I’m not sure what re really expects.
Ubisoft is like, trying to sell 10 million copies, and I suspect that in pursuit of that they want to make everything as vanillaly unoffensive as possible.
This is like expecting Disney to put in hard hitting social commentary into Black Panther, which they mostly avoided fairly deftly for the same reasons. They want Trump supporters to buy their shit too.
I haven't played Far Cry 5, but I'm assuming Black Panther is going to read like an ERA post compared to it. There's some strong political commentary littered throughout the poorly CG'd normal superhero schlock.
Expecting Ubi- "This Game Was Made By People Of All Backgrounds" -soft to insert any identifiable political stance is tantamount to self-harm.
It’s definitely more ppolitical than most of the MCU films, though I kind of remember Winter a soldier as having some sort of semi-strong anti-government bent to it as well... but it was basically never really addressed again in subsequent films.
That said, I think the biggest political statement of black panther was “hey you can have a big budget blockbuster film with black creators in lead creative positions and black actors and still be successful”. It also upends a few tropes. I think those things are important, but it’s entirely possiblye to just watch it with the same level of engagement as Ant-Man and get nothing extra out of it.
My cynical side says that pushing the black creators was a marketing move designed in part to deflect criticism of a property that is sort of a large sampling of National Geographic tribal Africa arcticles with laser beams.
Showing a bunch of people that are the most technologically advanced in the land, but still practice ritualistic body modification is kind of weird to me, like, “no matter how much Africa advances they’re still sort of backwards”.
That's very cynical, the principle creatives on Black Panther are all super talented so it's no surprised that it turned out to be a very good movie. I think they pushed so hard to have black representation throughout the creation simply because it made the most sense. Making a Black Panther movie in our current political climate without heavy black representation would have resulted in a much more mediocre flick imo.
Also, body modification != backwards culture imo, but that's just how I read it.
I don’t think like, getting a piercing is necessarily backwards, but there’s something off to me about how they are incredibly advanced and yet very primitive. Like, they are the richest, most powerful country in the world but they ride rhinoceroses and decide their next ruler by a ritualistic wrestling match. And one of their biggest sub populations is a bunch of black dudes living in caves wearing loincloths and making monkey noises.
Or that the Wakandan people haven’t really “earned” any of their status. Their origin story is basically the Gods Must Be Crazy, except they dropped vibranium instead of a coke bottle.
I don’t really know the way around this, because it’s really a byproduct of Black Panthers origin, as he was created by a couple of Jews in the 70s for a comic book called Jungle Action (or something like that). It was probably pretty progressive for it’s time, but I think if that book were created today with a couple of black dudes running around with Spears, people would call it racist or at least insensitive.
I wouldn’t say that I’m offended, I’m just sort of surprised nobody else is offended.
