Black Panther (film) Essay Questions

A subject of intense debate after the film’s release was the question of whether Killmonger was in fact right to attempt mass rebellion and whether the film was wrong to portray him as a villain. Discuss the ways in which the film both supports and refutes Killmonger’s vision.

Regardless of the morality or lack thereof of Killmonger’s plan, there are quite deliberate attempts to make him unpalatable to the audience as a character. He is impulsively violent, frequently killing people unnecessarily and generally enjoying the havoc he wreaks on everything around him. However, Killmonger is also granted a level of righteousness and cathartic powe as he externalizes the trauma of African American oppression, and many elements of how he is represented, such as Jordan’s charismatic performance, lead us to sympathize with him

Explain the significance of the scars on Killmonger’s body and discuss what they reveal about his character.

When Killmonger fights T'Challa, we see that he has scars all over his body, scars that he branded onto himself. The significance of these scars is that each represents a person that Killmonger has killed, and every kill was made in order to prepare him for the day that he would challenge and kill T'Challa and take the throne as King of Wakanda. The fact that KIllmonger has warped his body in this way suggests that violence has come to define everything about him. He is totally committed to his mission to kill T’Challa and overthrow oppressive governments.

What does T’Challa’s return from near death illustrate about his character and journey?

Dying, or coming near death, and then returning is a common recurring element in religions, mythologies, and stories of all kinds. Some examples are Osiris, Orpheus, and Jesus Christ. Usually characters who go through this arc gain some kind of insight or wisdom from their journey. T’Challa must fall (literally and figuratively) from a high point to a low point so that he may learn the ways in which he was wrong. He visits the land of the dead (the Ancestral Plane) and realizes the error of his ways. Only then can he come back to a high point (both back to life and to the top of a mountain) and defeat Killmonger.

What is the symbolic and historical significance of Ulysses Klaue and his theft of Wakandan vibranium?

Klaue is a white South African, and his probable age indicates that he grew up in the country’s vicious and oppressive Apartheid regime which denied even the most basic human rights to its black citizens. It seems likely that Klaue has internalized many of the racist attitudes from this era, a notion supported by some of his words and actions in the film (calling Wakandans “savages”). He is also an arms dealer, a profession which has done much harm to parts of Africa by selling weapons to totalitarian military regimes and terrorist groups. Finally, his defining accomplishment is the vibranium theft; his status was won by stealing from Africans, like many a hostile foreign power before him. All in all, Klaue is made out to be a kind of microcosm of the myriad problems facing African countries in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Though much of the focus is on the male protagonist and antagonist, Black Panther is notable for its robust and interesting female characters, more so than most comic book films. Choose one of the female characters, and discuss how her perspective compares with T'Challa’s and/or Killmonger’s and adds depth to the story.

You may, for example, choose to write about Nakia and her desire to change Wakanda’s policies to help the world. She is bold and adventurous, wanting to go out into the world to fight injustice despite T’Challa trying to convince her to stay in Wakanda and become his queen. You could also contrast her vision of peaceful cooperation as a path to improving conditions of oppressed black people to the violent, hyper-masculine vision of Killmonger’s quest for world domination.