Genre: Superhero
Premise: After T’Challa’s death, an angry group of people at the bottom of the sea show up on Wakanda’s doorstep and demand an alliance to help defeat the rest of the planet.
About: After the death of the series’ star, Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther franchise had to reset and construct a new path. After a long and agonizing production that had its fair share of victims (star Letitia Wright claimed, at one point, that she was done with the franchise), the film finally came out this weekend. The movie caps off Marvel’s controversial, “Phase 4,” which found itself taking more chances and putting a premium on diversity, which yielded mixed results. The film took in 180 million dollars over the weekend. The original film debuted with 200 million dollars.
Writers: Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole
Details: 160 minutes!
Can you imagine making this movie?
Your star dies. A pandemic swoops in, handicapping your production. And your replacement star resists getting vaccinated, causing a complete upheaval on set. Oh yeah, and she later suffers a terrible injury, which further throws production into disarray.
I don’t believe in cursed movies. But if you’re going to make an argument for them, Wakanda Forever is Exhibit A. It reminded me a lot of what happened to the Matrix sequels. Those films were so devastating to those directors that they haven’t been the same people since.
But Hollywood has a long history of cursed productions that turned into great movies. Look no further than Titanic. The prevailing theory for a pro-drama production is that on-set conflict fuels an energy that seeps into the movie itself.
Let’s find out if that was the case with Wakanda Forever.
WK starts with T’Challa’s scientist sister, Shuri, frantically working through a computer computation to move the molecules around to save her sick brother, who we do not see. She fails and an elaborate Wakanda funeral follows.
As Shuri and her mother, Queen Ramonda, pick up the pieces after T’Challa’s death, they are visited by a spooky dude from the water with wings on his feet named, Namor. Namor tells Ramonda and Shuri that some American scientist is providing the U.S. with tech that’s allowing them to mine super-resource, vibranium, from their seabed. He wants them to kill this scientist.
So Shuri joins Wakanda’s new number 1 warrior, Okoye, and they head to Massachusetts where they find out this scientist is a college girl named Riri. Riri’s been working on her own personal Iron Man suit, which she’s able to bust out and play with as soon as the government gets wind of this meeting and attacks the three of them.
Our trio escapes, but are quickly captured by Namor and his sea people, who take Shuri and Riri down to the bottom of the ocean. There, Namor explains to Shuri that the Wakandans have to team up with his people and destroy the world because, um, the world is bad?
When Shuri and the Wakandans refuse, Namor kills the queen, making Shuri the new queen. Shuri finally accepts the burden of leading Wakanda, becomes the new Black Panther, and orders an attack on Namor for revenge. The two then battle to the death!
I absolutely loved the opening of this movie.
Well, first of all, I love Letitia Wright, the actress who plays Shuri. She’s unlike any actress out there. And I felt that she captured not just the fictional response to Black Panther’s death in this opening scene, but her own response to Chadwick’s death. It was so heartbreaking. And I teared up myself when the Marvel logo came up but instead of playing all the best moments from Marvel movies like the logo usually does, it played the best moments of T’Challa. It was probably the best creative choice of the movie.
But once the movie got going, it was clear that the screenwriters were lost in the woods as the entire narrative took on a ‘searching’ vibe. It was never quite sure what it wanted to be and, as a result, became a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the villains. The choice of villains felt totally random. Why ocean people? There isn’t any clear connection or irony in choosing these sea villains. The only thing I could come up with was that Namor’s folks were the only ones who could get into Wakanda, since they did so through the water.
Don’t get me wrong. The design of these people was cool. I just didn’t feel any organic connection between them and the Black Panther mythology.
From there, you have this double-whammy issue of no main character and no male characters. Through the first 100 minutes of the movie, I had no idea who the main character was. For those who don’t know, the main character in a screenplay is almost always the one driving the plot forward. They have a goal. And we follow them as they try and achieve that goal.
Here, we get this awkward mash-up of quarter-main-characters with Shuri, Okoye, Ramonda, and Riri. Audiences feel confused when they don’t have a main character to latch onto. They need that guidance. Even in Avengers, Iron Man was our main character. We always came back to him to pull the story together. This film lacked that.
And then, you had this strange lack of testosterone in the movie. While I know all-female casts are trendy these days, it seems like a major risk for a movie that’s supposed to be for everyone. To have no male protagonist joining the Wakandans?? You need that balance between the male and female and this most certainly lacked that.
There was something else missing from the story and I kept struggling to figure out what it was until late. Coogler decided to make an origin story. This movie was Shuri’s origin story. Never in the history of trilogies have we ever had an origin story in the second film. Granted, these were extenuating circumstances, but still. If something felt odd to you, that was probably what it was.
And the thing is, they could’ve made it work. But they decided on a structural choice that kept the plot from succeeding, which was they waited all the way until the end to turn Shuri into Black Panther. That sounds great from a character arc perspective. But from an audience enjoyment perspective, it doesn’t work.
Look at The Matrix. Neo doesn’t fully turn into “The One” until the very end of the movie. But he still gets to do cool matrix-like stuff, such as fighting Agent Smith in the subway, or shooting up a bunch of swat dudes in a building lobby while flipping around, well before that happens.
Shuri does absolutely nothing before she becomes Black Panther. And that really hurt this film. Cause we were all looking for someone cool to latch onto. And we didn’t have it for the bulk of the movie.
On top of all this, the motivation is really weird in this film. “Motivation” is the starting point for any plot. Thanos is going to snap the universe in half – we need to stop him. That’s clear motivation.
The motivation here is all sorts of wonky. The U.S. or NATO (it’s unclear) are trying to steal vibranium from Namor’s people. So Namor comes to Wakanda and says, “you need to help us stop them.”
What???
So the main issue isn’t even Wakanda-related? It’s affecting some other group of people we didn’t even know about until this movie?? And they need our help to stop a third party??
What are we doing here?
I call these “one-step removed” motivations. They’re not direct. They require some connecting variable to make sense. And those are never as strong as direct motivations.
So when you combine a one-step removed motivation with no main characters with the oxymoron of a sequel origin story with a “No dudes allowed” sign with a hero who doesn’t do anything cool until the final act… it’s really hard to get a good movie out of that.
YET…. I almost recommended this. As I said, I really like Letitia Wright. So I enjoyed watching her whenever she was onscreen. I thought some of the bad guy moves – such as water bombs and siren songs – were kinda cool. I thought Okoye was a kick-butt fighter. I liked watching all her fight scenes. And while there were too many talking-heads scenes for my liking, I find Ryan Coogler to have a great feel for directing character-driven scenes. They always felt genuine to me.
The reason it doesn’t get a passing grade is Riri. Your movie is too long. Way too long. Yet you’re greenlighting the addition of a character who has nothing to do with the plot and who adds a good 20 minutes to the movie? That’s unacceptable.
How off was the addition of this character? Namor literally says, “I want to kill this girl.” That’s his whole motivation for the first half of the movie. Then, he has her IN HIS UNDERWATER PALACE and he doesn’t do anything to her!!!! He seems unaware that she’s even around.
Someone has to take a stand against this dumb Marvel directive of shoving unimportant characters into a movie in the hopes of building their awareness for separate franchises. Wakanda Forever could’ve been a really good movie. It could’ve been the most emotional movie of the entire franchise. But when you’re forced to rearrange plotlines, making them convoluted and hard to follow, in the process elongating your film to an annoying length, to include characters like Riri, who weren’t even likable mind you, you lose a lot of points for that.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has some shining moments. But its endless runtime and questionable plot choices keep the narrative from ever finding a satisfying pace. I would rank it somewhere in the middle of the pack of the 30 Marvel movies that have been produced so far.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Reluctant Leader Narrative, which is what we get here with Shuri, shouldn’t be executed to such an extreme that she only becomes a leader in the waning minutes of the film. There are ways to get your hero into cool situations and have them do cool things without them having to officially lose their reluctance. That’s the entirety of Braveheart. William Wallace was the most reluctant of all the reluctant leaders. And yet he fought in several giant battles throughout the movie. Yes, it’s cool to have that big transformational moment in the end when your reluctant hero finally accepts their calling. But I felt Shuri could’ve done a lot more in this story, and still got that cool symbolic moment where she puts on the suit and officially becomes the leader.
