→ March 21, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Black Panther was a tremendous action movie, a smart film with an incredible cast, an interesting concept and solid story, and brought some great action sequences that helped the film survive a story that didn’t quite hold together in its final third. The loss of its star and the actor who played the title character, Chadwick Boseman, meant that the long-awaited sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was hemmed in by real-world events and would have to start its story with something acknowledging Boseman’s death.

That’s part of why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is so long, running over two and a half hours, but for a script that was forced on some level to hit certain points, it’s smart, empathetic, and more interesting start to finish than its predecessor. It’s the action that lets this film down, not the story, as there’s something almost perfunctory about the battle sequences, both large and small. And the film doesn’t need a lot of that fighting anyway – it’s smarter and more thoughtful than a film that just resolves everything by having characters throw each other off buildings or boats.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens with T’Challa dying off screen as Shuri (Letitia Wright) moves frantically to try to find a cure, only to have their mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) arrive to inform her daughter of T’Challa’s death. This leads to a brief but solemn sequence to open the film as we see the community mourn and get glimpses of the Wakandan funeral rites, which are interspersed with scenes from the outside world, where other nations are demanding access to vibranium, with one country going so far as to stage a raid on Wakanda to try to steal some. An incident aboard a mining ship that was searching for an underwater source of vibranium in the south Atlantic exposes the existence of a suboceanic culture, Talokan, that also has access to the powerful metal. A young scientist named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) – whom Marvel Comics fan know as Ironheart – designed the ship’s vibranium detector, putting her life in danger and setting up a conflict between Wakanda and Talokan over her fate and their relations with the rest of the world.

The reveal of Talokan and a sort of diplomatic mission to the underwater kingdom allows screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole to engage in more of the world-building that was so mesmerizing in the first Black Panther film. There’s an extended flashback that explains the origins of Talokan and how their king Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) has been in power for centuries, tying them back to a Mesoamerican tribe that was threatened by white slavers and the smallpox viruses they brought to the region. Namor is the only Talokanil character we get to know, unfortunately, although the stage is set for more such characters to appear in a future movie.

There’s also further development of the Wakandan culture on screen through the death of T’Challa and a further character death partway through the film, as well as more exploration of some of the core characters from the initial movie, notably Shuri and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Nakia has left Wakanda and her post in California where she was about to work at the end of the first film, a decision that the film explains in pieces right through the end credits. There’s a little more exploration of Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), but I would have loved to see more with both of those characters, as well as the new Dora Milaje fighter Aneka (Emmy winner Michaela Coel of I May Destroy You). Instead of getting more time with them, we get a couple of pointless bits with Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and his boss/ex-wife Val de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), which are throwaway scenes that don’t advance the plot and are painfully unfunny.

Indeed, there’s a lot of humor in this film, and it often feels organic as different pairs of characters are thrown together – nearly always women, by the way, because this is very, very much a film about the women of Wakanda. Serious conversations turn light with a bit of unexpected banter, and the actresses deliver it seamlessly in ways that also make the relationships between them more credible.

Eventually, two things have to happen in this movie beyond the acknowledgement and grieving that open the story. One is that we need someone else to become the new Black Panther, and the other is that that character and Namor have to fight, probably within a larger battle between Wakanda and Talokan. The former worked for me – I thought it was one of the two obvious choices, and I thought the way the script handled it was smart and insightful, especially when that character takes the herb and travels to the ancestral plane. There’s a shorter story arc there that brings that character through to the film’s (first) conclusion that is effective if a little facile and sets us up well for at least one more movie in this series. The second part, the huge battle that mostly wraps up the film, had the problem I have with most Marvel movies I’ve seen – the fighting is mostly ridiculous, because one or more characters are all but invincible, people on the screen are doing all sorts of absurd things, and people are thrown great distances into hard objects without anything worse happening than getting the wind knocked out of them. It’s good that the ultimate solution in this movie isn’t just one character beating the hell out of another, but there’s a lot of that between A and B that didn’t help the plot and that just wasn’t as exciting as the action stuff from the first movie.

As for Angela Bassett and her Oscar nomination, I think she was clearly better than Jamie Lee Curtis, who won the award for Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I would have voted for Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) or Stephanie Hsu instead of Bassett, who isn’t in the movie all that much and whose character is not that complex here. She is regal, but it’s a bit of the Judi Dench thing – is it enough to just be the queen, even if you’re not on screen and don’t have a lot of work to do to build out the character? (Yes, I know Dench won, but that will be a controversial win forever.) The most award-worthy performance in this film, for me, was Wright’s, as she has way more to do to develop and fill out her character, who went from a fun sidekick in the first movie to the closest thing this film has to a lead. This film leans on her almost as much as the first leaned on Boseman.

Is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever better than the original Black Panther? Yes … and no. It’s less fun and ebullient. It misses Boseman in many ways. The action sequences don’t work that well and there’s too much CGI in them. But there’s also a better story here, some really interesting and worthwhile character development, and more meaning in its story and conclusion. It almost demands a third movie in the franchise, beyond the Ironheart TV series that’s coming soon (with Thorne in the title role), that goes further with the women who now lead Wakanda in almost every way. It may not be what everyone involved intended for the franchise when it first starter, but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has the series in a good place.

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→ July 24, 2020
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The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

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→ April 6, 2018
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Black Panther.

I’ve never been a big fan of the superhero genre of fiction, whether it’s comic books, TV cartoons, or the recent wave of movies set in the Marvel or DC universes. (I never collected or read comic books as a kid.) The characters never really work for me as fully realized individuals; the “it’s hard to have super powers” theme always felt rather silly, yet it keeps coming up in this corner of fiction. The Dark Knight is the only major superhero movie I’ve seen in the last decade, and I thought it was fine, but overlong and probably too ambitious for its execution. I never saw its sequel.

So I originally figured Black Panther would be another big hit that I skipped because it’s just not my kind of story; only when the critical praise was as effusive as the public’s reaction did I figure I should check the film out. There are two major elements here that I feel like I’m unqualified to discuss – how it compares to other superhero films, and the script’s attention to detail and and authentic depiction of sub-Saharan African culture – but I can at least break it down as a movie like any other work of fiction, and it is, of course, very good, with performances and visuals strong enough to overcome some flaws in the second plot and a sudden loss of momentum partway through the film.

Black Panther is both superhero and king of the (fictional) African kingdom of Wakanda, which appears to be located somewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa near present-day Rwanda, a utopian society with technology well beyond that of any other country thanks to its location on top of the world’s largest deposit of the (fictional) metal vibranium. Wakanda has sealed itself off from the world, cloaking its location and its riches so the world doesn’t show up at its door with hands out or guns aimed. The story opens with a brief prologue showing the former king seeking out a traitor, his own brother, in Oakland, after which we see the coronation of the new king and Black Panther, played by Chadwick Boseman (42), and the first plot, around the theft of a half-ton of vibranium and the assassination of his father, kicks into gear.

That first storyline takes up about half the film, and it’s a chance for some great special effects and superhero-style combat, although the enemy, named Claue (no relation), is just a madman and not terribly interesting. That turns out to be a red herring of sorts, as the second half of the film involves a different, more politically-oriented plot, with a threat to the king coming from an unexpected outside source with connections to Wakanda, forcing the Black Panther to defend his throne and eventually retake control of the kingdom in a giant battle reminiscent of that in The Return of the King.

Boseman is solid as the title character, and apparently the ladies very much approve of his casting, but I thought he was overshadowed by the three leading actresses around him: His former lover, Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o; his sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright; and the head of the (all-female!) presidential guard, Okoye, played by Danai Gurira. are all more dynamic and fill roles more commonly filled by men in action films, especially Shuri, the tech expert who gets to make all the fun gadgets for Black Panther to wear, and who also gets the best one-liners in the movie. (“No, it’s Kansas,” was second only to the joke about vegetarians if I’m ranking the quips in the movie.) This isn’t just a movie that stars African-American actors in nearly every significant role, but it’s also one of the most female-forward action films I’ve ever seen, and never stoops to jokes about their femininity or contrasts their toughness with their gender. Boseman himself has somewhat less to work with, even in the titular role, because of what he has to be – the even-keeled statesman who sometimes puts on a mask and funny suit and kicks some ass – and there’s very little room for him to work beyond that, even when he tries to convince Nakia to stay in Wakanda and be his queen. Their chemistry is much better when they’re plotting and scheming than when they’re supposed to be in love.

The story itself starts to drag around the 2/3 mark, when Black Panther has been deposed by the usurper, even though we know he’s going to come back to fight to reclaim it. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of a movie here.) The loss of momentum in the action comes as the script tries, with modest success, to delve into more contemporary political themes and into some perennial philosophical questions. Does Wakanda, a nation of endless prosperity (and great health care!), have a moral obligation to share its technology or resources with the world? Should Wakanda open its borders to refugees from war torn or famine-struck nations around it? With black populations in U.S. cities like Oakland (where the real Black Panther Party started) caught in a cycle of poverty and crime, does Wakanda have any responsibility to help its brethren?

The usurper arrives and all but promises to Make Wakanda Great Again with a “Wakanda First!” speech and belligerent mentality, arguing that Wakanda should show the world its greatness by force. His arrival and his words split the ruling council of tribal leaders, some of whom are rather quick to abandon their king’s pacificist-isolationist policies in support of the upstart. We know how this is likely to end, although the final battle is drawn out to try to infuse some drama into the inevitable outcome; there are few surprises, unless you still have a hard time seeing these badass women in every fight scene.

The cast is really strong across the board, with solid supporting performances by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Martin Freeman (yep, that’s Watson, with an American accent), and Michael B. Jordan, and smaller but still notable contributions from Angela Bassett as the queen mother and Sterling K. Brown as the first King’s brother. (His name, N’Jobu, is a little unfortunate if you grew up with Major League, which I don’t think bothered as much with cultural accuracy or sensitivity.)

I’ll be very curious to see if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considers Black Panther seriously for any non-technical awards, given its critical reception and awareness of the awards’ tendency to overlook African-American films and actors in several recent slates of nominees. Star Wars earned a Best Picture nod in 1977, one of ten nominations for the film that year, and it’s probably the best historical analogue to Black Panther as a sci-fi action flick. It shouldn’t hurt that the cast includes two Oscar winners for acting (Nyong’o and Forrest Whitaker) and two more past nominees (Bassett and Kaluuya). If I had to bet money right now on one non-technical nomination, it’d be for Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler (who directed this and also wrote and directed Creed and Fruitvale Station) and Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson). I also wonder how many voters would check off Octavia Spencer’s name if she made the original ballot, even though she’s not actually in this movie.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve largely avoided superhero films because their stories just don’t speak to me, and I don’t think Black Panther will change that – it is so exceptional in the depth of its setting and back story while also bringing together as strong a cast as you could assemble that it’s not something other films in the genre could easily replicate. Even with that jarring momentum shift while Black Panther is temporarily off the throne is just a brief setback, one that made me more conscious of the film’s running time (a little over two hours) but didn’t truly detract form the experience. I will predict, however, that it ends the year as one of the top ten English-language movies I see.

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