New movie review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Letitia Wright as Shuri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Sequels are hard. Sequels in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are harder still. Making the followup to what was once the most successful standalone superhero film of all time in the wake of your leading actor’s tragic death: near impossible. But the gears of corporate movie making grind away, demanding the next big thing.

Director and co-writer Ryan Coogler gives it his best shot, and while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is not a perfect film, nor does it quite rise to the level of its predecessor, it is the best anyone could have done under the circumstances. Wakanda Forever is smart, subversive, and filled to the brim with excellent performances by a game cast who deliver comic book exposition like it is Shakespearean verse.

The missing cast member, of course, is Chadwick Boseman, whose absence looms over the whole film. Boseman died of colon cancer in August 2020 at the age of 43, leaving a whole in the hearts of family, friends, and fans alike. Though it was likely considered, there was no replacing Boseman, who put his stamp indelibly on King T’Challa and the Black Panther. 

Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole would have to adjust their plans and rewrite a sequel that was already in the works. They would have to address the tragedy directly. There could be no quickly moving on from one of the iconic characters of modern times. After all, the first film is the highest-grossing live-action film with a black lead of all time. It was a cultural event with meaning that far outstripped its place in the MCU. It became the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, where it won three Oscars. And it made Boseman a hero to a generation of black audiences that had been and remain historically underserved by big-budget Hollywood movies.

The film opens with the offscreen death of T’Challa, as we watch his sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), in her lab, desperately seeking a cure for his unnamed illness. Her idea: to create a synthetic version of the purple heart-shaped herb that Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger destroyed the last of in the first film. Her mother, Quen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), arrives to tell her she is too late. T’Challa is dead.

What follows is the first of the film’s many gorgeously crafted sequences – a lengthy Wakandan funeral that is equal parts reverent and exultant. It is intended as an opportunity for the audience to grieve Boseman as much as it is an opportunity for the Wakandans to grieve their king. It works on both counts and sets up one of the central themes of the film: How does a nation, a people, move forward without its protector and patch the hole in its soul?

We quickly learn that world powers see Wakanda as weakened and the loss of the Black Panther as a chance to pilfer the nation’s reserves of vibranium, thought to exist only in Wakanda. However, we soon discover there is another source of the precious metal, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, in the heretofore unknown underwater kingdom of Talokan. The Talokan people, led by the centuries old mutant Namor (Tenoch Huerta), defend their territory from the mining operation, which leads to increased international scrutiny of Wakanda.

If this sounds like a lot already, it is, and Wakanda Forever’s greatest sin is that it is overstuffed with side characters and plots meant only to service the greater MCU story. This is not the fault of the filmmakers, necessarily, but rather one of the burdens of operating within the massive Marvel machine. Among these side characters, we get the return of Martin Freeman’s Agent Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ CIA Director de Fontaine. We are also introduced to Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a brilliant MIT student who invents a machine for detecting vibranium.

Thorne is great in the role, and I enjoyed much of what the Riri character brings to the movie, but along with the CIA plot, it is one thing too many in a movie that already has so much to deal with. We also get a side plot with Danai Gurira’s Dora Milaje general Okoye as she grapples with her place in the new Wakandan order. And the always-great-to-see Lupita Nyong’o is back as Nakia, a former Wakandan spy who now runs a foundation for children in Haiti.

As great as Gurira, Nyong’o, and Thorne are, it is all too much. The film is at its best when it focuses on its three central characters: Queen Ramonda, Princess Shuri, and Namor. It helps that Bassett, Wright, and Huerta give the three best performances in the film. Bassett, in particular, is just stunning in her power and control. When they all meet on a river bank about a third of the way through the film, the fireworks are instantaneous and the key conflict of the story is set into motion.

At the end of Black Panther, T’Challa reveals Wakanda’s power to the world, ending centuries of isolationism. This inadvertently places Talokan at risk due to the world’s newly born hunger for vibranium. Namor insists that Wakanda form an alliance with Talokan and go on the offensive to protect their nations from any would-be invaders. Like Killmonger in the first film, he wishes to burn the world to save his people. If Queen Ramonda refuses the partnership, Namor says he will destroy Wakanda as a show of strength and go on to burn the world anyway.

Namor and the Talokan people are clearly Latin coded, descended from Mayans who took to the seas to avoid destruction and enslavement at the hands of white settlers. They do so using a plant that bears similar properties to the heart-shaped herb of the Black Panther. One can easily see the seams where Namor would have been set up as a mirror to T’Challa – superpowered protectors of their people with differing views on what protection means. Instead, Shuri must fill this role, and it becomes a story of the destructive power of vengeance and the need to work through grief.

Similar to Killmonger in the first film, Namor makes a good point. It is highly likely that (probably white) invaders will come to destroy his people in order to steal their resources. We have already seen similar attempts on Wakandan resources. It becomes a matter of whether these two nations of color will come to war with each other over their disagreement on how to deal with outside forces beyond their control.

These are heady, fascinating dilemmas, and no one but Coogler is infusing the big-budget Hollywood machine with these kinds of radical discussions and ideas. The reason Coogler’s antagonists – neither Killmonger nor Namor is a “villain” in the traditional sense – are the best in the MCU is because they are complicated and in many ways correct. They have a point of view. They are not kill-crazy mad men lusting for power. Their goals stem from real cultural and political ideologies that come into conflict with Wakanda’s sense of justice.

Other MCU films do not ask these kinds of questions. They are mostly about their protagonists learning to be heroes and dealing with the responsibilities of what that means. Though the plots often involve world-altering stakes, the themes are generally quite small in their ambitions. Among the rest, only Captain America: Civil War really even attempts to look outward and consider the political and social ramifications of these narratives.

Maybe that is a lot to lay at the feet of a piece of blockbuster ephemera. But more than any other director working in the MCU, Coogler seems to understand that these stories need not be ephemeral. Superhero movies are the westerns of our time – the dominant cultural force, encompassing both the film and TV worlds and crafting the iconography of the era. They feature larger-than-life heroes operating against clear villains in worlds of strict moral codes. The thing about westerns, though, is that most of them are forgotten, or at the very least not particularly well remembered.

The ones that stood the test of time were those that dealt with themes that resonate beyond the screen. Films like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident last because they are unafraid to delve into the murkiness of real life and the gray areas in which most people live. For whatever flaws the sequel has, both Black Panther films share this essential trait. So as other superhero flicks fade from memory, Coogler’s willingness to engage the audience in meaningful moral debate ensures that we will remember Wakanda – forever.

See it? Yes.