Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Rating

Director

Ryan Coogler

Screenplay

Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole

Length

2h 41m

Starring

Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Tenoch Huerto Mejía, Martin Freeman, Dominique Thorne, Florence Kasumba, Michaela Coel, Alex Livinalli, Mabel Cadena

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Original Preview

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Review

What path should one take after suffering an immeasurable loss? One’s character often dictates the course to acceptance and redemption and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever must find a path through unexpected tragedy both off-screen and in various elements internally.

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 beset by an unknown illness that threatens to consume his life. Shuri (Letitia Wright) is working furiously to try to come up with a compound that can save him. With original T’Challa Chadwick Boseman having 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 Wakanda Forever.

Director Ryan Coogler infused much of the film with the African tribal custom and designs 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 experience. 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, going about it in a brash and unexpected way.

The film had a lot of parallelism in bringing these stories to the screen. The informal rivalry between Shuri and Thorne’s Riri Williams. The similarities between Talokan and Wakanda. The path Shuri and Huerta Mejía’s Namor take to get to where they are and more. Those dynamics make for a compelling story where one decision can complicate one relationship while making the other stronger. It’s a delicate dance that Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole have to put forward in their script and it works amazingly well. It’s often the case that the world building necessary in the MCU, once completed, allows for tremendous growth of the characters in their second outing and that’s exceptionally true here as Wakanda Forever ends up even better than its predecessor.

Where The Avengers: Endgame lacked in its depiction of post-traumatic psychological exploration, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever makes up for it in its examination of grief as a motivator and the difficulty of moving on from a core part of one’s own identity. It’s a complex and moving film that improves on the original and gives the audience more than a handful of moments to contemplate the psychological burdens of loss and how radically different every person is when handling those types of situations. It’s fascinating to see all the ways the film tackles this weighty subject and how successfully it answers the myriad methods employed within. It’s a film that requires more than surface interpretations and deepens the impact and purpose of a broader franchise so often blinded by its own successes.

Oscar Prospects

Guarantees: Original Song, Costume Design
Probables: Original Score, Film Editing, Cinematography Production Design, Sound, Visual Effects
Potentials: Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress (Angela Bassett)

Review Written

December 7, 2022