Marvel’s Grown Trick-or-Treaters Grow Tiresome

I finally watched Black Panther. I wasn’t looking for entertainment. I was doing research. I wanted to see if the same spell that afflicted the people who gave positive reviews to Thor: Ragnarok was at work in the panther fans.

It is, indeed, at work. This is a very long, boring movie full of cartoonish stunts and social justice warrior canards. The writing is very, very weak. The direction is clumsy. The pace is glacial. The premises are idiotic. Nonetheless, people act like this mediocre movie cures AIDS. Not only do they praise it to the skies as entertainment; they seem to think it has the potential to bring success and respect to blacks across the world.

If you are black, and you like watching movie characters blame the non-black world for your problems, you will love Black Panther. If you are on the receiving end of the blame, or if you have black friends who are poisoned by the excuse-making and blame-shifting, you may not like it as much.

I will put in SPOILERS at will, so get ready.

There is an African nation called Wakanda. It is populated by geniuses. They have technology about two centuries ahead of ours. They have always been ahead. Their natural response to their situation has been to sit by and do nothing while most other Africans lead lifestyles that are…typically African. You know what I mean. Starvation. Constant violence. Superstition. Ignorance. Illiteracy (including lacking written forms of many languages). All of these problems are fine with Wakandans, who probably had the Tesla S in 1000 A.D.

Wakanda’s only city is hidden by a big force field. I assume Wonder Woman and her mom have sued them unsuccesfully over this. Wakanda pretends to be a backward African nation (I repeat myself) even though it’s basically Asgard on earth.

Wakanda has a neat local drug. When you take this drug, it makes you super-strong. It gives you incredible speed, too, and it heals you of whatever your physical problems might be. It also makes you trip like crazy. When characters in the movie take it, they go off to the Wakanda afterlife and hang out with their dead ancestors (whom they worship).

This drug is wonderful, so naturally, only the king gets to take it.

Wakandans are far more intelligent than the rest of us, so of course, they have a sophisticated, civilized way of choosing their kings (sorry, no democracy in Marvel’s dictatorship). They have candidates fight to the death with sharp weapons.

Could anything be more insulting to black people? In the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), black geniuses resort to bloody violence to choose their leaders. Even animals are smart enough not to fight to the death, but Marvel’s black savants haven’t caught up with them.

Someone should have had a talk to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the white, Jewish creators of the Black Panther character.

The king, with his drug strength (shades of angel dust) is the Black Panther. Every king is the Black Panther of his time. New kings take the drug, and after some tripping, they begin their reigns.

Some would say it would make more sense for a king to take a drug which makes him smarter, not stronger. Kings don’t need super strength, especially when they are surrounded by technology that does everything for them.

The latest Black Panther tries to catch a one-armed thief with mental issues, and he fails because, well, he is stupid. This results in a successful challenge by a relative who wants Wakanda to rule the world and give all the “colonizers” their comeuppance.

One could say that MCA’s (Marvel Cinematic Africa’s) problems are caused not by “colonizers” but by Wakanda’s long, uncompromising tradition of selfishness.

The challenger beats the movie’s hero (“T’Challa”) fair and square, and the new king sets about sending Wakandan weapons all over the world in order to start his global empire. T’Challa appears dead after the fight, having been speared in the gut and tossed off a thousand-foot-high cliff, but because this happens early in the movie, we are not distressed. We are merely annoyed, knowing he has to come back unless Marvel wants to refund our money.

T’Challa returns (surprise!), and there is a very undignified civil war fought by a total of about 300 combatants aided by trained rhinos in armor (nice technology). He kills the new king, which is technically an assassination, and all is well. He tells the UN Wakanda is going to share its technology, which impresses no one, because Wakanda has always pretended to be a backward dirtheap that absorbs charity dollars and discourages Peace Corps volunteers.

I want to complain about the stunts in the movie, but there are no stunts. Stunts died when CGI was perfected. Instead of stunts, we now have realistic-looking cartoons flipping and flying all over the screen. Whatever they are, they are silly.

One of the problems with living in a world dominated by comic book films is that we live with drama inflation. Every film has to be more sensational than the rest. Bigger crises. More-impressive characters. Crazier “stunts.” Black Panther is no exception. This is the sort of problem entertainment franchises run into when they constantly push for new heights. They end up pushing too hard, and then you end up with Fonzie on water skis beside the shark pen.

In one scene, two women who are helping the king have their car blown up while they’re riding in it. The roof comes off, and one character flips through the air and lands on it, standing. She then surfs down the road on it, toward the enemy.

What can I say? Isn’t this the point where the adults get up and go sit in the lobby? In real life, when your car gets blown up, they find little bits of you here and there, and if you’re lucky, they don’t find one big piece which is still alive.

This is worse than Fonzie jumping the shark. A man on water skis COULD jump over a shark pen, but nobody lands on their feet, uninjured, after having their cars blown up, and nobody surfs down streets on car roofs.

When you watch this movie, you get the feeling that the script was sketched out in 5 or 10 minutes, and that the actual writing took a week or less.

To understand the difference between good comic book movie writing and bad comic book movie writing, consider the first Iron Man film. It was excellent. The main character was a hoot; his jokes could not have been better. He was a blast to watch. On top of that, he had a little complexity. He struggled with guilt over making weapons.

He was also interesting from a personal standpoint. He was an incredible (but not TOO incredible) engineer, and he was a great showman. The plot was intelligent and logical. He invented something powerful, bad people took control of it, and he had to use his skills to regain that control. In the meantime, he developed an engaging relationship with Pepper Potts.

Iron Man made beautiful use of CGI. Instead of creating silly rhinos with armor, Marvel gave us a beautiful flying suit which was enjoyable to watch. The stunts weren’t sensational, but they didn’t have to be, because the writing was so good. When Tony Stark used a tiny missile to blow up a tank, in a very ordinary explosion, it was extremely entertaining. The writers set it up so well, it had to work.

I hate to cite Deadpool, because it’s a filthy movie no one should watch, but again, superior writing. It could not have been handled more skillfully. Logan was also done well. Black Panther isn’t on anything like the same tier.

Why did Black Panther get glowing reviews? It has to be the SJW angle. Critics feel sorry for black people and black filmmakers. Black Panther’s stars and director are black. It’s situated on a black continent. It makes black people look smarter than everyone else. Critics are generally liberal, so they are pumping the film up because they want approval from other leftists.

I wonder if they would rave about a movie where all the best athletes come from Japan.

People seem to think a badly made movie based on a silly comic book is going to help the black race. This is how crazy we’ve gotten. We look to comic book movies to save us.

Wakanda isn’t real. Africa is dirty, violent, poor, and full of ignorance. There is no African technology. Black people, like all other people, cause their own problems. The answers can’t be found in comic books. The real answers haven’t changed, and here they are: develop a strong prayer life, do well in school, be a good worker, and don’t commit crimes, drink too much, or take drugs. You don’t have to trip on a nonexistent African drug, and you definitely don’t have to reject the powerful majority culture. You have to embrace the majority culture and adopt its strengths.

I’m tired of hearing about cultural appropriation. It’s a good thing. It’s good when an American eats Chinese food, and it’s good when Africans live in modern houses and drive cars. Every time a black or Asian man puts on a suit and goes to work in a nice car, it’s cultural appropriation. They are appropriating my white culture, and I am all for it.

Black Panther reinforces people’s excuses, and as God has told me, when you deny an excuse, you take your power back. Excuses lead to weakness and subordination. Black Panther reinforces hostility toward whites, who are the most together people on the planet. Hating white people is a great way to guarantee failure. Our way of doing things works much better than anyone else’s, and we are happy to teach it to others.

It made me sad to see the movie blame whites for Africa’s problems. Here’s a list of the terrible things we brought to Africa:

1. Literacy. There is no possible excuse for going thousands of years and not realizing you should create a written form of your language. Illiteracy guarantees that knowledge will be lost.

2. Medicine. The rest of the world doesn’t import African medical secrets. The flow is exclusively one-way.

3. Electricity. Even in this century, Africans have heated their huts by burning fuel inside them, WITHOUT CHIMNEYS. Can you imagine what the air is like in a home where you burn firewood in the middle of the living room?

4. Pesticide. Think of all the diseases that are spread by mosquitoes.

5. Modern farming techniques. Crops don’t just happen, and primitive farming methods are nothing like as productive as modern ones.

6. Cleanliness. In Africa, it’s still common for people to go blind simply because they don’t wipe the dirt off their faces. Look it up.

Did whites bring slavery to Africa? Not really. Slavery has always been big there, and it still is. Whites simply took advantage of the willingness of Africans to sell each other to white people. There used to be 16 African ports where whites could park their ships and pay Africans for cargoes of black slaves. Look it up.

Did whites bring colonialism to Africa? No. Africans have a long history of infighting and pushing each other around. Whites brought WHITE colonialism, but it’s not like Africans lived side by side in peace before whites showed up.

Sure, white people did all sorts of bad things to Africans, but if we had never visited, Africa would still have been a disaster. It’s good that we don’t have African colonies now, but the end of white rule isn’t giving rise to reform or better lifestyles.

White people didn’t bring evil to Africa. We just did evil things better.

If all western white people were removed from the world this afternoon, things would almost surely be much worse a year from now than they are today. In spite of our enormous faults, we are a positive influence, especially when it comes to spreading the gospel.

Black Panther reinforces the idea that whites are responsible for the world’s ills, and that, naturally, reinforces the idea that whatever evils people choose to do to us are justified and maybe even necessary. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t like it when a movie studio puts a target on my back in order to make money. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I don’t deserve this.

This must be how Jews felt when they started seeing propaganda in prewar Germany.

Thank God the movie has a black antagonist. Things could have been a lot worse. The villain could have been a red-haired billionaire who operates casinos and eats African babies.

It’s funny; telling damaging lies about white people is proof of enlightenment, but making any effort to correct the record is racism.

I’m looking forward to the end of the comic-book-movie era. I’m not sure it’s coming, but I look forward to it. I’m tired of the silliness. I think grown men and women look like idiots in bat and cat costumes. They look like trick or treaters, except they take themselves seriously.

Chadwick Boseman looked like a mental case in his cat ears. It was like something you would expect to see on reruns of Second City TV. John Candy and Martin Short (as Ed Grimley), prowling the streets of Toronto in Danskins and ski masks, thwarting evildoers who steal people’s Labatt Blue and peameal bacon. “Get in the white van, Mr. Panther! We’re taking you to Avengers Headquarters!”

It’s wild to see intelligent blacks pin their hopes on a ludicrous character created by two white Jews who wrote lowbrow fiction for bored children.

The names comic book characters give themselves add to the unintentional humor. The S.H.I.E.L.D. show had a guy named “Deathlok.” What? What does that even mean? It’s like something a six-year-old would come up with. “Deathlok! Mom says to come down from the treehouse and drink your Capri Sun!”

I’m not happy with the idolatry we see in comic book films. Black Panther contained ancestor worship plus a remark glorifying Hanuman, the Hindu antichrist demigod Barack Obama endorses. How likely are we to see positive references to Yahweh/Yeshua, the only real God, in a Marvel movie? Not very. Kids should not be exposed to idolatry in films (or anywhere).

Black Panther is a sick, badly made film. It’s too bad it has done so well.