Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Wakanda Forever, the second instalment of the Black Panther franchise and the umpteenth of the MCU, doubles as a case study in the limitations of algorithmic, formulaic filmmaking – the kind on which Marvel Studios have hung their marketability and obscenely wide profit margins for almost a decade and a half. You can hardly blame them. It is a formula that has thus far generated an estimated $25 billion, with Wakanda Forever projected to add at least $400 million to that sum in the US alone, meaning the film will almost certainly be profitable on its roughly $200 million budget, despite production delays and setbacks.
Of these, the widely publicised tragedy of Chadwick Boseman’s premature passing in 2020 during pre-production was the most emotionally and logistically pulverising. Not only was this a shock for fans the world over, but also landed co-writer and director Ryan Coogler and the production team at large at a crossroads. For a while, the idea of recasting the central role of T’challa, king of Wakanda, was touted, and subsequently abandoned in favour of facing the loss head-on. Loss would therefore be thematically woven throughout the script, the grief of Wakanda mirroring the real grief of the cinematic community. In T’challa’s place is Ramonda, Wakanda’s Queen Mother (portrayed in a typically commanding performance from Angela Bassett), who takes the administrative reins of the nation in the wake of her son’s death at the hands of a mystery illness. Also stepping into a more central role is Letitia Wright’s Princess Shuri, whose grief is coloured by guilt at her inability to identify and cure T’challa’s illness. While Bassett’s Ramonda is where the weight of power now rests, this is, in essence, Shuri’s film. It is her arc that imbues the narrative with its moral jeopardy.
It is a moral jeopardy that feels confused and unfocused, however. The reluctant antagonist is the vibranium-rich, mesoamerican aquatic empire of Talokan and its ankle-winged leader Namor (Tenoch Huerta). In a screeching contrivance, Namor seeks an alliance with the Wakandans (the surface world’s vibranium powerhouse) in an effort to strengthen their own standing in diplomatic relations. The alternative, Namor warns Wakanda, is war and the destruction of their nation. But Namor is framed as righteous in his antagonism, a typically bloated, with an indulgent backstory sequence and a thriving underwater community he is duty-bound to protect apparently designed to introduce moral ambiguity and prickly dark edges. In the place of enigmatically woven moral introspection is the cinematography, so dark and moody that inane battle sequences may cause crow’s feet around the eyes. The overcast photography also dulls the visual splendour of Wakanda, so meticulously and vibrantly realised in 2018’s Black Panther.
In its pacing and soullessly planted beats, Wakanda Forever microscopically follows the structural handbook while attempting to instil something more thoughtful, melancholy, even ghostly in its mechanism. While the correct judgement was exercised in the choice to acknowledge and attempt to reckon with Boseman’s untimely passing (recasting T’challa could have unleashed biblical disaster of Talokan capability on the franchise) the film’s failure to execute this in any meaningful sense exemplifies the limitations of the box-ticking procedural of Marvel filmmaking. In place of a carefully harboured tone of pathos, perfunctory references to death and grief feel scattered over the story like hundreds and thousands.
There is no doubt that the film lacks the charismatic kernel of Boseman’s T’challa, and it is a void Bassett and Wright come just short of filling, although it is perhaps fair to point out that nobody could. Wakanda Forever is almost antithetical in every sense to its landmark predecessor: unfocused, uninspiring and insipid, not to mention half an hour longer.
Matthew McMillan
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is released nationwide on 11th November 2022.
Watch the trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever here:
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