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.
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 →