Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Ryan Coogler’s follow-up to his genre-transcending Black Panther (2018) is even worse than a typically terrible sequel to a good blockbuster. I wasn't surprised by this significant drop-off in quality, but I was still disheartened. Coogler’s initial take on Marvel Comic’s Black Panther possessed many of the qualities I used to love about Hollywood blockbusters before there was a Marvel Cinematic Universe. Prior to Black Panther, the "MCU" and other corporate behemoths had bled out most of the joy and the craftsmanship that was once plentiful in unapologetically commercial filmmaking, as they created endless, muddled narratives of self-perpetuating franchises. Black Panther felt different. It was an entertaining and thought-provoking stand-alone story. True, it was part of a larger series but felt like a film made entirely on its own terms. With this picture and Creed (2015), Coogler seemed to prove there was value in the modern studio practice of scooping up a young talented indie filmmaker and utilizing that person’s voice to make a tentpole product for the masses seem distinctive and personal. Black Panther wrestled with important and complex contemporary issues without having characters look into the camera and shout the subtext at you, as nearly all comic-book movies have since Bryan Singer and Lauren Shuler Donner made X-Men in 2000. Black Panther also featured state-of-the-art special effects that instilled a sense of wonder in audiences who showed up to see the movie on the big screen. I'll never forget the moment when the hidden kingdom of Wakanda was first revealed—a beautiful use of computer-generated imagery that brought me back to when I was a kid seeing impossible things on screen for the first time.

But the most important aspect of Black Panther was its excellent villain. Hollywood blockbusters are only as good as their villains, which is the main reason most of them, with rare exceptions like The Dark Knight, are so inconsequential these days. In Michael B. Jordan’s Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, we got a rare antagonist who was the protagonist's equal in every way. Killmonger's goals were as valid and his beliefs as righteous as those of the Black Panther. Only the internal motivations of these characters made one a hero and one a villain. Killmonger believed that Wakanda's power, technology, and national resources should be shared with all the people of the African diaspora to help them conquer their oppressors. His conviction was arguably a more valid position than the belief that privileged members of a society should hoard their power and treasure so as to preserve their prosperous and comfortable place in the cultural hierarchy.

Unfortunately, the sequel to Black Panther does not explore big, complex, important questions of our era the way its predecessor did so surprisingly well. Coogler, working again with co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, attempts to capture some of that depth by creating a new hidden civilization to clash ideologically with Wakanda, but it all comes up short. The story takes place a year after Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, the Black Panther, has died of a mysterious illness. With Wakanda's king out of the picture, the Americans feel it's time to launch a search for the precious material vibranium that provides the Afrofuturist nation with its power and technology. The CIA hasn't discovered a way to steal vibranium from the Wakandans, but they have uncovered an MIT student prodigy who has built, amongst other gadgets, a machine that can find vibranium deep in the ocean. In using this invention, they disrupt the undersea kingdom of Talokan. Its leader Prince Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is 700 years old but acts like a stunted adolescent. He tries to get Wakanda to join forces so they can wipe out the rest of the world, but when Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) says no, he declares war on her nation. This plot results in many prolonged CGI fight sequences and even more scenes of characters meeting up to spew exposition and thematic content at each other.

When his star Chadwick Boseman succumbed to cancer at the age of 43, Coogler faced a near-impossible set of challenges. He had to rewrite the script hastily to accommodate the vacuum left by the star's passing and also incorporate the death of his titular character both narratively and thematically. Coogler and Cole make a valiant effort to craft a story that takes on themes of vengeance in the face of great loss. But revenge is hardly a fresh subject for a Hollywood action picture, even when it's able to tap into extra-textual feelings of collective grief and loss. It means something that Boseman's death casts such a disruptive shadow in our current cinematic era where, as Quinton Tarantino pointed out this year, actors are no longer movie stars. The stars of comic book movies and other modern franchise pictures are the characters, with the people who portray them viewed as almost interchangeable. So it’s both appropriate and a powerful sign of respect that the untimely death of Boseman leaves a big empty hole that can't simply be filled by a replacement. The people who make these pictures know that hiring another actor would not sit well with fans. So the fictional death of Boseman's Black Panther carries weight in ways that are unimaginable in series like Spiderman, Batman, The Hulk, and others that have seen multiple actors come and go in their title roles. I mean, James Bond got killed off in the prior year’s No Time to Die, but his loss felt no more significant than misplacing your iPhone. We all know “James Bond will be back.”

Into the void left by Bosman step the women characters that were another key component in making the first Black Panther so effective. While Wakanda was presented as a patriarchal society, it was the women who held most of it together and kicked much of the ass: Bassett as T'Challa's mother and the Queen Mother of the nation; Letitia Wright as T'Challa's little sister who designed his Black Panther suit, his weapons, and the newest technology of her country; Lupita Nyong’o as the selfless, undercover spy who also happened to be T'Challa’s love interest; and Florence Kasumba as General Ayo of the Dora Milaje—Wakanda's all-female special forces army. These supporting cast members never felt like feeble attempts at inclusion by a Hollywood studio. They were fully dimensional characters who added depth, perspective, and dynamism to the story. It shouldn't feel like so much of a burden for them to carry this movie, but it does.

Perhaps part of the issue is that Wakanda Forever came out less than a month after Gina Prince-Bythewood’s excellent action blockbuster The Woman King, which is about the Agojie—the same historical African all-female fighting force the Dora Milaje is partially based on. Prince-Bythewood’s picture is made for the same audience that goes to comic book superhero movies, but it's far less ridiculous and infinitely more thrilling. Wakanda Forever has it rough, with its release sandwiched between The Woman King, which upstages its female warriors, and Avatar: The Way of Water, which will no doubt outshine its undersea world populated by super-humanoid blue people. How can I be sure in predicting Avatar’s superior ocean realm? Because the underwater kingdom of Talokan looks as unimpressive as everything else about Wakanda Forever.

Yet another thing the original Black Panther had going for it was Rachel Morrison’s cinematography. Morrison (Fruitvale Station, Cake, Mudbound) gave Black Panther a look that set it apart from the other MCU pictures. The colorful film almost glowed, the vistas seemed to go on forever, and Ruth E. Carter's Oscar-winning costumes practically leapt off the screen. But Wakanda Forever's cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw drags the vibrant African world back down into the bland, muddy, terribly lit MCU. The visual effects look unfinished, the many night scenes are so dark we can barely make them out, too many actors look like they're performing in front of a green screen, and the underwater scenes are dark and green screened and don’t look like they are underwater at all. Why couldn't the reveal of Talokan in this film be as impressive as the reveal of Wakanda in the first movie? There is no reason apart from the fact that the company that pays for these movies knows that making a release date is far more important to the bottom line than building in time to perfect visual effects. They have proved this disinterest in expanding or even living up to the current VFX status quo time and time again. The Avatar sequels might suck, but at least they'll look great.

Finally, the most offensive aspect of Wakanda Forever is the character of the mathematically brilliant and streetwise vibranium-detecting machine inventor, MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). Among Riri's many creations is a flying suit of armor like the one Tony Stark built to become Iron Man. She flies around the Boston area in this contraption with the same skill as Stark. Riri has all the technical genius and abilities of Letitia Wright's Shuri (who I guess is the main character in this movie?). But not only does it make little sense that Riri is able to pull off everything she does here, but she also makes Shuri seem far less special. Of course, this is a universe in which there are hundreds of people with superpowers, so I guess it figures that there would be multiple teenagers hanging around who can create technology no one on Earth has ever seen. But to me, the more “supers” you put on screen, the less super they all seem.

Thorne's acting style also feels out of place with the rest of the performances. Her broad, sassy characterization feels more suited to a breezy TV show than this somber feature. Maybe she's meant to be comic relief? Or maybe she feels like a TV character because she is a TV character getting the kind of back-door introduction the MCU is notorious for. I know fans like that these characters exist in multiple entries across many platforms. (That's what puts the U in the MCU.) But it's such a blatant promotional gimmick I'll never understand why audiences eat it up. Riri is shoehorned into the events that incite this movie's plot, and then she spends the rest of the picture standing around watching the real characters deal with grief, loss, anger, and existential challenges. I've never walked out of a movie before, but I would feel justified walking out on this one during some of the scenes in which this character appears. Only the MCU would stoop to running a commercial during a funeral.

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