Black Panther Casino Scene Cast
Posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2018 by Angie Han
Wakanda doesn’t actually exist, and if it did, it’d be located somewhere in Africa. But for a several weeks last winter, it actually set up shop right in Atlanta.
More specifically, it was situated in Pinewood Studios, which is where I and several other journalists found ourselves in February 2017. We’d come to visit the set of Black Panther, which even then felt like one of the most hotly anticipated movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s decade-long history.
We were rewarded with a wealth of information about the film – everything from the inspirations behind the look of Wakanda’s Golden City to some juicy details about the central themes that drive the movie.
Black Panther Borrows From the Comics
Although Black Panther is relatively new to the MCU (he made his first onscreen appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War) the character has been around in the comics since the 1960s. Like all long-lived superheroes, he’s changed time and time again – to reflect whoever was writing or drawing him at any given time, to react to an evolving culture.
Now he’s refashioned himself onscreen as the MCU’s first leading black superhero. But to take that leap to the screen, the team behind Black Panther had to look to the comic pages.
“I would say the two runs that were most inspirational were the [Christopher] Priest and Ta-Nehisi [Coates] run,” producer Nate Moore told us. The visuals were also drawn from the books. “Brian Stelfreeze is an amazing artist and some of his version of Wakanda, and even Wakanda technology, was stuff that we borrowed pretty liberally from.”
T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) infiltrate an underground casino game in Busan, South Korea on a mission to apprehend the black-market arms dealer.
- Killmonger has his own version of the Black Panther suit — this one golden. The two men become locked in battle, and this time there’s no telling who will be left standing. Black Panther hits.
- Black Panther director Ryan Coogler’s fascinating video breakdown of that epic casino fight scene. There was a lot more going on than you might have realised.
- Watch 'Black Panther' director Ryan Coogler give an in-depth breakdown of how he created one of Marvel's best fight scenes, from costumes to CGI enhancement.
Wakanda Is Fantastical – But Not By That Much
Wakanda being what it is – which is to say, totally fictional – it could’ve wound up being just about anything the Black Panther team imagined. The approach they went with was to make the country feel “amazing” yet “grounded.”
“What we were very afraid of was making Wakanda almost too Kirby-esque, and by that I mean making it feel almost like they’re alien and not human,” said Moore. “The truth is they’re human. They’re just 20 or 25 years ahead of us.”
Wakanda got there through a combination of natural resources (it sits atop a rich store of vibranium), technological ingenuity, and deliberate secrecy. It’s a country that’s never been conquered, largely because it’s been careful to present itself to the rest of the world as a place that’s not worth conquering.
That’s freed up Wakanda to pour their energy into technological advancement – which, in turn, has resulted in a unique culture that combines ancient tradition with cutting-edge modernity.
T’Challa Struggles to Be Leader and a Superhero
That’s the context in which T’Challa was raised, and that’s the context in which he must now rule. Black Panther picks up not long after Civil War left off, which means T’Challa’s still mourning the death of his father and settling into his new position as king. To top it all off, his actions as the Black Panther have exposed Wakanda to the rest of the world.
It’s a lot for any one person to handle – even one as powerful, as intelligent, and as capable as T’Challa – and the film finds him pulled in a few different directions. “I think that’s the big question,” said producer Nate Moore. “Can you be a leader for a country and still be a hero? And still look out for the interests of the world when you have a constituency that has a very specific agenda?”
Needless to say, not everyone in Wakanda is pleased with the way that T’Challa is going about resolving that tension. “All of Wakanda is not monolithic,” said Moore. “I don’t think everybody in Wakanda was super happy that he was out there [in Civil War]. For a country that values its secrecy so much, it was a big deal.”
Black Panther Is Part Godfather, Part Bond
That political unrest sends our heroes on an adventure that sounds less like your typical superhero wish-fulfillment fantasy, and more like a mix of power-play drama and jet-setting spy action.
Moore told us that director Ryan Coogler saw Black Panther as an almost Godfather-ish saga, in that it deals with a family organization (in Black Panther’s case, the royal court) dealing with a change in leadership. Various factions are vying for power within the country.
Wakanda’s internal conflict turns out to have consequences outside the country’s borders as well. That’s where the Bond influences come in. Moore described Black Panther as a “big globe-trotting epic” – which probably doesn’t sound all that crazy, if you’ve already seen bits of that South Korean casino scene.
The Villains’ Grudges Get Very Personal
Into this world come two villains with two very different, very personal agendas…even if all the cast members are kind of reluctant to say exactly what those agendas are.
The one we’ve met before is Ulysses Klaue. Since Avengers: Age of Ultron, Andy Serkis explained, has been running around “causing mayhem in the world, on minor and major levels.” But he’s got a very specific love-hate relationship with Wakanda. “He certainly has discovered things about it than nobody else has,” he said. “He’s one of the few people who’s been into Wakanda, and he reveals quite a lot about it.”
Michael B. Jordan plays the film’s other villain, Erik Killmonger – though Killmonger himself would never refer to himself as such. Instead, Jordan said, Killmonger would say he’s a revolutionary. “I feel like Killmonger is very selfless. I feel like he’s looking at the bigger picture.”
Whatever that “bigger picture” is (and Jordan wasn’t allowed to get much more specific), it’s not the same one T’Challa has in mind. “Killmonger sees Wakanda as something that could be used differently than it currently is, and that puts him directly at odds with T’Challa,” teased Moore.
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Posted on Monday, February 19th, 2018 by Hoai-Tran Bui
In the hype-filled weeks leading up to the release ofBlack Panther, one of the few scenes to be shown in its entirety was the casino fight scene. And for good reason.
In a movie teeming with exciting action scenes, the casino fight stands out. Taking place on two levels of an illicit casino in South Korea, it’s perhaps the most stylish and stylized of all the battles in Black Panther — not simply because of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and Okoye’s (Danai Gurira) glamorous outfits. It’s because the scene has the balletic choreography and assured camera work of a great action film. And for a Marvel movie, that’s saying something.
In a video for Vanity Fair, director Ryan Coogler breaks down the minutiae of the scene, including everything from the colors of T’Challa, Nakia, and Okoye’s outfits, to that iconic wig-throwing moment.
The Black Panther casino fight scene is a dynamic and sleek riff on James Bond movies — a franchise that directorCoogler cited as a heavy inspiration for Black Panther — as well as a sly homage to the movie’s pan-African roots.
Black Panther Casino Fight Scene
One of my favorite things about this scene is the confident camera movement from the first to second floor midway through the fight scene — showcasing the action in one long take. It’s a technique that Coogler has used before in Fruitvale Station and Creed, and he goes into fascinating detail about how hard it was to pull off here. “It took several takes,” Coogler says. “What we had to do is we had to float a camera up with a cable rig.There’s no green screen here, it’s all happening live and direct.”
There are some other really cool factoids, like the purposeful reflection of the colors of the Pan-African flag in the trio’s red, green, and black outfits, as well as the distinction between their different fighting styles. Pay attention especially when Coogler goes into the fighting style of Okoye — the true star of this scene. So much research has gone into creating a full portrait of Okoye and the Dora Milaje, and most of it goes unsaid in the movie. It’s incredibly fun to see Coogler reveal those details like the giddy fanboy he is.
Black Panther Casino Scene Song
Here is the official synopsis for Black Panther:
After the death of his father, T’Challa returns home to the African nation of Wakanda to take his rightful place as king. When a powerful enemy suddenly reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king — and as Black Panther — gets tested when he’s drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people.
Black Panther is currently playing in theaters.