Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Directed by Ryan Coogler

The King is dead, long live the Queen. 

The film opens with a very well crafted and respectful send-off to King T’Challa and by extension the actor who played him Chadwick Boseman, who succumbed to cancer in August 2020. The emotions in this scene seem genuine, as Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) and Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), his sister and mother respectively, cry for him as he is being sent-off to the ancestral plane, while the whole of Wakanda clad in white, dances and celebrates his life. I was genuinely surprised and thankful that Disney refrained from CGI-ing him into the movie. 

A year later Ramonda is now Queen of Wakanda and constantly under attack by the world community for not sharing their precious resource of Vibranium, a very durable metal imbued with nigh magical capabilities. It is made clear that the world leaders, led by America, will at some point try to take it for themselves, whether the Wakandans want it or not. 

At the same time, an American military vessel that searches for vibranium in the sea with the help of some mcguffin device, finds it and is instantly attacked by a new foe: blue sea people. As everyone on the ship is dead, the Americans are convinced that the attack was perpetrated by the Wakandans. Meanwhile, the King of the blue sea people, Namor, a muscly dude with tiny ridiculous wings on his ankles, contacts Queen Ramonda and asks her to bring him the inventor of the mcguffin searching device and kill them, as his people don’t want to be found, therefore setting up another unfathomably powerful nation that has Vibranium.  

The inventor turns out to be a 19-year-old genius college student by the name of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) who, as the film tells us in no uncertain terms, will become Ironheart, the successor to Iron Man. Shuri and General Okoye (Danai Jekesai Gurira), the commander of Wakanda’s all female palace guard the Dora Milaje, retrieve the girl, but being the good guys and all that don’t want to kill her.  

First the good things. It is definitely a female-led movie and the action scenes are fun, as we see the ladies decked out in the latest Wakandan tech beat on various faceless goons (and goonesses). M’Baku (Winston Duke) is a delight, as he was in the last movie and his interactions with Shuri are some of the best character moments in the film. Shuri’s character development in the wake of her brother’s death was mostly well done and made her transition into the new Black Panther believable, but also quite tropey. 

Unfortunately that’s it for the good things. The film clocks in at 161 minutes, of which at least half an hour is unnecessary bloat. The climax was built up to, but never really delivered, showcasing some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in a Marvel movie in a long time. The feeble attempt to humanize Namor’s people in the span of the movie fell flat, as they turned into faceless CGI Orcs attacking Helm’s Deep in the last battle.  

All in all, the sequel strayed too far from its realistic and social commentary roots that were set up beautifully in the first movie and fell into exploitative pitfalls that shouldn’t have been possible had it followed the route that was set for it. It tried to tell a tender story of grief and failed, tried to tell a story of vengeance versus responsibility and failed in this regard as well. What’s left is an overlong (sometimes fun) husk of cinematic drivel that I can’t recommend in good conscience.