Nothing we are shown about Killmonger leads him to where he is as an adult. He goes from child whose father has been murdered to a man who rages at the injustices against black people and seeks a reversal of that situation in a blink. But why? What in his life led him to that path? The movie's only justification for his motivations is that he was black in America. And that's why I see it as a stereotypical "angry black man" ... there's no context whatsoever to how he feels and why he believes his idea is a good one ... we're just expected to accept that black people in America as a monolith hate white people and want to rise up and conquer them but only lack the means to do so.
And that's not even getting into how he knows so much about the otherwise super-secret Wakanda beyond the stories of sunsets his father told him as a child.
Well, let me help you out then. The title of the film is
Black Panther, not
Killmonger. They could have given him the full treatment, like
Infinity War did with Thanos, but then the focus of the movie would have been entirely different. We are given enough to establish the character, but much is left to the viewer to connect the dots. Killmonger's father was killed by his own brother, who just so happened to be the King of Wakanda, and even though he was a citizen of Wakanda, he was not given the opportunity to join the most advanced nation in the world. We don't know everything his father told him about Wakanda, there is only one scene that even shows dialogue between the two, and that is a hallucination brought on by the heart-shaped herb. There is no telling what else he learned from his father directly, or possibly from things his father had confided in his mother before his death. He had also been palling around with Klaue for some indeterminate amount of time, and Klaue knew alot about Wakanda.
Yes, being a fatherless black child in the inner city has certainly turned many a young boy into an "angry black man", but we know enough about Killmonger to realize that this is not his only motivation. One only needs to reflect on that knowledge and allow for Killmonger to also have come to this knowledge off screen for us to assign further motivation to flesh out the character. He is angry about how the society he grew up in treats minorities, he is angry that Wakanda exists and can improve the plight of blacks in America while it chooses to hide itself instead, but mostly he is angry that the King of Wakanda, his uncle, killed his father and left him behind to be raised in the crime-ridden inner city.
KeepTalking said:
I'm not sure why you are picking on the CGI either, I certainly did not notice any problems with it. And finally, "drab"? Are you sure you were in the right theater, watching the right movie? The cinematography was, for the most part, vibrant and colorful.
To be fair, I was watching it on Blu-ray on a large TV and not at the theater so that may account for some of it. And the CGI was fine on the city and ships and rhinos ... it was only when the panther suit was in the action that the CGI looked Green Lantern-esque to me. The final fight was so hard to watch because the suit CGI was just that woeful IMO.
I originally saw it on the big screen, but also have it on blu-ray, and have watched it a couple of times in recent weeks on my own entertainment system. I thought the CGI was pretty spectacular in both settings, but then again I am of an age that when I was a youth there was no CGI, and we had to marvel at clay models of people filmed in stop motion for our action scene SFX, and that makes me fairly appreciative of the high quality SFX that we have today with CGI. There are some outlying cases these days, like the
Transformers movies where I can barely tell what is going on in the CGI robot fights, but this movie was not one of those cases.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to explain where you were coming from. I count Black Panther among the best of the MCU movies, but then again
Dr. Strange is one of my favorites as well*, so what the hell do I know?
*Dr. Strange is also one of my favorite comics, and I love the trippy visuals in the film, so that may have something to do with it.
I didn't care for the "sling ring" at first but have to admit it makes for a nice explanation and visual for portals.
I tended to prefer the Thor movies and the first Captain America. Spider-Man was better than I expected as well, though I had similar complaints of the Vulture as I do Killmonger. And, of course, I love the DC movies 
Though I'll admit that other than Man of Steel they all have some pretty meh villains as well.
