The MCU Wasn’t Built for This

Grief and colonization can’t be dealt with like just another supervillain.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER carries a series of burdens no one film should ever bear. Its director, Ryan Coogler, must grapple with the challenges and expectations born of and influenced by the tragic loss of star Chadwick Boseman while crafting an entertaining sequel to a billion-dollar blockbuster in the constricting Marvel Cinematic Universe. He must balance the expectations of Black folks who have elevated the movie to celestial status—a pinnacle of Afrofuturistic desires for a specific kind of Black power and representation onscreen. The film is called to respectfully introduce a new Black Panther and push the MCU forward with the introduction of Namor (Tenoch Huerta), an Indigenous Mesoamerican god-king of the isolationist undersea kingdom Talokan—which has its own cache of vibranium and a superhuman strength that makes Wakanda buckle. Perhaps most crucially, the cast must act out their grief while mired in the emotion themselves; this is especially true for Letitia Wright’s Shuri, who is tasked with shouldering the film’s most dramatic moments.

To say the sequel is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid—a failure less of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative limitations.

I have mixed feelings about the original Black

Panther, which was released to great acclaim in

2018. I’ve never gravitated to the mythos, primarily

because T’Challa is a person of such noble stature that he can come across as too perfect and lacking the human foibles that let a character take root in your memory. (In a surprising moment of self-awareness for the franchise, someone in Wakanda Forever says as much.) But Boseman imbued T’Challa with a sweetness toward his loved ones, making the actor’s absence even more profound. Without him, Wakanda Forever struggles to hit the elegant emotional frequencies of its predecessor. The Marvel framework tends to falter when trying to portray genuine, complicated feelings, and what is more complicated than grief? It lacks a linear quality. It isn’t something you can overcome with a magic spell or divine ability. It breaks against the form and function of a Marvel property.

Wakanda Forever begins with T’Challa’s funeral—a sight tinged with joy and sorrow. Here, the film is at its most vivid and visually intriguing. The coffin is carried through Wakanda’s capital by the tearful Dora Milaje, led by Okoye (Danai Gurira). The cortege and the people of Wakanda are dressed in all white, a striking touch from costuming legend Ruth E. Carter. While T’Challa’s closest loved ones are solemn, the others move their bodies in an ecstatic dance slowed down to the speed of molasses. But the scene is all too brief. The editing, which creates a rushed quality here and a lethargic one elsewhere, works against what the sequence accomplishes. We’re soon jettisoned into the thrust of the story (though thrust is perhaps too forceful a word to describe such an anemic film).

In the wake of T’Challa’s death from an unnamed illness, his mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), must help her empire navigate assaults from within and without. The true might of Wakanda is now widely known, and the film tries to spell out the geopolitical consequences of this new reality. In doing so, it turns to its lone white folks—Everett K. Ross (an annoyingly nondescript Martin Freeman functioning as living exposition) and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (a hard-edged but not altogether engaging Julia Louis-Dreyfus)— and screeches into the land of boredom and obligation. They and the CIA soon learn that an even greater threat than Wakanda is Talokan, led by Namor, who is eager to fight against the surface world in order to protect his people. Namor isn’t so much a villain as a misshapen antagonist forced into violence by a script that requires it to push the plot along, yet he cares deeply for the barely sketched supporting figures of his kingdom.

The beating heart of the film is meant to be Shuri, who is pulled in as many directions as the story itself: between grief-fueled vengeance and growth, between chaos and peace. The sharp-mouthed, highly intelligent younger-sister archetype Shuri embodied never quite worked for me, but her graduation to a character saddled with so much devastation doesn’t either. Wright can’t find the required intensity, and she lacks the physicality to stand out in frames filled with more forceful actors. Lupita Nyong’o fares much better; her brightness as Nakia, T’Challa’s widow, infuses the film with some beautiful moments. Other characters feel mostly cursory by comparison, never totally rounded out with their own moments of bereavement or fully planted personalities. Consider the spunky college student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who is weighed down by the film’s clunkiest jokes. Gurira and Bassett, however, when given the space to do so, capably provide the complex characterization that is otherwise sparse—as in a stunning moment in the kingdom’s throne room shot through with anger and deep longing.

There’s a lot of wasted talent onscreen. Michaela Coel’s character, Aneka, is missing the tricky magnetism the writeractor displays everywhere else. The look of Namor is beguiling, as are the ideas behind his Talokan lineage (he was born in the 16th century and witnessed, as a young child king, the morally repugnant, heartbreaking violence of Spanish conquistadores). But despite the film’s nearly three hours, there isn’t enough time dedicated to Namor’s people and culture. His hurried origin story is never focused enough on building out Talokan. Who are its people beyond their isolationism? What do they worship and delight in? What powers their beliefs in a world where a deity like Namor exists? Within this section of the film’s tapestry, no character possesses a hint of interiority. Rather than showing a sincere exploration of this Indigenous world, Namor plays like a cunning decision made to broaden Disney’s and Marvel’s target audience under the banner of representation (despite Huerta’s clear commitment and his pleasure in the role). When he is called to deliver lines with the word mutant, they land with a thud.

The action scenes, meanwhile, provide few of the decadent thrills that can power even the emptiest superhero narrative. Those involving the Dora Milaje are blocked in ways that render their physical presence much less graceful than the muscular kineticism of the first film. The choreography of the Talokan fighters isn’t distinct enough either—save for in fits and spurts, as during a fight with Okoye on a city bridge. The new Black Panther is meant to flex their muscles in the back half, but by then, an overstuffed quality has set in. Ultimately, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw lose sight of the rich color and minute detail that make this comic-book world alluring and instead allow their picture to feel as busy as the Black Panther’s updated goldand-black costume.

Coogler is a strong director who’s still relatively early in his career, but his voice isn’t evolving so much as rattling inside the morass of the ever-growing MCU. Who does Coogler want to be as an artist? What does he have to say about humanity? Black Panther: Wakanda Forever doesn’t have the answers. ■