In this age of endless reboots and remakes, it’s heartening to see that a good old-fashioned unoriginal movie can still get made. To its credit, Beast isn’t a direct rip-off of any particular man-vs.-nature flick, but it has no interest in doing anything new with the genre, and that’s fine by me.
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The best movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and now, Black Panther) all have a few things in common. For one, they’re essentially standalone, requiring nothing from their audience other than a willingness to have fun. Their other shared element is the introduction of a new world to their viewers. For Iron Man, that was the then-new and exciting MCU itself; Guardians of the Galaxy created a colorful, pulpy version of outer space; and now, Black Panther gives us Wakanda, a fictional African country that plays at third-world poverty but boasts a technologically advanced society hidden from all other nations. Continue reading