Marvel movies are not just cinema; they’re good cinema. At the end of
Marvel Studios’ 2018 hit
Black Panther, there is a moment that unfailingly reduces audiences to a stunned silence. The film’s villain, Erik Killmonger (played by Michael B Jordan) is carried, dying, by its eponymous hero (Chadwick Boseman) to a high ridge to watch the sun set. Bitter and in pain, he refuses medical treatment and says: “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, ’cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
In a big Hollywood movie, a superhero movie no less, he delivers a stinging rebuke to those who would overlook the history of racial injustice. It may come from a villain, but the line echoes in our hero’s actions afterwards, as he opens his hi-tech African nation’s borders to help the oppressed.