Wakanda Forever is ambitious until it isn't
like T'challa himself, something is missing at the center of this gorgeous but ultimately flawed film
For the first hour of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's very long runtime, I was living in a parallel universe where a Marvel movie had the balls to call out the global north's neocolonial exploits of the global south and damn the entire world order enabling them… And then, as if the CIA had black-bagged that other, better film into an unmarked van, I was living back with all of you in this reality. The one where the movie instead says, "Welp, no time to unpack all of that. Here's a big battle scene where these two indigenous cultures unspoiled by the ravages of white supremacist, capitalist colonialism fight each other. Don't think about what message that sends from a sociological angle. Look over there! An orca just flicked a dude thirty stories into the air with its tail!"
In many ways, that inability to follow through is emblematic of Wakanda Forever as a whole. As someone who suffers from ADHD, I know what a lack of focus looks like. For each incredible idea the film begins to construct, there's another left behind like a half-built Lego set. The film is ostensibly constructed around the grief felt by those close to T'challa in the wake of his passing, and metatextually the grief of the director and cast over the death of Chadwick Boseman, but even that dissipates into the ether whenever a fight scene needs to happen.
It's jolting because director Ryan Coogler's script, co-written with Joe Robert Cole, opens on a powerful note. With Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) questioned before the U.N. regarding Wakanda's refusal to sell vibranium, she publicly lambasts the global north and notes that if America had vibranium, they'd have already used it to make weapons of mass destruction. To punctuate her remarks, she summons a group of French special forces, captured by Wakanda while trying to steal vibranium, onto the chamber floor at spearpoint.
That theme is furthered when Namor (Tenoch Huerta) enters and demands Wakanda ally with his underwater kingdom of Talocan to preemptively attack the rest of the world before they can colonize and plunder the two nations. Huerta is merely the latest talent to be plucked from relative obscurity by the Marvel machine—Simu Liu, Iman Vellani, and others precede him—and Marvel's talent for casting remains one of the MCU's strongest traits. You can feel the pain in Huerta's performance, without which the entire concept of him as a character would fall flat. This is a mutant who lives underwater and has wings on his ankles. Even in the comics, it's a lot, so for it to work this well in live-action feels monumental.
Even better, Namor's motives line up perfectly with the themes introduced before his arrival. As he explains to Shuri (Letitia Wright), his mother lived in Mesoamerica during the 14th century as the Spanish began to colonize and enslave the Mayan people. While she was pregnant with him, a shaman discovered a plant growing near vibranium underwater and turned it into a potion which he commanded the remaining villagers to drink. Consuming it allowed them to breathe underwater, but took away their ability to breathe air. Namor was the exception, the first child born underwater, he was amphibious and had superhuman strength; he was made king of their new civilization, Talocan. Upon returning to the surface world, he found the rest of his people enslaved, so he burned the Spanish colony to the ground and vowed to keep Talocan a secret from the surface world. His decision to attack the surface world is born out of seeing Wakanda become an international target after going public in the first Black Panther.
All of this feels cohesive, even as the American government enters the picture through the characters of CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louise-Dreyfus). When an American vibranium mining operation is attacked by Talocans, de Fontaine and the White House believe it to be the work of Wakanda in retaliation for attempts to steal Wakandan vibranium. The Pentagon is ready to go to war. Only Ross, in contact with Queen Ramonda, knows there's another actor at play, even if she won't tell him who, so he tries desperately to stall the Americans' warmongering long enough to figure out what's going on.
So far, everything is working like a Swiss clock. We have A, B, and C plots all revolving around a central theme, backed up by gorgeous sets and costuming (courtesy of Black Panther Oscar-winners Hannah Beachler and Ruth Carter), and with great actors inside those costumes. And then the cogs start to misalign. The springs pop out.
Don't misread me as soured on Wakanda Forever. There's a lot to love, starting with Beachler's lushly rendered locations and Carter's elaborate costumes. Beachler and Carter both won Oscars for their work on the first Black Panther, and if anything, they've outdone themselves on the second go-round. Wakanda's Golden City feels more futuristic and authentically African than ever, and the newly introduced underwater city of Talocan, though often viewed through dark and murky water, feels as real as its surface-dwelling counterpart. That's important, because audiences must buy into the idea that a Mayan mutant with wings on his ankles has been ruling over a suboceanic kingdom in total secrecy for hundreds of years. The movie totally works, up until it doesn't.
I'm late in reviewing the film, and I've seen a lot of existing reviews complain about the franchise-building aspect of the movie. They have entirely misdiagnosed the problem. Wakanda Forever does less to establish future MCU projects than anything else the franchise has released in recent memory. What holds it back is that it must jettison all its ideas to satisfy Marvel's structure.
The problem lies with the Marvel formula, which Wakanda Forever seems desperate to buck, yet must ultimately conform to. We must have an initial confrontation between the villain and hero which serves to make their differences personal. We must have our hero undergo a crisis of faith which undermines their superpowers until they resolve it. We must have a climactic final battle that looks like a video game fight.
In practice, that means the movie simply stops talking about the ideas underlying the conflict between Wakanda and Talocan, choosing instead to let them resolve through bog standard superhero fight logic. The fight isn't won because Shuri, now the Black Panther, finds a moral middle ground with Namor's hardline ideology. The script attempts to frame it as such, but in truth, she wins because she figures out that the water guy has less power when he's dehydrated. She wins because she figures out how to reverse engineer the herb that gives people Black Panther powers. She wins because, hey, we have to wrap this thing up somehow, right?
I can't think of a more potent example of these problems than the storyline featuring Everett Ross. He's arrested by de Fontaine, who knows he's been secretly communicating with Ramonda, so that she and the US will be free to declare war on Wakanda. This happens right before the final battle between Wakanda and Talocan, which meant that, for the entire extended battle sequence, I was expecting the US Military to show up and rain hellfire on both armies. It would be the perfect narrative device to force an alliance between Wakanda and Talocan, giving them a common enemy with explicitly imperialist, neocolonial goals to rally against. Instead, the movie seems to forget how much of its own script was focused on setting up an Iraq-style US intervention. It never comes back into play, and the Americans never commit the war crimes we're explicitly told they're planning to commit. After the big battle, the Dora Milaje bust Ross out of custody, and the film expects us to consider the whole issue resolved.
How did this happen? I can think of any number of reasons. The studio not wanting an explicitly anti-American message for the film. The Pentagon, who funds a lot of Marvel movies, might have had similar notes. Or, most charitably, they're saving these storylines for the next Captain America flick. But no matter why it happened, the sudden shift from big ideas to big battles neuters the entire movie. Wakanda Forever almost had the balls to say something important, and maybe almost is as close as a Marvel movie will ever come.
Then again, Thor: Ragnarok exists, and it has a message Wakanda Forever came close to making. In that film, director Taika Waititi argues that civilizations built on colonial violence and exploitation must be burned to the ground in order to save the people currently living in them. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) allows Ragnarok, the destruction of Asgard, to pass because the alternative is allowing the sins of the past to destroy his people. Namor in Wakanda Forever wants to burn the colonizing powers to the ground no matter how many lives it costs, and instead of maintaining a status quo, could Shuri not have arrived at a similar conclusion to Thor? It's true that Ragnarok is set in outer space, where Marvel can get away with such things, since the Pentagon only cares what they say about America. That's why I suspect the Department of Defense were the ones to cut the balls off Wakanda Forever.
It's a hard swing and a close miss for Wakanda Forever, and the close misses are always the toughest. It's so easy to see what this movie could have been in comparison to what it is, and given the uphill battle Coogler and co. were fighting—the death of once-in-a-generation talent Chadwick Boseman, a pandemic that scuttled Marvel's entire release strategy, the need to graft everything onto the existing MCU timeline—I can forgive its flaws up to a point. But despite all those very real obstacles, I must judge the finished product on its own terms, apart from everything surrounding it.
On the Rihanna song made for Wakanda Forever that scores its credits, she sings, "Burning in a hopeless dream / Hold me when you go to sleep." The former bar might describe the brilliant first half of this movie. The latter is how I felt when I walked out of the theater.
—M.A.M.