Marvel Studios
The first Black Panther from director Ryan Coogler was a truly great Marvel movie, with exhaustively impressive production design, costuming, acting, and a legendary score by Ludwig Göransson. It was also buoyed by a very strong set of performances from Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan as protagonist and antagonist as dark mirrors of each other.
My main issues at the time still hold true — they ran into CGI time issues at the end and left with some shaky final action scenes, and I never really liked the whole ‘noble dictator’ concept which isn’t really investigated. But otherwise it’s a remarkably strong effort — something that is always hard to follow up with for a sequel even without the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman. In the end the sequel is forced to serve multiple roles and some of those work better than others.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes again from director Ryan Coogler with a script co-written by Joe Robert Cole and absolutely still kills it when it comes to design, sound, and performances. Ryan Coogler has a great sense of how to frame things, especially when it comes to emotional, weighted moments. Some of the big CGI nonsense scenes, maybe not so much, but I know those are often not even directed by the main director for Marvel movies.
The story starts with T’Challa dying off screen with Shuri unable to save him and thus we move into the real life grief bleeding into the performances and feelings of these characters. This is all handled very well, but it’s later undercut by a very cheap character death that really feels like it’s minimizing the passing of an actual person instead of just a fictional character.
One of the other running storylines is the CIA and other countries trying to find vibranium outside of Wakanda, and there’s a long stretch of stuff with Martin Freeman’s character that feels like it easily could’ve been trimmed from the movie’s 160 minute runtime — this is one of those other matters, the big tease of other Marvel projects in the future that always feels superfluous.
Similarly superfluous is the introduction of new character Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who is a cool, young, Black inventor who figured out technology to find vibranium. Dominique Thorne is an engaging, often funny presence on screen, but her character essentially is a ‘MacGuffin’ and doesn’t really have a significant role in the movie or its outcome — which means it feels like another tease, this time of her future IronheartCaptain America: Civil War was a tease too, but a very well integrated one, despite the often messy nature of that movie. Here Riri feels unnecessary except to introduce a new character, which I wouldn’t mind if she felt a more important character or at least having an important role in the resolution (which she doesn’t).
The main antagonist this time is Namor (Tenoch Huerta), one of the original Marvel bad guys and leader of his underwater people the ‘Talokans’ (which is a reference to the Mesoamerican/Aztec deity of Tlaloc) although they also call him the god K’uk’ulkan (which is another ancient deity of that region). His main motivation is to protect his people from the surface world, and maybe take revenge for his tragic backstory.
Although Tenoch Huerta has a great, rageful energy in the movie, his motivations as a dark mirror and negative influence for Shuri feels like an inferior repeat of essentially the same motivations of Killmonger from the first movie. It doesn’t help that the Wakandans here are depowered to a level where they feel much weaker than they ought to so that the Talokans appear as a more dangerous threat.
The movie is a long one, with a lot of asides and side stories, and final action scenes that strain credulity. The final resolution almost makes sense, and it certainly could’ve been worse, but it’s spoiled by a later scene right near the end. Shuri is really the main character of the movie, about her struggles to handle her guilt and grief about her brother, which bothers me because of Letitia Wright’s anti-vax stance (even if her performance is still good, she can be a good actress while still being an uninformed problematic person).
In contrast, Angela Bassett is a force of nature here, a powerful presence that overshadows most other people — similarly Lupita Nyong’o is always great but severely underused here and given a sort of odd, conflicted ending that feels both nice and manipulative. Winston Duke as M’Baku is a standout again, bringing an energy and humor that stands out among the darkness, and Danai Gurira acts up a storm in a story arc that starts promisingly and ends very disappointingly.
Ryan Coogler has integrated a lot of themes here — grief, responsibility, vengeance, colonialism, etc — but some feel more stuffed in than others. I don’t think it would’ve made sense to recast T’Challa at all, but there’s a way this movie goes that makes me a little frustrated about the future of the Wakandans.
As we reach the end of Marvel’s Phase Four movies, we end with a point where only the Spider-man movie really felt like something special (despite a bunch of story issues) and otherwise a lot of disappointing efforts — either movies that weren’t great or were just fine. The inconsistent way the ‘Snap’ was integrated into these movies didn’t help either, but I’m mainly wondering about what’s coming next.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has a run time of 2 hours 41 minutes and is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language.
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