Agreed.

Imo, the movie’s popularity among mainstream critics derives primarily from virtue signaling.

I’m not the kind of person who watches superhero movies. They started feeling boring and formulaic around the time I graduated high school. But when Black Panther came out, I heard some chatter, and then later a friend invited me to watch it on the front lawn of New Belgium Brewing as part of an event they were hosting. So we rode our bikes to the brewery to join one or two hundred other middle class, college educated, socially conscious white people to watch a movie. And I proceeded to be bored and somewhat annoyed when it turned out to be a formulaic, slightly worse than average superhero movie.

The way I picture it is that a room full of movie studio execs were brainstorming how to appeal to kids these days, and their wokeness, and said to themselves “what if black people!” So they greenlit “What If Black People: The Movie”, found a superhero from the comics to shove in the spotlight, nabbed a bunch of idealistic people who wanted to make a great movie that would change the world, let them shoot their dream movie, then chopped it up in post to make it appeal to the braindead average moviegoer.