Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

This was delayed from its normal Monday appearance due to the sheer number of short reviews that needed to be written. So, here is what I watched this past week:

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

There’s something rather static about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All throughout the Avengers series that encompassed phases 1 through 3 (the delineations of which never made logical sense), Disney/Marvel was coasting on its superhero universe without finding new directions for the narratives to go. It was only when they branched out in new directions like the original Black Panther, Black Widow, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that things started to feel a bit fresher. Returning to the Black Panther well again, although expected, was fraught with potential peril because if there’s one thing Disney’s good at, it’s running a concept into the ground.

What came out of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is something entirely different than expected. Sure there’s the expansion of world building and the connections to MCU’s phase 4/5/?, but there’s also something wholly fresh and dare-say spiritual about this latest incarnation. Part of that is thanks to the opening of the film, which puts us into the Wakandan hospital where T’Challa is plagued by an unknown virus that threatens to consume his life. Shuri (Letitia Wright) is working furiously to try to come up with a chemical compound that can save him. As everyone knows, the original actor to play T’Challa was Chadwick Boseman who died of colon cancer in 2020 at the too-young age of 43. It was inconceivable that this film would not address those issues. A lively debate stirred about whether he would be re-cast like other characters in the MCU or if the mantle would be passed to others. The choice is ultimately revealed in this film.

Director Ryan Coogler infused much of the film with the African tribal custom and designs as he did in the original film, yet they feel significantly more fleshed out with funereal rights and other ceremonies standing in stark relief to anything else in the MCU. Not even Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were given the same kind of parting revelry. What the film also looks at is the passing of a nation’s leader, someone who had engendered support for his nobility in his brief tenure as leader of Wakanda. Those ramifications play into the teetering edge on which Wakanda finds itself with a world in desperate need of their vibranium and the nation’s unwillingness to budge. Taking advantage of this conflict and hoping to divert interest in a sub-oceanic pocket of vibranium, the leader (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) of another sequestered nation, Talokan, seeks Wakanda’s assistance in killing the scientist (Dominique Thorne) who helped develop a vibranium detector.

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