While the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as a collective entity of films, has been an era-defining juggernaut, no single entry in the overarching super-franchise has had the cultural impact of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. That made star Chadwick Boseman’s tragic death in 2020 just as the film’s sequel entered pre-production all the more devastating, throwing up a major obstacle that, combined with other delays and holdups throughout the Covid pandemic, primed Black Panther: Wakanda Forever for disaster.
Thus, the fact that the film emerges as narratively and thematically coherent feels almost miraculous, and a testament to Coogler’s status as one of few contemporary filmmakers who’s able to bring a unique vision to today’s blockbuster formula. The first Black Panther boldly grappled with the hypothetical existence of a hidden African super-state, namely the complicity of Wakanda’s silence in the slave trade and legacy of colonial exploitation suffered upon the rest of the continent. And in Wakanda Forever, Coogler explores the aftershocks of Wakanda’s decision to reveal itself to the world, tracing how Western—American and European—powers attempt to close the technology gap with the advanced nation by seeking vibranium.
This, in turn, exposes the underwater kingdom of Talokan, populated by the mutated descendants of indigenous Latin Americans who fled to the seas to escape the conquistadors of the 16th century. And just as Killmonger held Wakanda responsible for their tacit acceptance of Black suffering worldwide, Talokan’s leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta), threatens Wakanda with war for inadvertently risking his home’s safety. With T’Challa dead of a mysterious illness, the task of protecting his homeland falls to his grieving family, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and tech-wizard Shuri (Leticia Wright), who blames herself for her brother’s death.
A long-running Marvel character who straddles the line between villain and antihero, Namor is more clearly an antagonist here. Like Killmonger before him, Namor’s criticisms of Wakanda are perceptive and hard to argue with, but the way he instantly perpetuates heartless violence feels like an attempt to thwart audience sympathies. Huerta cannot quite measure up to Michael B. Jordan’s raw charisma, but he makes up for it by projecting an imperial mien worthy of Namor’s status as a demigod among his people, and his absolute certainty of will clashes with the crises of confidence that Wakanda’s grieving figures are still working to resolve.
Namor’s status as a king reorients the more intimate action of the first Black Panther toward large-scale battles, and the shift works against Coogler’s skills. In general, Wakanda Forever is a significantly shabbier-looking film than its predecessor. Gone is Rachel Morrison’s gorgeously chromatic and fluidly moving cinematography, replaced by a more bland color scheme, pervasive and distracting shallow focus, and chaotic coverage of bodies.
Only the first action scene, a too-brief and atmospheric depiction of Talokan’s denizens launching an ambush on a C.I.A.-run deep-sea drilling platform, has the panache that the previous film displayed at numerous turns. And the sight of two mostly CGI-rendered groups of warriors colliding in slow motion quickly makes Wakanda Forever feel lugubrious and plodding as its narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes.
If its action is paint-by-numbers, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief. Numerous scenes show the private and public displays of mourning for Wakanda’s king, but it’s Wright and Bassett who infuse the film with a real pain that’s wholly foreign to the customarily glib MCU. Shuri, already established as impulsive and hot-headed, can barely contain her rage at others and herself, and Wright plays the woman as if she’s almost excited to have an external enemy like Namor onto whom she can project all of her inchoate feelings. Bassett, meanwhile, gives a performance of penetrating, agonizing emotional depth, peppering her stern gazes with tremors of latent emotion that reveal the storm roiling underneath the surface.
Barring the hamfisted inclusion of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), protagonist of the upcoming Disney+ Ironheart show, Wakanda Forever sidesteps the tedium of long-term franchise setup that plagues so many MCU films. Its focus instead remains on dealing with the emotional fallout within and outside of the story’s context. Saddled with a horrible real-life tragedy, Coogler crafts a film that breaks from the glib cycle of death and rebirth that characterizes comic book stories and confronts the reality of a world moving forward after an irreversible loss.
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