its shortcomings, Black Panther had far more positives than negatives, and so for that reason I give the movie a score of six-and-a-half to seven out of ten (half point for Killmonger’s Vegeta costume, heh heh). It definitely could have been better, but I think a sequel by Coolger and Cole can be expected to be better written and more developed—IF they learn from critical analyses like this. Time will tell if they iron out the narrative wrinkles.
If you haven’t gone to see Black Panther on the big screen yet and want to enjoy it in the theaters, go now while you still can. It’s not the same on a TV monitor.
In 2012 Disney plopped down over four billion U.S. dollars to acquire LucasFilm, Ltd. from owner George Lucas, with the intention of churning out one movie per year as part of a plan to milk as much money out of the Star Wars franchise as it could before audiences grow bored from over-saturation and move on to something else. So in 2015, we were subjected to Jar Jar Abrams’ mediocre rehash of the first movie, the next year saw the release of the equally mediocre Rogue One, a quasi prequel centering on the theft of the Death Star plans leading up to the events of the first film of the original trilogy, and finally, late last year, was the truly abominable The Last Jedi, directed by rank amateur Ruin Johnson, a boy who despises Star Wars and anyone who is a fan thereof so much he felt compelled to utterly destroy it. This year, a movie based on Han Solo’s early years will be released to theaters to compete against the likes of Avengers: Infinity War, another Disney property, in effect forcing it to compete with the parent company’s other franchise. Solo is widely expected to be as much of a box office disappointment as The Last Jedi, if not more so, which alienated fans and failed to pull in the revenue needed for Disney to justify the four billion dollars spent on LucasFilm.
Still with me? Yes? Good.
I probably don’t need to go over all the reasons how and why The Last Jedi is a steaming pile of bantha poodoo. Others such as the people at Midnight’s Edge, World Class Bullshitters, Doomcock, and Mindless Entertainment, among others, have all chimed in with their opinions and I highly recommend you visit their channels to watch the video analyses of the movie. You can also read writer Sean P. Carlin’s excellent discussion about the cinematic refuse that is this movie and its effect on audience expectations.
I will, therefore, give my own (non-comprehensive) list of what’s wrong with the movie and how it insults the audience:
Seriously, there is not even one actual character in this movie. What we are subjected to are concepts, and bad ones at that. They are not fleshed out characters with histories, flaws, sympathetic qualities, or any real motivation beyond getting from one “beat” to the next. Who are these “people” supposed to be? What drives them, that is, why do they do what they do? Are they supposed to learn and grow to become something better? According to Johnson, there is no answer to these and other questions set up by Abrams in the previous movie, and you’re an asshole loser for even expecting answers or trying to come up with any of your own. So even though Abrams implied that Ma-Rey Sue has some mysterious background we’re supposed to ask questions and speculate about, according to Johnson she is “nobody” and calls you stupid for even thinking she is anybody or has anything to do with anything previously established in the Star Wars universe. And it just get worse from there.
Nothing that takes place in this movie makes any freakin’ sense. There’s a scene in which Leia is blown into the vacuum of space, which according to logic means she would be dead within seconds. There is no way to survive being blown into space. None. Yet we’re supposed to believe that she has enough consciousness after being exposed to extreme cold, lack of breathable atmosphere, and lethal doses of unfiltered stellar radiation to use the Force to save herself. What the actual fuck!? I won’t even go into the ludicrously bad decisions made during the space battle by both sides, or the inane side stories that add nothing to the larger narrative.
All the stupidity in this pitiful excuse for a “story” simply breaks suspension of disbelief, that unspoken contract between viewer and storyteller in which the former agrees to set aside incredulity in order to become immersed in the tale being told. For example, in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, we set aside our disbelief that a man can fly without aid of technology or wings or anything other than his own apparent will. We set aside that people can’t fire lasers out of their eyes or have breath powerful enough to knock people about or freeze things. But Donner and the screenwriters (including legendary Godfather author Mario Puzo) knew well enough not to take things so far that the audience couldn’t agree to set aside disbelief. They kept things just realistic enough that the audience could immerse itself in the story for those two, two and a half hours.
Not so for The Last Jedi, or for that matter, The Force Awakens, or Jar Jar Abrams’ pathetic attempt to reboot Star Trek, or Paul Feig’s shitty Ghostbusters reboot, or CBS’ STD.
No, we get nothing that allows us, the viewers, to pretend that any of the crap going on in these movies could feasibly happen. Johnson assumes the audience is stupid, then berates the audience for failing to appreciate the insult to our intelligence.
In The Force Awakens, Han Solo dies like a bitch at the hands of his son, Emo Vader. In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker is depicted as a burnt out coward who is too scared of facing his former pupil to go in person to confront him, choosing instead to hide away on some distant backwater planet and ultimately fade away like a bitch; this is the guy who, as a young Jedi pupil, faced down the two baddest asses in the galaxy just to redeem his father from the Dark Side, yet here he’s a coward who seriously considered murdering his own nephew rather than let him fall to Snoke’s influence. Leia is depicted as an incompetent leader, a has-been, a relic of a rebellion that supposedly no longer needs her and yet can’t survive without her knowledge and skills. Carrie Fisher’s death in real life in late 2016 makes resolving Lei’s arc impossible now, but I’ve a feeling that the former princess, senator, and rebel leader would have met with an equally humiliating end for the sake of puffing up the hollow concepts Abrams and Johnson have foisted upon the audience. And speaking of how Leia is depicted…
Supposedly Ma-Rey Sue, Admiral Holdo (played by Laura Dern, whose talent was complete wasted on the role), and new concept Rose Tico—this last being the closest thing we get to having an actual character in The Last Jedi—are the best-est evar! We’re supposed to “know” this because we keep being told they are. But we never get to actually see them being good at anything, because every single decision they make, every single action, is about the dumbest thing one can do in even the most poorly-written slasher movie. Criminally reckless behavior is on display in every scene, getting people needlessly killed, yet somehow we’re told that there’s nothing wrong with any of these bone-headed mistakes and you’ll find defenders of these concepts launching into convoluted, nonsensical rationalizations trying to justify them. But there is no justification because the actions in the movies are indefensibly stupid. There’s no thought put into anything that happens. And yet Abrams and Johnson demand that we blindly accept it all as genius and tell us we’re sexist, racist morons who are too stupid to see how brilliant they are.
So for all we’re told how great Abrams’ and Johnson’s female concepts are, what we actually see is that they’re stupid, incompetent, and shallow to the point we don’t care what happens to them. Can you imagine any of these one-dimensional cardboard cutouts holding a candle to Carrie Fisher’s Leia, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, or Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor? I sure as hell can’t. And it’s a fair bet you can’t, either. Abrams’ and Johnson’s concepts are so devoid of substance, sympathetic qualities, and ability, that the only way to puff them up is to debase and destroy the characters we’ve all grown up with and that were presented much better and more competently, because otherwise the audience would never be able to accept the concepts.
Far from having strong female characters, we’re shat upon with lifeless, brainless, incompetent cutouts. How is that even remotely feminist? John Carpenter and Debra Hill, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, and Dan O’Bannon, all wrote famous, strong female characters, that were truly feminist in both concept and execution. Yes, the characters are flawed, but in that way they’re just like real people, and because they are flawed we more easily identify with them and want them to prevail. We care what actually happens to them. We grow and learn with them as they evolve on the page and screen. THAT is how you write a strong female character who wins in spite of everything thrown at her. She either has or obtains the skills and abilities needed to fight the monster/villain of the story, in a more realistic manner that, while we may have to suspend our disbelief, doesn’t require us to suspend so much of it that it takes us out of the story.
Everything seen so far in Disney Star Wars is a rehash of movies that have been made before. The Force Awakens is a shameless retread of the original Star Wars. The Last Jedi is an even more shameless retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, but deliberately insulting to audience intelligence, so much so that the Chinese, who typically gobble up Western cinema, actually said as much in explaining why the movie was dropped from 92% of screens in the second week in what is arguably the largest foreign market.
It would be bad enough if this was all part of some plan that failed because of poor decision-making by producer Kathleen Kennedy and her stable of no-talent directors. But Ruin Johnson appears to have tossed out even the half-assed plan concocted by Jar Jar Abrams, thus leaving the Star Wars franchise basically without any overall direction or structure. Given the episodic nature of George Lucas’ seminal creation, this is unacceptable. Small wonder, then, that the new movies are falling short of minimum profit requirements Disney needs in order for its four billion dollar investment to pay off.
The bulk of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of Kennedy, who seems incapable of imposing any order at LucasFilm, or any guidance with regard to where cinema’s biggest and arguably first blockbuster franchise should go from here. It would be laughable if not for the realization that, if she ultimately causes Star Wars to tank, there is little likelihood that it can ever recover enough to be resurrected at any point in the future. With Carrie Fisher dead, Harrison Ford at age seventy-five, and Mark Hamill at age sixty-six, the chances of seeing either of the surviving main cast members reunited once again to do a reset are pretty much nonexistent.
And the saddest part of all this is that it didn’t have to be this way. Disney could have hired someone to helm LucasFilm who actually has a vision and isn’t afraid to lay down the proverbial law with regards to what can and should be done with Star Wars. Instead, the suits behind the Mouse arrogantly thought that the franchise would practically run itself, without any need for vision or legitimate storytelling. They assumed, like CBS, that, because the property they own came with a built-in audience, they could simply churn out product like on an assembly line without regard for quality. The inevitable result of such hubris is that what was once a popular, almost guaranteed money-maker is now no longer that, because fans who grew up with the originals have been so alienated that they’ve turned away, and that means the future of the franchise is in the hands of audiences who’ve never seen the originals and therefore could take the new movies or leave them, and they aren’t enough to sustain the franchise.
At least there’s Marvel…I guess…
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