**NO SPOILERS FOR WAKANDA FOREVER, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU MOVIES AND SHOWS ABOUND WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***
T'Challa is dead.
Long live the king.
You know you're in for a vibranium spear to the feels when this movie opens with Shuri scrambling in her lab to synthesize the heart-shaped herb, lost when Killmonger burned the whole crop in the first Black Panther movie almost a full five years ago, in a last-ditch attempt to save her ailing brother T'Challa. Not unlike Chadwick Boseman in real life, T'Challa dies very suddenly of a terminal illness which no one had known about, and by the time it became clear, it was too late.
Then cue the Marvel Studios logo, the same specifically Black Panther edition which Disney+ placed on the streaming version of the first film in Boseman's honor, with the logo background in purple instead of red.
Total silence.
Don't reach for your popcorn.
And if you think that's the most intense tearjerker this movie has to offer, just you bloody wait.
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| As T'Challa once famously said, "This never gets old." |
By all accounts, Marvel had a little more trouble getting this one off the ground, even by the skewed standards of the Covid world wreaking havoc on major productions in all the ways. Between the rewrites necessitated by Boseman's death, as well as Letitia Wright getting injured and allegedly refusing to take a Covid vaccine (not entirely implausible given she did share at least one anti-vax video - from her church? - though she's denied all claims of expressing views her costars and colleagues would find objectionable), it's no surprise that this movie wound up being one of the biggest and most expensive Marvel productions since at least Infinity War and Endgame.
Then there's the fact that Boseman's death is worked into T'Challa's story, dividing the fandom between those who accept that decision on the producers' part and those who wanted to see #RecastTChalla happen. After all, there's been so many different Spider-Men and Batmen and Supermen over the years - who's to decide that Black Panther shouldn't get the same treatment?
With this movie, though, T'Challa being dead and only seen in archive footage from films previous helps add another layer to its complex themes and storyline.
Without T'Challa, and with the world still recovering from the damage wrought by Thanos' Snap, the promise of wisely building bridges between Wakanda and the world is no more. Western powers are threatening to steal all the vibranium from Wakanda they can find, while Ramonda, the Queen following her son's passing, excoriates French and American UN reps in Geneva for trying to play innocent when she's already well aware they've attempted to raid at least one Wakandan Outreach Center in Mali.
Needless to say, when an American team finds an unexpected source of vibranium outside of Wakanda, they pay the ultimate price for it, leading the CIA in particular to cast suspicion on Wakanda. Wakanda, meanwhile, learns that an American scientist has designed a detector for vibranium, but she may not even be aware of the extent to which her invention has been co-opted, because she spends most of her time fangirling over all the movies and demanding tons of money on Venmo for homework help at MIT.
Meet Riri Williams, the new Ironheart for whom this film serves as an origin story in one of its many storylines - at least four parallel storylines that all intersect and interweave so seamlessly that the movie never failed to lose my attention for its whole 161 minutes.
And one of those storylines centers on a new threat which only Wakanda can face and live - Talocan, the vibranium-enhanced underwater nation of blue-skinned subaquatic warriors, led by the powerful, ankle-winged mutant Namor. (Alone of all his people, he is not blue of skin, explained by him being the first born after his people departed dry land. And yes, he does name himself a "mutant" specifically.) No, they're not the Na'vi from Avatar, but you could be forgiven for seeing the similarities - indigenous peoples forced to fight to protect themselves from colonizing forces, with a significant presence underwater, which feels especially strongly coincidental given that James Cameron is about to finally release The Way of Water next month. The difference being that while the Na'vi have colonizers to repel in the present day of Avatar, the people of Talocan have lived in secret safety for centuries, and are taking preemptive action before the demons of their past strike again.
No spoilers, but this movie absolutely doesn't fail in any department. Action, emotion, visual style, it's all as spot on point as Ryan Coogler gave in the first Black Panther movie and more. But there are a couple of important themes that are going to stick in my mind for quite some time.
One, colonization and its consequences. The benefits of vibranium have helped both Wakanda and Talocan stay isolated from exploitative outside powers, but while Wakanda has intentionally isolated itself for centuries, the people of Talocan, the indigenous Maya who still speak the Yucatec language in the present day, had to move somewhere new for their isolation, and mutate themselves to live in an otherwise inhospitable environment. Worse, Namor has lived for hundreds of years. His trauma isn't merely generational - he still remembers the death and destruction wrought by the Spaniards as clearly as yesterday, and this makes him an even more sympathetic anti-villain than any whom Marvel has written to date.
And two, the sheer number of flawed heroes and villains alike. Aside from really obvious Hate Sinks like Julia Louis-Dreyfus's return (after at least two or three cameos so far) as Contessa Valentina, the increasingly warmongering director of the CIA, every character in this movie is defined by at least one highly questionable moral action or two. Namor and his people are ready to fight any outsiders at a moment's notice, knowing full well their superior might - but they still need to learn the same lesson that T'Challa once did, the lesson of wisely building bridges while the foolish build barriers.
Meanwhile, Ramonda rules Wakanda as a grieving mother, even when she symbolically burns her mourning garb, and deeply mistrusting any and all outsiders, with the exception of Martin Freeman as Wakanda's favorite colonizer, Everett Ross. Nakia, T'Challa's old lover, never came back for the funeral, and when asked why numerous times, she consistently dodges the question. And Shuri...dear God, Shuri. She throws herself into her work, managing to come off even more like Tony Stark than his true spiritual successor Riri. And while the movie's veteran talents still act circles around her - especially Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia, Dania Gurira as Okoye, Florence Kasumba as Ayo, Michaela Cole as newcomer Aneka, Ayo's lover (though that's told rather than shown), Winston Duke as the ever boisterous M'Baku, and finally Angela Bassett as Ramonda (I, along with at least one friend, hope she gets Oscar nominated for this one, especially to see my mom's reaction since she utterly despises Bassett, based largely on her performance on 9-1-1) - I'd like to think there's one reason in particular why Letitia Wright gets top billing in this one. It's because she really has to play against her own personality - Wright being famously devout a Christian, and Shuri equally devout in her doubt of Wakandan traditions and spirituality, which really comes back to bite her in the ass as the story progresses.
If the movie has any flaws, it's that a number of the humorous moments, as one might expect for most Marvel movies, fall flat as pancakes. But there's still a lot of well-timed jokes, along with heart pounding action and massive emotional bombs (there's one major character death in particular that had me crying ugly tears) to buoy this movie up to an A+ as the most epic ending that Marvel's scattershot, loosely connected Phase Four could ever have delivered.
Till next time, Pinecones...
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| #FeedTheRightWolf |
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| Remember: Denis Leary is always watching. Always. |
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