Warning: This piece contains spoilers.

We have never seen a black superhero movie quite like Black Panther.

While previous films like Spawn, the Blade series and Hancock have experienced box office success, the origins of the characters had a similar theme. In Spawn, the protagonist was dead before the devil transformed him into a superhero. His special powers thus came from hell. In the Blade movies, the main character was half-vampire, that is, half-undead. His unique gifts were attributed to him partially being a monster. In Hancock, the protagonist was an alien. His exceptional traits were thus based on him being from another planet.

In Black Panther, however, the central figure, TChalla (Chadwick Boseman), the king of the fictional, technologically advanced African country of Wakanda, is fully alive and fully human. This is admirable progress. After all, in the real world, the value of black lives in America, Haiti, African nations and elsewhere is still an unsettled matter. Furthermore, the Black Panthers powers are not rooted in evil or race-neutral otherworldliness; his superhuman strength, speed and reflexes come from the Heart-Shaped Herb of his own African country. Black Panther highlights the possibilities of black power, something that still seems like a fantasy at times in the 21st century.

Unlike the Black Panther, the black superheroes in earlier popular films enabled many fans like me to subconsciously take in the blackness on our screens without constantly thinking about what blackness meant in those movies or in our own lives. They were a way to avoid thinking about the specific slights at school and work, or police stops and fatal shootings. Simply put, they were a form of escapism.

For some moviegoers, the previous black superhero movies were palatable because the protagonists were still safely the other. For example, Spawn and Blade seemed dangerous on the outside, but they still enabled viewers to stick to a tradition of associating blackness with darkness in the worst sense of the word. Hancock was powerful, but he was still a foreigner; he was a remarkable black person who did not truly belong in society. These superheroes entertained audiences, but they did not force moviegoers to expand their minds about black people.

They were familiar. Viewers had been told before in one way or another that black people were straight out of hell, monsters and/or outsiders. Pieces of these characters had previously been in the public consciousness, whether they were the aggressive black person with a shady past or the one-of-a-kind black individual who seemed to be a credit to his race because he was not really of his race.

The African-based Black Panther movie is something entirely different. The continent is the birthplace of mankind, but people often view it as a place of physical and intellectual death . The film instead shows that Africa can be a source of transformative power, even for those who understandably identify much more deeply with the Wakandan-American Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) than TChalla himself.

Throughout the film, viewers thus see the Black Panther literally rise above the laws of science while remaining anchored in his African identity. They watch him repel bullets and absorb energy while wearing a suit made out of Vibranium, the precious but severely underutilized metal that is plentiful in Wakanda.

Moreover, when both TChalla and Killmonger use the Heart-Shaped Herb to gain superhuman powers, the audience itself is taken to uncharted waters. It witnesses two black men a superhero who defies our understanding of physics and an MIT-educated revolutionary from Oakland serve as vehicles for the idea that movements for African souls have always mattered, even if the leaders could not always agree on the best course of action.

On a much more basic level, even the simplest things such as the Black Panthers speech and skin color also force the audience to grapple with his blackness. With respect to TChallas accent, Boseman himself explained that he was very intentional with the characters speech . The actor wanted to attack the notion that speaking as a leader and speaking with an African accent are mutually exclusive. TChallas accent shows that not only did Western dominance outside of the uncolonized Wakanda fail to brainwash him; it also had no hope of ever wiping away the mark of Wakanda on his tongue.

When the Black Panther utters the words Wakanda forever, not just what he says but how he says it makes a statement about his African identity.