Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the umpty-umpth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and stars Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Tenoch Huerta, Winston Duke, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Dominique Thorne, Martin Freeman, and Trevor Noah.
The movie opens with King T'Challa dying (offscreen) from an unspecified illness as his sister Shuri (Wright) tries vainly to recreate the Heart-Shaped Herb (burned in Black Panther) to save him. Fast forward a year and Shuri has given up on the herb and therefore the Black Panther. Her mother Queen Ramonda (Bassett) is trying to cope with being queen after losing her husband and son, and with the world's perception that Wakanda is weakened without the Black Panther.
And then as mother and daughter sit by the river and talk about loss and mourning, a dude with wings on his feet calling himself Namor (Huerta) rises up out of the water and delivers a message: The US has a machine that allows them to detect vibranium, and there's more of it around the world than just in Wakanda. His nation, the undersea empire of Talokan, controls much of it, and they want the scientist who developed the vibranium-detector. So Shuri goes to Boston with Okoye (Gurira) to retrieve the young genius Riri Williams (Thorne), and in the process both Williams and Shuri get captured by Talokan.
From there everything spirals into war between the two nations, Namor drowns Queen Ramonda, and Shuri recreates the Herb to become the Black Panther. In probably the deftest bit of writing in the movie, when she undergoes her "meet a dead person" vision after taking the Herb, she expects to see T'Challa but instead sees Erik "Killmonger" Stephens (Michael B. Jordan), who tells her - correctly - that it was his influence that pushed T'Challa to bring Wakanda into the wider world, and that he, like Shuri, has the "courage" to get things done, even if that means blood.
This is one of the better films of the post-Endgame MCU, probably the best one of Phase Four (maybe tied with Spider-Man: No Way Home). It reaches that point by staying true to the characters established in the first Black Panther movie and to the larger MCU. It largely ignores the Blip, but it doesn't pooh-pooh it, either, it's just not relevant to this particular story. But of course the really big hurdle this movie had going in was the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman. Marvel could have gone a number of ways: They could have recast him, they could have put him off-planet or some shit, they could have had him killed in action as the Black Panther, but his death from "illness", kept secret from everyone around him, I think helped keep the focus on the mourning process of the principle characters and how they cope with the loss.
If I have a complaint, it's that this movie is kind of overstuffed. There's a lot it's introducing as well as working on its rather heavy themes of loss, legacy, and revenge - we bring in Namor and his kingdom, Riri Williams, the potential assumption of the throne from M'Baku (Duke), and this ongoing hint that Valentina Allegra De Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is going to be the "Nick Fury" of this saga of the MCU. I don't know that any of that needed to or could be cut out, but it means that the movie sometimes elicits an "oh, yeah, and also that" sort of thought.
Visually, it surpasses the first one (the CGI in Black Panther wasn't always, erm, great). The underwater scenes are impressive and Talokan comes off as more mystical than technological, but still powerful for all that. I'm continually annoyed that when Shuri is run through, that injury just...doesn't matter? There's no blood, no lingering effect. But whatever, PG-13.
Angela Bassett was nominated for an Oscar for this movie, and while she didn't win (rightly so, since she lost to Jamie Lee Curtis for Everything Everywhere All At Once), she turns in a nuanced and fierce performance as Queen Ramonda. Dominique Thorne introduces Ironheart and gives us something to look forward to in her D+ series, whenever the hell that happens. But the real standout here is Tenoch Huerta, who does the hard job of presenting an antagonist who's clearly dangerous but still very much sympathetic. The clever play on words that gives him his name ("Namor" is a portmanteau of "sin amor", Spanish for "without love", because he has no love for the surface word) is a very smart bit of world-building, too, and takes us away from the tired-ass trope of all undersea kingdoms being Atlantis.
One of the consequences of Marvel movies being so long (this one's almost three hours) and so frequent is that they often improve on a second watch because you have time to process what's happening. I really like this movie, but I also really hope that some of the things introduced here pay off in the larger world sometime soon.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Pig
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