“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (2022) knows it misses the late Chadwick Boseman’s O.G. Black Panther. The opening Marvel Studios banner loads up on images of Boseman. Shuri (Letitia Wright) cries in half of her scenes as she thinks about her deceased brother.
Despite hyper-awareness of its missing piece, director/co-writer Ryan Coogler’s sequel can’t overcome the character’s or actor’s absence. It tries, certainly, by taking us through a smorgasbord of characters, creatures, technology and locations around the globe, each one designed to the hilt.
The new mutants
The “Star Wars” prequels come to mind, and fittingly, lead character Shuri goes through an internal light side/dark side conflict. Competing for our attention are Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor, the leader of an underwater race of mutants (since Disney’s purchase of Fox, the MCU can now say “mutants”); and Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a genius American college student.
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (2022)
Director: Ryan Coogler
Writers: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
Stars: Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Dominique Thorne
Mejia is charismatic, and the Talokans are a fascinating race, similar to Aquaman’s clan in the DCEU. I love how the Talokan warriors ride like barnacles on the killer whales they’ve befriended (or mesmerized). People who aren’t tired of superhero spectacle will appreciate “Wakanda Forever” as a visual version of its own “Making of” book. The Talokan underwater city is the best chapter, although Wakanda also looks stunning.
Riri needed to be a much bigger part of the film, as she – like Killmonger in the original – is the link to the normal ole USA viewers are familiar with. Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia could’ve also provided grounding; she’s a Wakandan, but she has settled in Haiti to help the common folk. But there’s not enough of her, percentage-wise, either.
While the script co-penned by Joe Robert Cole is somber, Coogler does sense that “Wakanda Forever” needs to breathe a little more. He asks the actors to put “fish out of water” humor into the sequence where Shuri and warrior Okoye (Danai Gurira) nab Riri from her Boston campus.
Also, scenes between exes – and now rivals within the CIA – Ross (Martin Freeman) and de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) are presented playfully. Although the real-world grounding never arrives in full, the plot mirrors reality in the abstract, at least. The global conflict satirizes the real world’s, starting with a great opening sequence at the United Nations.
The avoidable inevitable war
The American secretary of state/warmonger (Richard Schiff) rips Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) for her policy of not trading vibranium. He tries to paint Wakanda as a threat via strongly voiced mental gymnastics – a bigger-stage parallel to how people who own guns for protection are pre-judged for what the gun can do. In a comeback politicians dream about, Ramonda points out that she’s not scared of the vibranium, she’s scared of what other countries would do with the vibranium.
Sparked by the USA’s search for the element (previously thought to only exist in Wakanda), Wakanda and the Talokans then end up in a war largely because of Shuri’s and Namor’s personal issues. “Wakanda Forever” never quite recognizes the tragedy nor distastefulness. Although the film makes Namor nominally more “evil” than Shuri (in that he thirsts for a worldwide war), both are comfortable in letting their emotions send warriors to pointless deaths.
The battles happen in a fog of two nations that live for war. Okoye is clearly only happy when she’s fighting; she also recruits an old friend who had decided to be a miserable country bumpkin between films and misses killing enemies. Granted, Coogler peppers in cool stuff, like the newly superpowered Shuri defying gravity while scaling the side of an ocean vessel.
Riri gets lost in the final act. She functionally becomes the new Iron Man, so we see her as a face inside the helmet, surrounded by digital screens, amid the gee-wiz spectacle. I always think of how the actors, starting with RDJ, are merely filming those interior-helmet scenes in a booth. But at least back in 2008 this type of tech was special, and difficult to devise. In this 30th MCU film, Riri makes a bunch of flawless Iron Man suits off-screen.
The plot points and themes make sense but aren’t seriously dealt with throughout the 2 hours and 41 minutes. The character arcs track, but we’ve seen them before. This is a smart movie, not a dumb one. It’s somber, but it has to be since a nation is mourning its superhero protector. “Wakanda Forever’s” heart is aggressively in the right place, but it has more special effects than soul.