taken down the reviews and bleached them from the internet. It should be noted that the site has yet to do the same with the overtly racist user reviews for Troy: Fall of a City, another production with a black lead that has been subject to vote brigading and ballot stuffing despite the fact that it has not yet been released.
It should be noted that Black Panther is not even that overtly political. The most political aspect of the movie is an acknowledgement of the consequences of slavery and the imaginary construct of a utopian African nation unscarred by such an atrocity. Black Panther goes out of its way not to offend white audiences, acknowledging slavery and colonialism indirectly and as asides, casting its most revolutionary black character as a villain and assigning a major supporting role to a completely superfluous white character so that white audiences might not feel left out.
Indeed, the biggest problem with Black Panther is arguably that the film is too apolitical, that it refuses to engage in the cultural war into which it would inevitably eventually be drafted. Much like Luke Cage glossed over the racial politics of police brutality against black communities, Black Panther acknowledges the oppression and victimisation of minority communities within the United States, but without ever directly calling it out. Black Panther is a movie that genuinely doesn’t want to alienate any of its viewers, even those who bristle at concepts like “black lives matter” or “social justice warriors.”
This is the political and cultural climate in which we live, in which every piece of pop cultural discourse is poisoned by racist trolls and smear campaigns – in which an innocuous superhero blockbuster becomes a do-or-die online battlefield in which insecure racist audiences vent pent-up fury. Of course, these keyboard warriors are undoubtedly empowered by recent political movements. The internet has always been home to extremist rhetoric and communities, but the past few years have seen this hatred and vindictiveness explode into the mainstream.
The current political discourse has given these people confidence, and encouraged them to express loudly and proudly views that would have been socially unacceptable even five years earlier. Indeed, the alt-right is a product of (and still connected to) these communities, the festering wound of GamerGate tied into the recent election. The digital battlegrounds over Black Panther and Beauty and the Beast are not so different from those on which the 2016 election were fought, populated by culture warriors and battle bots engaged in a bitter existentialist struggle against what they see as progressive encroachment.
In February 2018, everything is political. Even Black Panther. Even IMDb scores.