For the week of May 14th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment and Marvel Studios are bringing the box-office smash Black Panther to Blu-ray. For a film with as much immediate cultural cachet as this one has (it's made over $1.1 billion worldwide and counting), its first half or so is gently overrated. This initial hour functions on the level of a good Bond movie - so, we get a Bond proxy (Chadwick Boseman's noble title character) who isn't a piece of human garbage, a support staff made of strong and powerful women (with Lupita Nyong'o and Danai Gurira first among equals) who prove just as crucial to the action as Black Panther, and a plucky Q (Letitia Wright) who so thoroughly steals the movie I give Wright five years before she becomes a Jennifer Lawrence-level megastar - but like every Bond movie ever made, it's still half an hour longer than it needs to be and narratively poky. Take the big South Korea setpiece at the midpoint. As exciting as it is, you could cut most of it from the film and lose few vital plot details, and a good rewrite might leave even less than that: I'm still at a bit of a loss why something that happens to Andy Serkis' JV-baddie Ulysses Klaue doesn't happen long before then, other than to belabor the many action sequences. Throughout these opening scenes, the characters and the world building are very strong, but even they can't shake free of all the conventions. And then Michael B. Jordan enters Wakanda, and Black Panther gets so good, so fast. What Jordan brings is a sense of racial animus more provocative than anything else in the MCU. The second half of Black Panther isn't Do the Right Thing or anything, but it's far more nuanced and interesting a look at race than I was expecting. Jordan's character has more in common with Civil Rights leaders like Malcolm X than with, say, Loki or Ego. I agree with everything Killmonger says about the state of black people on Planet Earth; it's only that his solution advocates in favor of some brutal solutions to hundreds of years of social/political/cultural ills. To Black Panther's immense credit, you can feel director Ryan Coogler gently massaging our sympathies in Killmonger's direction, that we can support his cause and still decry his methods, but that's just Coogler for you. Between this, Fruitvale Station, and Creed, he's already proven himself a master of crafting socially conscious popcorn fare, and he gets a big lift from his Creed and Fruitvale star Jordan, who injects so much genuine hurt into this movie. Maybe more than it can handle: Jordan has two lines in his last scene that are devastating in context. I hesitate to reveal them (they're more than a little spoilery), but in moments like these, the superhero trappings fall away, and we find ourselves watching a conflict that can't be solved through mystical technology and members of the Avengers. How wonderful, that you can say something relevant about the world AND still stage a $200-million light show. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive.
In his Black Panther 4K Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "soars as a production steeped in its characters' culture. The film is set in the fictional nation of Wakanda, a landlocked country said to be isolated form the world and believed to be a poor, struggling third-world nation. However, the people hold a secret that has provided them radical advancements in technology, including medicine and weapons. The filmmakers have done a wonderful job of effortlessly blending together colorful, carefully considered culture and radical, but not unbelievable, technology into the film's world. It's an oftentimes breathtaking display of new and old, of characters expressing themselves, battling, and caring for one another in ways that highlight both ends of the spectrum, and that they so effortlessly, and believably, maneuver through both with nary a hiccup along the way is a testament to, certainly, their skills as actors but also the writers' vision for the world and how and why it works. For the audience, it's a dazzling display, quite unlike anything that has ever been on the screen before, and even as the film plods through a story that's as cliché as the world is visionary, the structural support carries the film beyond the crudities of its basic arc."
From Paramount Home Media Distribution comes two 4K remasters: the Best Picture winners Braveheart and Gladiator. It's very easy to pick on these films in the afterglow of their Oscar victories. In many ways, Braveheart and Gladiator helped solidify the fortunes of a certain Oscar contender: technically immaculate genre fare with nothing substantial on its mind. Despite its basis in history (the legend of Scottish warrior William Wallace, upon whose life screenwriter Randall Wallace liberally extrapolated), Braveheart is just a war movie, while Gladiator plays like a pulpier version of Spartacus (its revenge plot is straight out of Rolling Thunder, with Russell Crowe's disgraced Roman general (Russell Crowe) seeking revenge against the emperor who killed his family). Certainly, Braveheart and Gladiator aren't the only two shallow movies to win Best Picture (The Artist. Titanic. Terms of Endearment. The Greatest Show on Earth. There are many more), but I guess I expect AMPAS to reward films that are more than just high-toned Jerry Bruckheimer pictures. Of the two, Braveheart is the least defensible, but look at its director-star! We're dealing with Mel Gibson, after all, and if Braveheart isn't as immediately off-putting in its sociocultural attitudes as The Passion of the Christ, it still shares that latter film's abiding love of sadism (Gibson loves violence, and never more so than when his Wallace endures a ghastly, Christ-like torture session) and cultivates its own uncomfortable streak of homophobia (everything that transpires between Longshanks and Prince Edward is so culturally insensitive). Is Braveheart exciting and well made? A thousand times yes. But the entertainment comes at an uneasy cost. Ironically, Gladiator's even more pronounced lack of substance makes it the more palatable of the two. Director Ridley Scott had come off a run of expensive underperformers (White Squall and G.I. Jane, anyone?), so you can understand why he styled this one as a bloody four-quadrant epic. Scott needed everybody to like Gladiator, and fast. But his hunger to not fail gives this film such energy, whether we're discussing the kinetic action sequences or the full-throated embrace of melodrama, and so Gladiator sweeps you along even when you're aware it's just junk food. He also benefited from two actors who, though they'd be better elsewhere, knew what a high-profile opportunity this was. Russell Crowe might have won over critics with L.A. Confidential and The Insider, but he wanted to be a movie star, and he gives one of the screen's most confident leading-man turns as Gladiator's proud hero. And Joaquin Phoenix strikes this perfect mix of Method affectation and Hollywood import as the sniveling heavy: you feel for this neglected kid even as you wish Crowe would rearrange his facial features with his boot. That's an interesting combination, and tougher to blend than you might think.
Of Braveheart's 4K debut, Martin Liebman wrote that this "great movi[e]...has now received a highly desirable UHD release. Picture and sound alike are fantastic, and the carryover supplemental content is very strong. In 2018, it doesn't get much better than this." He was just as adulatory when discussing Gladiator's release, noting that it "is an excellent film that has aged very well since its theatrical release and its Blu-ray debut many years ago. Paramount's UHD release is of a high quality, featuring a 2160p resolution that modestly boosts the film elements over the excellent Blu-ray, but it's the Dolby Vision color that truly allows the image to soar. The new DTS:X Master Audio soundtrack is by-and-large fantastic, and this three-disc set carries over all of the previously released Blu-ray's extra content."
Still, as any fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine can tell you, there's only one Greatest Movie Ever Made, and though it might not have won Best Picture, I'm comfortable branding Die Hard (which is also getting a 4K release this week) a better populist adventure than either Braveheart or Gladiator. I keep waiting for the time when Die Hard doesn't work. You'd think that, by now, with all the imitators and sequels (Die Hard on a Boat!Die Hard on a Bus!Live Free or Die Hard!) that bobbed up in its wake, the original might seem quaint or uninspired. Hell, you could argue that Die Hard itself was little more than a canny synthesis of terrorist thriller and disaster epic (you blend up Black Sunday and The Towering Inferno, and you've pretty much got Die Hard dead to rights). But the film plays as fresh now as it did in 1988, and I'd argue that its longevity springs from two welcome-but-often-ignored characteristics in Hollywood blockbusters: craft and character. You can make Die Hard just a litany of stunt-and-effect sequences (and the worst of the Die Hard sequels, A Good Day to Die Hard, does just that), but it takes more discipline to structure the action in a manner that feels organic to the situation. Enter screenwriter Steven de Souza and director John McTiernan. De Souza's script is a marvel of three-act construction. There's a reason they teach this and Back to the Future to aspiring screenwriters. Every setup, every character, and every motivation gets a payoff that's both logical and surprising. And McTiernan brings this peerless technical acumen to the material. When he was in his prime, few directors used anamorphic lenses as well as he did, or were as good at constructing clean, spatially consistent action sequences. McTiernan oh-so-subtly takes us through all the main rooms in Nakatomi Plaza during the first twenty minutes so that when all hell breaks loose, we'll remember where we are and how it all connects. And the reason we care about the various explosions and gunfights is because we're invested in every character. That's not an exaggeration. Yes, the dynamic between Bruce Willis and Reginald VelJohnson is heartwarming, and everyone loves Alan Rickman's Big Bad, but every one of the side-characters gets at least one bit of business from de Souza/McTiernan to define their individuality (the terrorist who likes candy bars. The indignantly lazy electric-company guy. So it goes, across the board). We love Avengers: Infinity War for juggling thirty-some people with relative aplomb - Die Hard does likewise, and it didn't need nineteen movies of setup. And anyone who thinks it isn't a Christmas movie is on drugs, or has taken to watching movies with eyes shut and fingers in ears. A modern classic, full stop.