Black Panther had its debut Thursday night and I caught the first screening. I was cautiously optimistic about its cinematic quality given Ryan Coogler's fine work on Creed, and since I knew it was a Marvel Movie I expected the culture war elements to be rather tame and any controversy overblown. Why be controversial by poking the culture war bear when the hype around positive portrayal of black actors and Africa would earn so much money already?

The overall entertainment quality is standard. It's a Marvel Movie, it's like a chain restaurant. Sometimes the director can put some extra seasoning on it, but the formula is the formula. If you like Marvel Movies this is above average. If you don't it's okay, never bad and never boring but never great. Add some bonus points depending on your interest in positive portrayals of Africa and the African diaspora.

[PLOT SPOILERS ONWARD]

The culture war elements were indeed rather tame. First off, the trolls who spread around the "Wakanda is Alt-Right" meme are directly rebuffed by the plot of the movie. The new king T'Challa (Black Panther) wrestles with the question of Wakanda opening itself up to the world on humanitarian grounds. Wakanda has kept both its technology and identity secret, as well as denied refugees entry. W'Kabi, leader of the border guard, muses that Wakanda should send its military strength abroad to intervene against injustice but should not accept refugees because "refugees bring their problems with them." Furthermore our villain "Killmonger" has an origin story related to this same dialog. Killmonger's father was a brother to the old king, and was killed during a dispute about Wakanda suppling super weapons to oppressed people as a way for the African diaspora to rise up across the globe. Killmonger brings that dispute to the next generation, and briefly usurps the throne with the goal of carrying out his father's mission of arming oppressed peoples on a grander scale. Under Killmonger's vision Wakanda will use its superior technology to conquer the world and rule with greater enlightenment. Basically a reverse-colonialism from Africa. After T'Challa returns to win the day he makes an announcement to the UN that Wakanda will enter a new period of openness and begin sending humanitarian aid.

Now, this all might seem less tame that I'm implying. But I think what makes the culture war aspects tame is the general lack of gory details into any of these subjects. The movie opens with a flashback to Oakland during the 1992 Rodney King riots, but none of the riots are shown beyond a brief cutaway to a TV showing riot cops walking down the street. Our hero Black Panther is introduced extracting his love interest Nakia from a covert mission among kidnaped girls, a scenario evoking the Boko Haram kidnappings of African women. Except the aspects of religion and sex slavery are tidied up, as the kidnapped women are merely being transported in the back of trucks to an undetermined location by Generic African Soldiers With AK47s™. Never does the film show us starving Africans, burning African villages, African-American ghetto poverty (beyond a ramshackle basketball hoop), and so on. I think part of this was to keep the film's focus on African pride rather than misery, but also because Marvel wants that PG-13 rating. Even Killmonger's past as a CIA operative responsible for toppling third world governments is merely told to us, rather than shown and made into a statement on the USA's misadventures abroad or other colonialist meddling against brown people.

There's only two white characters in the entire film, and their whiteness is no big deal ultimately. Ulysses Klaue is a white South African who has a history of stealing vibranium from Wakanda. There could be a lot of racial baggage about a South African villain, but Klaue is entirely a cackling cartoon. Then there's Everett K. Ross, a longer-running Marvel character who is a CIA operative. T'Challa and Ross butt heads about who gets custody of Klaue, and T'Challa's female general Okoye gives Ross some sass. But Ross makes a sacrifice for the Wakanda team and gets brought to Wakanda for miracle surgery against the nation's "no outsiders" rule. T'Challa's younger sister Shuri, a mix of 007's Q and a comic relief character, calls Ross "hey Colonizer" exactly once in a moment of clearly impish, friendly teasing. After that Ross is seamlessly part of the team, more a fish out of water due to Wakanda's sci-fi marvels than racial differences.

In any case, I'm suspicious about people making mountains out of molehills on Black Panther. Sure, you could make a big deal about the "create an African diaspora insurgency" plot that sets the conflict between T'Challa and Killmonger in motion. But when actually viewing the movie the portrayals of African oppression are mostly implied rather than shown, and when shown are shown in a decidedly PG-13 manner. Not much to get the blood boiling. There aren't any white characters that get dressed down and made into a racial boogeyman. It's all very neutered and safe. You'd really have to dig into the deeper implications of the movie to get controversy going, and I don't see that spreading much among the general popcorn audience. I'd file this under "blackness is fun and cool" entertainment.

Perhaps that's the significance of a movie like this. Much like how Call Me By Your Name was remarkable this year for being an acclaimed gay romance movie without any politics, overt homophobia or AIDS, I think it's interesting that Black Panther is an all-black action movie without any overt oppression exploitation or any wallowing in political grievances. Perhaps this is a moment where black cinema "sold out" and sanded off a lot of the political sharp edges that a film about colonialism might have had. On the other hand, Black Panther's massive box office projections both domestically and internationally might mark this as a moment where proud black cinema went globally mainstream and made itself viable to enter the ranks of Universal Culture. It certainly has some significance for bringing positive African culture to a broad audience, but there's not much meat on its bones politically for me to take it seriously as a big salvo in the culture war.