Would Black Panther have a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score if it were White Panther?
The liberal media is going ga-ga over the upcoming superhero movie Black Panther. What makes Black Panther different from other Marvel films is that the protagonist, as well as most of the cast, are black, and Africa is portrayed as a super technologically advanced continent filled with spaceships. As of this writing the film has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What are the odds of every single film reviewer agreeing on this film... or any film?
I began to get suspicious when I dug into the reviews.
Directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright, the film is the first of its kind — a Marvel film led by a black director and a primarily black cast. Critics pointed out the importance of this diversity in today’s culture, particularly the film’s majestic portrayal of Africa following Donald Trump’s recent “s-hole” comments.
In his review for Variety, Peter Debruge noted how this diversity is not only racially inclusive, but representative of women and the LGBTQ community as well.
USA Today’s Brian Truitt: Black Panther is extremely grounded, dealing with the consequences of ages-old colonialism and exploring isolationism at a time when actual countries are building borders rather than breaking them down.”
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers: Not just a correction for years of diversity neglect, it’s a big budget blockbuster that digs into the roots of blackness itself. The result feels revolutionary.”
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich: Nobody has ever seen anything like ‘Black Panther’ — not just an entire civilization built from the metal stuff inside Captain America’s shield, and not even just a massive superhero movie populated almost entirely by black people.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a film with a black protagonist. Personally, I'd love to see a film centered around the character of Morpheus from "The Matrix", or Worf from Star Trek. But I would enjoy seeing such films not because the main character was black, but rather because the main character, who happened to be black, played such an interesting character.
The feeling I get from these "reviews" is that they are excited about the film because it is about a black superhero. Not an interesting black superhero, or a dramatic black superhero, but simply a superhero... who is black.
That's part of the same reverse racism we see from white media elites who despise their own ethnicity and automatically see virtue in every other ethnic group.
Black Panther might be a great movie. Or it might not. It's impossible to know from the reviews, because they are clearly the product of a mindset that praises the racial cinematography of the film rather than the content of the film itself.
And the fact that, as of yesterday, 100% of elite reviewers were in complete agreement about the film, probably for racial reasons, gives me an uneasy Orwellian feeling. The internet was supposed to expose us to many points of view, but all of a sudden they are all saying the same thing. That's disturbing, to say the least.
Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.