{"id":9853,"date":"2023-03-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9853"},"modified":"2023-03-20T19:06:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T23:06:24","slug":"black-panther-wakanda-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/21\/black-panther-wakanda-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Black Panther<\/a><\/em> 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\u2019t 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<\/em> was hemmed in by real-world events and would have to start its story with something acknowledging Boseman\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s part of why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever<\/em> 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\u2019s smart, empathetic, and more interesting start to finish than its predecessor. It\u2019s the action that lets this film down, not the story, as there\u2019s something almost perfunctory about the battle sequences, both large and small. And the film doesn\u2019t need a lot of that fighting anyway \u2013 it\u2019s smarter and more thoughtful than a film that just resolves everything by having characters throw each other off buildings or boats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever<\/em> opens with T\u2019Challa 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\u2019Challa\u2019s 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) \u2013 whom Marvel Comics fan know as Ironheart \u2013 designed the ship\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>film. There\u2019s an extended flashback that explains the origins of Talokan and how their king Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mej\u00eda) 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also further development of the Wakandan culture on screen through the death of T\u2019Challa 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\u2019o). 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\u2019s a little more exploration of Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M\u2019Baku (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<\/em>). 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\u2019t advance the plot and are painfully unfunny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, there\u2019s a lot of humor in this film, and it often feels organic as different pairs of characters are thrown together \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s a shorter story arc there that brings that character through to the film\u2019s (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\u2019ve seen \u2013 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\u2019s good that the ultimate solution in this movie isn\u2019t just one character beating the hell out of another, but there\u2019s a lot of that between A and B that didn\u2019t help the plot and that just wasn\u2019t as exciting as the action stuff from the first movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/em>, but I would have voted for Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin<\/a><\/em>) or Stephanie Hsu instead of Bassett, who isn\u2019t in the movie all that much and whose character is not that complex here. She is regal, but it\u2019s a bit of the Judi Dench thing \u2013 is it enough to just be the queen, even if you\u2019re not on screen and don\u2019t 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\u2019s, as she has way<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever <\/em>better than the original Black Panther<\/em>? Yes \u2026 and no. It\u2019s less fun and ebullient. It misses Boseman in many ways. The action sequences don\u2019t work that well and there\u2019s too much CGI in them. But there\u2019s 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<\/em> TV series that\u2019s 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<\/em> has the series in a good place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t quite hold together in its final third. The loss of its star and the actor who played the title character, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,1340,215,996],"class_list":["post-9853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-2023-best-supporting-actress-nominees","tag-movies","tag-superhero-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9854,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9853\/revisions\/9854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}