Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Ryan Coogler is back. The Director has returned to theatres with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the much anticipated sequel to the 2018 smash hit Black Panther. Wakanda Forever is a big film trying to cover a lot of ground. It wants to be a proper send off to series lead Chadwick Boseman after his unfortunate death, it wants to explore the loss of Boseman’s on screen character King T’Challa, the political and emotional fallout created by that death, and continue the series’ thematic interest in examining the effects of colonialism on the broader world. All this, while functioning within an MCU film that’s trying to introduce its audience to a number of new characters and an entire underwater civilization. It is a lot to juggle, and while there are individual moments throughout the film that deliver on all these ideas and themes, it can’t help but struggle under its own weight.
More than anything, Wakanda Forever is a film about loss. From a contextual perspective, the cast and crew are wrestling with the loss of their colleague and friend. Contractural obligations aside, the whole team coming back to make this film must have been a difficult decision to make for everyone involved. To work on a creative project that is so directly intwined with your own emotional reality can be a cathartic experience for an artist, but navigating that artistic process within the realities of corporate entertainment filmmaking would seem to be a different thing entirely. Imagine the mental gymnastics required to balance your needs both as a grieving person and as a creative person exploiting that same grief as part of your job. Tapping into those emotions on a daily basis to the inform hundreds of creative decisions throughout the course of the filmmaking process is the tough reality of a project like this. I give Ryan Coogler, who both writes and directs this film, all the credit in the world. The responsibility he must of felt to give Boseman the send off he felt he deserved, with all the pain and difficulty that would come from that creative pursuit is noteworthy.
From a story telling perspective, the film chooses not just to acknowledge the loss of it’s title character, but takes the time to celebrate him. We begin the film with the offscreen death of King T’Challa, The Black Panther, and his sister Shuri’s inability to save him. It’s a scene that doesn’t all together work for me. It feels clunky and rushed, but it gets us where we need to be emotionally. Wakanda has lost its King and we are in mourning. From there we are treated to a beautiful funeral procession through the streets of Wakanda’s capital city. As his casket moves through the crowds, the impact of T’Challa’s life on his people can be seen throughout the city. You can see it in the murals on the walls, the smiles on their painted faces, and in the passion they exude as they sing and dance. This man meant something to these people, and they are here to celebrate him. It’s in some way similar to how we as a culture celebrated Boseman’s own life after he passed. He is not someone we knew personally, but his cultural presence left an impact on us. So as the citizens of Wakanda dance, we the viewers are dancing with them. These moments of celebration are is in stark contrast to the grief and loss that can be seen on the faces of his family and his friends. The reality for this family, as it must have been for the cast and crew who made the film, is this procession is not so much a celebration, but a reminder of what they have lost and the heavy burden they now face in filling the hole left in his absence.
The acting in this opening scene and throughout Wakanda Forever is the film’s high point for me. The only positive that can be taken from Boseman’s absence is the opportunity it provides three great actors to fill the void. Latitia Wright, as Shuri, slips effortlessly into her new role as the film’s lead and emotional centre of the film. Wakanda’s warrior general Okoye, played by Danai Gurira, continues to be a personal favourite. The chemistry between her and Shuri is better than ever, and the added screen time provides opportunity for moments that add some depth to her character beyond the humour and action. Part of me wishes she could take the role of Blank Panther instead. She is so comfortable in her physicality, and her characters journey and devotion to Wakanda deserves more than that unfortunate armour she receives in the film’s final act. Unsurprisingly, the stand out performance goes to Angela Bassett as Queen Romunda. She effortlessly portrays the complexity of both a mother in mourning and a Queen in crisis. She is everything you expect Angela Bassett to be, and then some. Keep an eye out for a scene where she is addressing the United Nations, it’s a powerhouse performance. The film also pads the story with a number of characters who bring very little to the story other than to remind you that this is a Marvel film. Martin Freeman and Julia Louis Dreyfus are absolutely unnecessary, and the MCU’s introduction to Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams/IronHeart feels utterly wasted.
Wakanda Forever also introduces us to Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta. Namor is the films antagonist and chosen leader to the underwater nation of Talokan. Similar to Wakanda, Tolokan is an advanced culture that has been thriving in secret, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for the right time to finally reveal themselves. Huerta’a performance works for me. He brings a softness to this warrior king that helps you connect with him, even when you don’t entirely understand what his end goals are. As a comic character, Namor, was originally from the lost city of Atlantis. The filmmakers decision to change his origin to one rooted in the histories of Mesoamerican and the Aztec culture is an inspired one that gives Coogler a wonderful opportunity to continue his exploration into themes surrounding colonialism and it’s affect on the wider world. Namor’s anger towards the surface world stems from his first hand experience with the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica and eventual genocide of the Aztec Empire. The term colonialism has taken hold in popular culture over the last few years, but the English and their colonies, were not the only world power guilty of this behaviour. It’s refreshing to see the topic explored from the perspective of a different culture, even as vaguely as it is covered here. Even France, who has their own violent history with West Africa, gets a subtle call out in that wonderful UN Conference scene I mentioned earlier. Coogler rightly recognizes that abuse of power is not out of the grasp of any one person or culture. He smartly puts Wakanda in a moral dilemma where they must wrestle with their own position of power, struggling with what they can do, if anything, to avoid becoming the very thing they have spent so much time fighting against.
In the end, as interesting as these themes are, they amount to very little of the films runtime. Instead the film provides us with a number of impressive action sequences that, while being executed much more effectively this time around, lack the first film’s emotional core. I was often left feeling like the motivation for the character’s actions were forced onto them by the script rather than choices they were making for themselves. The central conflict in the film between Wakanda and Talokan is confusing at best. Their shared experiences early on seems to suggest a common ground for a perfect union. Instead the film bends itself into a thematic pretzel in order to keep their relationship antagonistic, solely for the opportunity it provides them to smash these characters together like action figures-because that’s what superhero do, right? An argument could be made that the conflict might be an exploration into the way suppressed people are often turned on each other as a tactic to avoid them turning on their suppressors, but the film does almost nothing to explore that. Instead, using that animosity as fuel for surface level action and spectacle.
I want to like this movie more, I really do. It wants to explore topics and themes most Marvel films never dream of exploring. It will at times complicate itself in order to explore more complex ideas, and I think that’s good. Coogler is a gifted filmmaker that has a lot of interesting things to say. He’s has proven in the past that he can tell these more nuanced stories in ways that are still accessible to wider audiences. So it breaks my heart that the hold Marvel has over it’s films seem to suffocate a lot the fresh and exciting places Coogler’s film seems so interested in exploring.
