Thoughts on the Black Panther Teaser Trailer

I got a moment to get a look at the Black Panther Teaser trailer.

I wasn’t impressed.

Yeah, it’s a movie with a Black Superhero in the lead. But it just didn’t grab me. Everything onscreen was dull. Predictable. By the numbers.

Unlike Captain America: Civil War and Thor: Rangnorok, there wasn’t anything exciting presented in the trailer to draw me into the story. It didn’t stimulate my senses. It didn’t make me CARE.

The visuals on this movie are FLAT. Most of the action shots in Black Panther feel re-hashed and uninspired. In fact most of them have been done in other movies with a far more exciting story. The machine gun shots in the dark before the hero attacks? Done better in Iron Man. The heroes getting out of the way of the flipping SUV?  Done better in Captain America: Civil War.

And this film features another big problem. The villain is…Ulysees Klaw. AKA The Evil White man.

Meh.

Yeah, Marvel Studios made a Black Panther Movie. But it doesn’t look like an exciting one.

Some people may get excited about a seeing A Black superhero in their own solo movie. But looking at the movie Black Panther is featured in the teasr I don’t see much to get excited about. The story in the teaser looks FLAT. The camera work looks uninspired. And the action onscreen has a been there, done that feel.

Blade this ain’t. Heck, this ain’t even Meteor Man.

And it still looks like Marvel Studios STILL screenwriters can’t write a villain for shit. The Evil White Man may be an exciting bad guy for the Hoteps and the Pro-Blacks, but I’m gonna need to see a LOT more to give me a reason to buy a ticket for a Black Panther movie.

At this point I want MORE when it comes to superhero movies. I want richer stories. Multidimensional characters. And a bad guy I can LOVE TO HATE. I want more than just a black superhero movie, I want a GREAT Black Superhero movie. Judging from what I saw the Trailer Black Panther wasn’t a GREAT Black superhero movie. Blade did everything that this movie looks like it’s trying to do a lot better 20 years ago.

All I see in the Black Panther teaser is a paternalistic White Supremacist view of Africa, not a fresh take on African-American fantasy. The bad guys are evil White men out to plunder the resources of a mysterious African kingdom. And Wakanda’s great hero, The Black Panther is going to stop them.

And Wakanda doesn’t look like an amazing place, it just looks like a White person’s view of Africa. Even thought the film is directed by a Black man, the pictures that are presented of Wakanda feel like we’re seeing the world of Wakanda through the eyes of what a White person sees, not how we’d see ourselves.

It’s not creative. It’s not original. It just feels….Meh.

Yeah, we finally have a Black Panther movie. But sadly from the teaser it doesn’t look like anything special. It just feels like a generic superhero movie with Black people in it, not a cinematic masterpiece with an amazing story that gives us a unique picture of Africa. It’s hardly the event some Black people like Hoteps and Pro-Blacks are getting all emotional about. After seeing three Black superheroes in Captain America: Civil War I expected something BIG with Black Panther’s teaser. But what I saw on the screen was nothing to get excited about. Will I spend money to go see Black Panther? I’m still on the fence.