All the best Marvel movies have been completely unlike all the ones that came before. This is one of the best Marvel movies.

So this isn’t Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Panther, but it’s definitely in dialogue with it, because like that comic, this is about the nature of power — how power is used, for whom it’s used, and what it means to be a king who is making these decisions. It’s honestly barely a superhero movie at all.

High points are like… basically everything? The cast is amazing, it’s visually stunning, it does a deep dive into comics arcana, the story is rich (and if it has a flaw, it’s that it feels a bit rushed — this could easily be a trilogy, telling just this story, without feeling padded), it’s thematically dense, its villain is superb, and it even manages to fit in well to the larger MCU arc (albeit in an indirect way).