Mark Reviews Movies: BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Marvel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 10, 2022

The Marvel superhero machine has to remain in motion, no matter what might happen within the stories of its fictional universe or in the real world. The biggest challenge for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, obviously, is the death of actor Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed the eponymous superhero. His untimely passing in 2020 is addressed in this sequel, which tries to keep going and finds a bit of comfort in the familiar. Under the circumstances, it's difficult to blame the filmmakers for that decision.

Here, then, is a movie that more or less does what its predecessor already has done, giving us a hero—a series of them, really, in this case, since a Black Panther is absent from the story until the third act—with one ideological bent and a villain with a different one. That worked wonders in the first film, which felt as if it was trying to tell a deeper and more politically aware tale than the superhero mold in which it had to fit.

This time around, the villain again wants to wage war against a world that has done—and would continue to do—harm against him and his people. Some in Wakanda, the African nation that had secretly flourished and continues to do so with the aid of an otherworldly metal, want no part of that, but others can understand, can sympathize with, and even might consider participating in such a cause.

That's the core of this story, but the screenplay by director Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole has a fairly lengthy list of other necessities to address. Some of those are relevant to the isolated tale here, such as what happened to Boseman's character, how other characters react to their king and hero's death, and who will take the mantle of Wakanda's ruler and the Black Panther (There's so much going on with this that the movie barely acknowledges that, in theory, half the population of the country, including that superhero, disappeared from existence for several years).

Other concerns are less relevant and bring us back to those ongoing issues with this franchise. It is always trying to cram its solitary narratives into some bigger picture, trying to maintain some level of the status quo, and trying to expand so that the series can continue for as long as possible. The mere existence of this story, which ultimately serves to give us a new Black Panther, fits into all of those issues, to be honest, but at least the movie doesn't feel as rote as that might suggest.

Its routines are everywhere, regardless. The opening addresses Boseman's death with King T'Challa dying off-screen due to an unspecified illness. His younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), Wakanda's tech specialist, blames herself for failing to synthesize the mystical plant that gave the Black Panther power. It's an affecting sequence—enough so that a pall of melancholy hangs over the few quiet moments in between all of the plotting and action.

Mostly, though, things keep moving. Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri and T'Challa's mother, takes the throne, but her patience for diplomacy is tested by constant attempts by foreign actors to steal Wakanda's major resource: vibranium. When a different deposit of the metal is discovered in the ocean, a drilling operation is attacked by an even more secret nation: the underwater realm of Talocan, led by an amphibious mutant with wings on his ankles named Namor (Tenoch Huerta). His story—not to mention Huerta's quietly commanding performance—and the history of this world give the rising conflict or possible alliance between the two countries some political heft.

As has become so often the case with this franchise of movies, though, Coogler and Cole's screenplay is simply trying to do far too much. In addition to the characters' grief and the potential for war and trying to get most of the major players from the first film back into the fold, the plot also introduces Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a genius college student who, here, is mostly a plot device (Her vibranium-detecting technology starts the whole conflict, and Namor is trying to kill her for inexplicable reasons). The evidence, though, points to her clearly figuring into this franchise in the future (This movie basically introduces two different replacements for dead superheroes, and it's difficult not to feel a bit cynical about that notion within the real-world context of one of them).

The movie is juggling way too much for anything but the most significant details to have much weight. Many of the more engaging supporting characters, namely Danai Gurira's Okoye and Winston Duke's M'Baku, are pushed into the background (Lupita Nyong'o's retired spy Nakia eventually returns, mainly to push the plot forward). By the time Shuri's internal conflict—between wanting to live up to the ideal set by her brother and simply wanting to give into anger—arises, the story has fallen back on a pair of large-scale battles to resolve most of the plot and character threads—and to finally reveal the new Black Panther, of course.

If any movie in this franchise up until now was going to do something legitimately different, it would be Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. That it doesn't is understandable to some degree, but here we have definitive proof that nothing, not even death, can stop the formula and momentum of this machine.

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