Plot twists, usually at the end of the second act, are Marvel Studios' regular stock-in-trade nowadays, but three out of their last four movies have had relatively mild revelations. The "bombshell" that the villain Erik Killmonger was, in fact, the son of T'Challa's brother N'Jobu and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne was telegraphed pretty early on, though the revelation that N'Jobu's betrayal was motivated by his desire to fight for oppressed people of African descent everywhere gave the movie a very interesting new complexion. It meant that Erik Killmonger was less like Hela from Thor: Ragnarok and more like Magneto from the X-Men films. And the question posed was a valid one: why couldn't Wakanda lend its technology to oppressed black people the world over to help them improve their lot in life?
When T'Challa learns of Killmonger's existence, he comes face-to-face with the fallout of Wakanda's millennia-old policy of shutting out the outside world, and has a couple of really difficult choices to make. It's not unlike the opposing viewpoints of Charles Xavier and Magneto, which in turn were based on the opposing views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Killmonger may have had his methodology wrong, but he asked the right questions: given that there are 2 billion black people all over the world suffering in poverty and subjugation, why is Wakanda standing by and doing nothing? Killmonger is of the Magneto persuasion, whereas T'Challa is more like Xavier, and for some reason, his solution to the problem he faced felt more satisfactory than Xavier's even though they're arguably similar approaches.
One thing about the "twist" that really gratified me was how T'Challa was able to confront T'Chaka for both his duplicity and his cruel abandonment of N'Jobu's son, who grew up to be the murderous Killmonger. This scratched a major itch for me as an MCU geek, because quite frankly I was really disappointed that Odin never had to face the backlash of his decision to conceal from Thor the fact that he had an evil, super-powerful older sister. Like T'Chaka does to T'Challa, Odin appears to Thor from beyond the dead, but unlike T'Challa, Thor basically begs Odin for help instead of calling him out for being a lying SOB. In his final afterlife vision, T'Challa really lets T'Chaka, and all of his ancestors have it for their selfishness, and the film is that much richer for it. There was something cathartic about that moment somehow.
Father issues, like story twists, are another staple of the MCU, whether it's Tony Stark's love/hate relationship with his dad, Thor's constant insecurity about living up to his father, or even Peter Quill's finding out that his dad is basically a god-like megalomaniac, and T'Challa, of the lot of them, did, for me at least, the best job of confronting his issues head on, though it probably helped that his relationship with his father was the least dysfunctional.
Speaking of fathers and sons, I'd like to take the time to heap even more praise on Sterling K. Brown's portrayal of the doomed Wakandan prince N'Jobu. I quite like how Coogler used a well-worn Marvel trope, i.e. the plot twist in a very different way. It's established early on that N'Jobu has betrayed Wakanda, but by saving the revelation of why he did it for much later in the film, Coogler gives that scene that much more emotional impact. One of my favorite sequences in the film is Killmonger's visit to the ancestral plane, where he speaks to his father. It was a heartrending, powerful bit of storytelling quite unlike anything I'd ever seen in a superhero movie.
Of course, the appearance of Bucky Barnes in the final post-credits scene did not exactly come as a surprise considering that it was in Wakanda where he voluntarily went into deep freeze at the end of Captain America: Civil War and considering further that he shows up, alongside a Wakandan army, in the Avengers: Infinity War trailer, but it was nice to see that the Wakandan way of healing his battered soul doesn't just consist of keeping him in a lab.
In truth, there's so much to unpack from this movie, which is shaping up to be an even bigger cultural phenomenon than Wonder Woman was last year, but these are the points that stuck with me the most. Oh, and I was happy that, unlike Woman Woman, with its ultra-generic climax, complete with her unbelievably corny "I believe in love" line, Black Panther actually managed to stick the landing.
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