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    dirtsideA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:26pm

    I’ll agree that Killmonger is definitely the most psychologically complex villain of the MCU films (TV is a different medium and it makes little sense to compare movie villains to TV villains), but I think he excels more in the concept than the execution. The problem of “should we stay isolated, use our tech to help the world, or use our tech to help our brothers overthrow the oppressors?” is a fascinating one, but the movie itself doesn’t actually do much with it. Killmonger takes over, plans to send weapons to their teams overseas, and then T’Challa et. al. stop him (violently). T’Challa himself moves from “let’s stay isolated” to “let’s help the world” but the complexities of actually helping the world are way beyond the purview of a standard Marvel punch-up movie.

    As @thewayigetby said, the bar is really low. Someone whose motives and actions hint at the level of complexity that Killmonger does is embraced as “the best MCU villain ever” (I still think Loki is a better villain, partly because he’s a great deal more fun) despite the movie’s handling of him being fairly shallow.

    (Not to mention the idea that Killmonger’s plan would never come off as he intended: I think the Avengers might have something to say about paramilitaries suddenly unleashing futuristic weapons all over the planet, not to mention that Wakanda, population-wise, is outnumbered somewhere in the range of 100-300 to 1. No matter how advanced their tech, other countries would quickly get their hands on some of it, and the battlefield would level pretty rapidly.)

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      BIRDMAN BIRDMANdirtside
      2/20/18 2:40pm

      I love Loki, but I honestly think he’s been used as comic relief too much to be considered the greatest villain. Aside from the first Avengers, he’s been more of a nuisance than a threat, and doing everything for his own gain makes him more one-dimensional for me. Killmonger was just terrific in every possible way, and the best way I can sum up how great Jordan was in the role was that he hands down stole every scene he was in, and the parts of the movie that he wasn’t in just seemed like a setup for his arrival.

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      knappsterbotdirtside
      2/20/18 2:46pm

      I really wanted at least one ship to escape with the weapons, it could’ve led into BP2 or it could’ve just been further color to the MCU, any movie could have a sequence where the hero is faced with Wakandan tech in the hands of regular criminals or something like that.

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    thewayigetbyA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:17pm

    While the bar is really low Killmonger is far and away the best Marvel villain ever. Even if we ignore the depth of the character and the questions he makes us ask he beats everyone else by simply being a legitimate threat, something the Marvel movies have a horrible time doing for their villains. The fact that he’s a very deep and nuanced villain is just icing on the cake.

    Also props to Serkis in a much smaller way. Klaue was a nice goofy pallet cleanser to Killmonger’s deeply serious and menacing villain that also comes off more legitimate competition than road block in the hero’s journey.

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      Andy Synnthewayigetby
      2/20/18 2:37pm

      I’ll back you on that.

      And kudos for giving a shout out to Serkis chewing the scenery as Klaue... his amoral bastard was a perfect counterpoint to Kilmonger’s more tragic villainy.

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      The Bob Thethewayigetby
      2/20/18 2:37pm

      And even Klaue deserves some credit. He’s a survivor, a profiteer who’s got no interest in power or ruling, only enriching himself and staying alive. He’s also really funny.

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    wykstradA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:45pm

    One of the other things that makes Killmonger such a compelling vision is that he has a tragic present as well as a tragic backstory. As T’Challa points out during their climactic fight, Killmonger wants to turn the colonizers’ weapons against them, but in taking control of Wakanda, he’s using the same destabilizing tactics that the colonizers used, to the same eventual end. The colonial legacy of his suffering is a psychic wound that he can’t help but replicate when he takes charge.

    Watching the movie, I kept on thinking of the various African warlords that rose to power in former European colonies—in some instances, they may have fostered a feeling of national power and unity in the post-colonial years, but once comfortably in power, they began plundering their own country in the same way the colonizers did, making it weaker in the process. Killmonger burning the grove of Black Panther flowers is this sort of action in a nutshell—he’s trying to consolidate his strength by preventing anyone else from being able to take his place, but by eliminating any possible opposition, he makes Wakanda weaker.

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      HerrKaiserMcGruppwykstrad
      2/20/18 3:27pm

      Human nature bend towards terrible 🙁

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      Dantewykstrad
      2/20/18 6:35pm

      All of this, that’s why he’s so compelling. You can understand why he is the way is, and why he’s doing certain things, because there are real world examples all throughout history. Even his more irrational decisions have real motivations behind them.

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    Robusto68A.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:33pm

    My son is 12 and he said Killmonger was the best villain of all the MCU he’d seen, so they definitely got it right. The shame is they still keep killing all the villains. Even Klaue who I figured would keep popping up to be an entertaining irritant throughout the MCU.

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      The Bob TheRobusto68
      2/20/18 2:39pm

      Yeah, so far Loki and Turk are the only interesting bad guys to get some meaningful replay.

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      knappsterbotRobusto68
      2/20/18 2:44pm

      Yeah they really need to figure out a way to have villains be a consistent part of the MCU, I feel like that’s the only part of it that’s not fleshed out. I don’t think it would be that hard to set up more grey villains like Loki as well, where they fight for their own interests even if it means allying with the heroes.

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    returning the screwA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:31pm

    The movie was good but it wasn’t great. I have a problem with the technology that Panther is planning to share with the world. If they have the technology to solve everything including traumatic wounds doesn’t it make any future movies stakes pretty low? I mean if everything can be solved with Wakanda technology then what’s there to worry about?

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      dirtsidereturning the screw
      2/20/18 2:38pm

      Anyone who knows anything about humans knows that such technology being unleashed on the world would inevitably result in enormous amounts of warfare. The first things humans use any new tech for is sex and violence. Sure, we’d be able to heal people instantly, assuming they hadn’t been vaporized by a vibranium laser cannon or whatever.

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      itrainmonkeysreturning the screw
      2/20/18 2:53pm

      Is it made explicit that he’s planning on sharing the technology? And ALL the technology? I figured he’d be “coming out” and revealing they’re more advanced and funded than they portrayed themselves but didn’t assume that he’d be handing over schematics and prototypes and all forms of their technology for the outside world to tinker with.

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    HairySquishmasA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:32pm

    I feel like quite a few of the more recent Marvel films have had articles like this. If you search you can find articles saying things like “Why Zemo Is One Of Marvel’s Best Villains” or “‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ Makes Vulture Marvel’s Best Villain Yet”.

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      itrainmonkeysHairySquishmas
      2/20/18 2:54pm

      Those both were very good villains in different ways but I agree. I’d also throw in Kingpin and the Purple Man from Netflix Marvel as villains who people were raving about being “the best yet”. I loved both of their performances, for sure, but the hyperbole for these kinds of things are getting out of hand. 

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      Bingo LittleHairySquishmas
      2/20/18 10:27pm

      I’m working on my “Thanos finally gives Marvel a Real Villain” article right now.

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    palmofnapalmA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 3:00pm

    Honestly, Black Panther squandered Killmonger in the same way that it has already squandered many potentially interesting villains (too many villaisn, too many plots). Black Panther feels like two movies - the origin story featuring Klaue and the sequel that pits BP against a evil version of himself - got smashed together.

    It’s a great movie and its unique voice is undeniable, but ultimately, it wasn’t the best version of itself.

    Really wish the movie had taken place with a confident King T’Challa so that we didn’t need two fights for the crown, two coronations, and three vision quests.

    Really wish we could have met the other three tribes.

    Really wish that the movie had at least attempted to make Killmonger a sympathetic antagonist. The first thing you see him do is kill a bunch of people, so it’s not like the audience ever actually thinks about rooting for him for even a second.

    Really wish that Daniel Kaluuya’s character’s motivation made sense (why flip sides and why flip back? His character really seems to be on whatever side the plot demands at that moment, not what actually makes sense for the character).

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      Ebopalmofnapalm
      2/20/18 3:34pm

      You basically just spelled out every beef I had with this movie apart from the yawn-inducing CGI fight scene in the end. It just tried to do too many things, but then it sort of had too because of how the culture is now with movies, you don’t get time to do one movie building up your protagonist and another for your villain before you get to play them off against each other in a third movie. It feels like everything needs to be a massive hit right away and you throw everything you have at it because all the studios are paranoid that even just one slight failure could snowball into an apocalypse.

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      flabberboozledpalmofnapalm
      2/21/18 7:20am

      Really wish that Daniel Kaluuya’s character’s motivation made sense

      I agree. Cramming 2 movies into one left little time to give motivation to W’Kabi. We get a few fleeting impressions of him: (1) talking with T’Challa in the fields by the rhinos, (2) the very brief discussion of the mission, and (3) his anger over the mission failure.

      Even then, (1) is crammed with introducing the rhinos and that W’kabi and Okoye are married. By the time the movie got to (3), I was thoroughly confused about W’Kabi’s rage over the mission failure because it wasn’t really earned.

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    BigBadBarbA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 4:33pm

    A few thoughts:

    Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger was, of course, an excellent performance. However, I only wish that he would have had more screen time. When he was talking and telling his story, the movie truly soared. It kinda lost me in some of the action sequences, especially the final big battle which was typical Marvel outrageous spectacle.

    Also, I will second the comments elsewhere - Andy Serkis was delightful as Klaue. That scene in the museum was gleefully violent and great in terms of developing both Klaue and Killmonger. Really a nice addition to an already great movie (it WAS a great movie, btw, even with my nitpicky nature).

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      squirtloafBigBadBarb
      2/20/18 4:46pm

      I was amazed that one of the post-credit scenes wasn’t Klaue reviving.

      ...in the comics, after he gets his ass handed to him by the Fantastic Four and Black Panther, he goes into the vibranium mound and allows himself to get mutated into an actual superhuman with weird powers.

      I though for sure we’d see something like that post-credits...”Say, whatever happened to Klaue’s body during the fighting? Oh. It fell into the vibranium mound? Well, what’s the worst that could happen?”

      Seemed like too much setup to just dispose of him.

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      Batista Thumbs UpBigBadBarb
      2/20/18 5:17pm

      MCU doesn’t exactly shy away from violence, but the museum scene and the ritual combat between Killmonger and T’Challa felt striking within what we usually see in the MCU, brutal and also, as you said, gleeful in the villain’s side. It definitely made them come across more dangerously by carrying out their carnage using tactile weapons in those sequences instead of the usual CG vaporizing. Klaue’s money shot in the trailer winds up being him shooting a poisoned female innocent, which is pretty dark for this universe!

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    Andy SynnA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 2:44pm

    One thing that came across to me, and I grant you this may not be other’s interpretation, was that Kilmonger’s whole “burn it all down” thing to start the revolution felt a lot like the whole “disrupters” shtick that’s currently so popular in certain circles - from the privileged tech bros who think that “disrupting” the current system in the name of “innovation” justifies their arrogance, to the people who I’ve seen doubling down on Trump as “disrupting” the current system... regardless of who it hurts or what the long term consequences might be.

    He was definitely an “ends justify the means” kind of guy, and it felt that he was so driven towards one particular goal, that he didn’t care about the damage done along the way.

    Of course there was a lot more to his character than that (he certainly was one of the most compelling villains the MCU has ever had), but I felt this was something that I should point out, to see if anyone else had a similar reading?

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      jimAndy Synn
      2/20/18 4:21pm

      His burn it all down was inserted in order to actually make him villainous at all. His only other villainous act was being involved when the cultural appropriator was killed when he was educating her on the history of the weapon while she was racially profiling him.

      His goal and his father goal was to give the tools to the oppressed to have a fighting chance against their opposers until they needed that line to make him bad.

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      DanniellaBeejim
      2/20/18 4:27pm

      I agree with your overall point but we did also see him senselessly murder his girlfriend and pick up a woman by her throat in the garden.

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    Gabriel ChaseA.A. Dowd
    2/20/18 4:10pm

    He’s easily the best of the Marvel movie villains, though I would still go with Wilson Fisk as the best of the Marvel movie or TV villains. That dude is complicated - violent, scary, smart, visionary, even romantic - and he makes his counterpart hero more interesting.

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      Belly Button Lint ConnoisseurGabriel Chase
      2/20/18 5:18pm

      I can’t get behind Fisk.

      He just seems like a mess of idiosyncrasies masquerading as a tough guy villain.

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      Ponsonby BrittGabriel Chase
      2/20/18 7:23pm

      Fisk is kind of a cheat though, since he’s partially inspired by a real person.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

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