Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good modern-day superhero movie that had the unfortunate distinction of having to compete with a stone-cold masterpiece: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The original Black Panther from 2018 is, I think, far and away the best comic-book superhero movie ever made, one which transcends the limitations of the genre the way Citizen Kane transcended all the other films made by classic Hollywood about newspapers and the people who ran them. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was handicapped from the get-go not only by the sheer burden of having to compete with the first film but having to compete without the charisma of the first film’s star, Chadwick Boseman. Boseman’s role of T’Challa, both the king of Wakanda (a very fictitious African country with access to the world’s only known supply of a magical element called vibranium, originally brought to earth by a meteor) and the titular superhero, was unavailable to the filmmakers because Boseman himself died of colon cancer in 2020 at age 43. When I heard that Marvel Studios and its parent company, Disney, were making a Black Panther sequel my two immediate questions were, would Ryan Coogler return as director and co-writer; and second, who would replace Chadwick Boseman? As things turned out, the answer to the first question was, “Yes,” and the answer to the second was, “No one.” Instead Coogler and his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, decided to have the character of T’Challa die along with the actor who had originally played him. They created a story about how the surviving Wakandans would keep themselves and their society going without him.

The principal characters of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever are Ramonda (Angela Bassett), who takes over ruling Wakanda after her son T’Challa’s death (unlike Boseman’s real-life death, we don’t know what T’Challa died from); Ramonda’s daughter (and T’Challa’s sister) Shuri (Letitia Wright, top-billed); and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), T’Challa’s ex and – though we don’t find this out until the very end, in the sort of post-credits sequence that’s become a trademark of Marvel films (and much imitated by other studios, particularly those like Warner Bros. which also own a comics company) – mother of Toussaint (Divine Love Konadu-Sun), T’Challa’s son and heir to the Wakandan throne. When the film opens, Shuri is in one of the high-tech labs Wakanda has been able to build and operate through the power of vibranium to genetically re-engineer the now-lost herb that gave the original Black Panther his super-powers. The previous supply of the herb was destroyed by the first film’s Black villain, Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), who wanted Wakanda to use the power of vibranium to subjugate the rest of the world as a sort of anti-colonial revenge for what whites did to Blacks over previous generations. The Wakandans realize that their power is determined by their country being the only one in the world that has vibranium – until a second meteor containing it is discovered on the ocean floor off the coast of Yucatan, Mexico by a team from the CIA and the U.S. Navy’s SEAL unit. They’re using a vibranium detector built by 19-year-old MIT college student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who’s Black – though it’s not clear whether she’s Wakandan, from another part of Africa, or African-American.

Alas, the CIA/SEAL team looking for vibranium underwater is slaughtered by a group of humanoid warriors who live under the sea and can extract oxygen from the sea with their skins, thereby not needing either lungs or gills. Their leader is Prince Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), who as a Marvel comics character was known as “Sub-Mariner” and was from the lost continent of Atlantis but here is an indigenous Mayan and the leader of Talokan, a lost remnant of Mayans who continued Mayan culture under the seas. I was hoping they would someday introduce Namor into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I didn’t think they’d make him an out-and-out villain instead of one of their typically angst-ridden heroes as he was in the comics! Namor wants to create an alliance between his undersea kingdom of surviving Mayans and Wakanda, but if they won’t join he intends to destroy Wakanda and then use the power of both the world’s vibranium supplies to conquer the surface world and at last avenge himself on the injuries done to his people by the conquistadores. (The real Mayans were conquered and subjugated by the Aztecs about 100 years before the Spaniards arrived, and many Mayans helped the Spaniards, wrongly thinking they would liberate them from the tyranny of the Aztecs.) Also in the cast list are CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman, one of the few whites who had a leading role in both Black Panther movies) and his ex, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia-Louis Dreyfus), who for the most part grimly tolerates his attempts to reconcile with her until at the end she surprises both him and us by arresting him for sharing confidential CIA information with Queen Ramonda of Wakanda. There’s also Okoye (Danai Gurira), female leader of Wakanda’s all-woman Special Forces until Ramonda demotes her for allowing Namor to capture Shuri and Rari Williams; and M’Baku (Winston Williams), leader of the Jabari, one of the five tribes that make up the Wakandan Federation, who claims the right under trial by combat to seek the throne of all Wakanda from Shuri, who has taken the reins following Ramonda’s death (from drowning during an attempt to save Rari).

The film climaxes with an all-out battle between Shuri’s forces and Namor’s, during which Shuri dons a female version of the original Black Panther costume after she’s acquired the super-powers to go with it via her genetically re-engineered herb. During the ceremony in which she ingested the herbal decoction, she saw Killmonger, who urged Shuri to use the herb’s power to avenge her family by killing Namor – but after she gets the upper hand over Namor she allows him to live provided he agrees to work with the Wakandans to preserve the secret of vibranium from the rest of the world. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a stunningly produced movie, and as with the first film Coogler and Cole are able to create amazing scenes blending together African traditions and high-tech science-fiction in staging rituals. What the film misses is Chadwick Boseman; early on the filmmakers decided to kill off the original Black Panther character rather than look for another young, hot Black actor to fill the suit, and once they’d made that decision they were stuck with a rather diffuse movie that doesn’t have the powerful character arc of the original. While it’s nice to know the Wakandans have transcended the reflexive sexism one might have attributed to them and can countenance the idea of a woman leader, it doesn’t help the film’s overall structure that Shuri doesn’t become the second Black Panther until the last 45 minutes of this 165-minute movie. The first Black Panther was a cinematic milestone – the first time Charles and I watched it I realized about 20 minutes in, “This is not a great comic-book superhero movie. This is not a great movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a great movie, period” – and the sequel, deprived by circumstance of Boseman’s charismatic performance in the lead and by the filmmakers’ decision not to seek a replacement for him, is a good, solid, entertaining movie in the modern high-tech superhero sci-fi mode but nowhere near the work of art its predecessor was.