Original Story Published by: Todd McCarthy for Hollywood Reporter
Photography courtesy of: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
(Above) Ryan Coogler's Marvel movie sports a 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in Wakanda.
Reviews are in for Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, and they are easily the best for a Marvel Studios project to date, with almost everyone left in awe not only of the movie’s ambition, but its success in achieving that ambition on the big screen. As of Wednesday evening, the film has a 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes with just one "rotten" review out of 76.
“There's no mistaking you're still in the Marvel universe here, but this entry sweeps you off to a part of it you've never seen: a hidden lost world in Africa defined by royal traditions and technological wonders that open up refreshing new dramatic, visual and casting possibilities,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy in his review. “There are vistas, costumes and settings that keep the images popping off the screen, even though this Marvel offering is not in 3D.”
“It’s as if everyone enlisted to bring the project to life understood the magnitude of what Black Panther, the first comic-based studio movie with a black hero at the center since 1998’s Blade, would represent," critic and writer Marc Bernardin wrote for Nerdist. “The chance to fill every corner of their fictional Wakanda with the same level of craft and detail usually reserved for British-star-studded period pieces. An opportunity to tell a story about black lives, which matter and are not defined by their pain but, instead, by their glory. An answer to a culture’s question, ‘When will it be our time in the sun?’”
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers agreed, calling the movie “an epic that doesn't walk, talk or kick ass like any other Marvel movie — an exhilarating triumph on every level from writing, directing, acting, production design, costumes, music, special effects to you name it. For children (and adults) of color who have longed forever to see a superhero who looks like them, Marvel's first black-superhero film is an answered prayer, a landmark adventure and a new film classic.”
And yet, argued Empire’s Jimi Famurewa, the movie is more than merely a milestone. “[O]ne of Black Panther’s greatest triumphs is to make you forget the barrier-breaking significance of its mere existence,” he wrote. “By the time the climactic battle has broken out — set a world away from the customary razed metropolis of modern comic-book films — you’re too busy marveling at its bottomless invention, its big-hearted verve, to truly consider the game-changing revolution playing out in front of you.”
That's something that is picked up by The Verge’s Bryan Bishop: “Not only is [the movie] a long-overdue embrace of diversity and representation, it’s a film that actually has something to say — and it’s able to do so without stepping away from the superhero dynamics that make the larger franchise work. It’s gripping, funny and full of spectacle, but it also feels like a turning point, one where the studio has finally recognized that its movies can be about more than just selling the next installment.”
Repeatedly praised in reviews is the script by Coogler and American Crime Story’s Joe Robert Cole. “[T]he screenplay does a remarkable job of not only ticking off all the Marvel boxes of action, disarming humor and romance, but balances dozens of characters and their emotional arcs while weaving in great layers of moral and political clash and confrontation,” according to The Playlist’s Rodrigo Perez, who added, “Black Pantherpacks so much in and yet never feels overstuffed."
To read the full article, visit Hollywood Reporter.
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