The release Black Panther like nothing before. The impact, immediate and lasting, is cosmic. That the film premiered during the Trump years, a tumultuous time in 2018 when Black lives felt more precarious than usual and the call for Black superheroes more urgent, was gives its message a special charge. It was a more than threefold phenomenon — a commercial, critical, and cultural triumph.
King T’Challa is a new age hero in a new uncertain time. No stranger to bigger-than-life roles, Chadwick Boseman brought poise and charisma to the performance alongside an all-star cast that included Lupita Nyong’o and Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther has teeth, and it’s smart enough to get through the easy trap of being represented in an industry that lacks color and meaning. A tribute to director Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole, the film is more than admittedly magic; it’s a measure of real progress. It talked to us and we replied back. The new Black future — complex, lush, and free — is unfolding.
Unforeseen in one of those futures, Boseman died in 2020 from colon cancer. The franchise is built on star power and without Boseman, one of Marvel’s brightest and most promising characters, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever To be haunted by his absence, put on a feeling that cannot be ignored. MCU movies and sequences rarely allocate the chaos of grief with such a light-hearted focus (WandaVision comes close in its unique depiction of the husband’s suffering and its psychological aftereffects). The positioning is curious but effective. I hesitate to call Wakanda Forever a new kind of superhero blockbuster — it hasn’t completely reinvented the wheel — but it’s almost done. Coogler has equipped his sequel with a changed vocabulary: It speaks from a place of loss as well as victory. Grief is its mother tongue.
The king is dead, and the eyes of the world are once again on Wakanda. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has ascended the throne, and in the year since her son’s death has gone to great lengths to maintain the African nation’s status as a sovereign power. The only country known to have it, Wakanda is still rich in vibranium – the mystical ore used to create advanced weapons and technology – and refuses to share its resources with allies (in an early scene). , French soldiers try to steal some and quickly get their donkey kicked by undercover agents Dora Milaje). Greed has been the source of all conflicts throughout history, and Cooler and Cole wanted to start the story that way. The United States government begins a campaign to track vibranium in the Atlantic Ocean, but it is mysteriously thwarted by an unknown force — the people of Talokan, an underwater empire that has the sole source of vibranium. on the earth.
Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is their wounded leader, and hell wants to keep Talokan’s existence a secret. He has mutant superpowers — enhanced strength, underwater regeneration, and the ability to fly (thanks to his ankle wings) — and commands his nation with a meticulous, if strong, hand. strong. (In the comics, Namor is known as the Sub-Mariner and hails from Atlantis.) The mining operation threatened to expose his oceanic utopia so he devised a plan to stop it. stop it: kill the genius scientist who built the vibranium tracker (Riri Williams, introduced Ironheart to the MCU) and team up with Wakanda to fight the surface world. But Wakanda refused. And the two nations find themselves looking down on an almost certain war.
It turns out that a fight isn’t quite as convincing as the cartoonish principles behind it. Like the U.S. government’s insatiable appetite for global influence. Or the extreme rage that Shuri (Letitia Wright) feels from the loss of her brother, and the very real way it drives her to act. Or Namor’s villain, if it should be called, is rooted somewhere deeper, somewhere more human. He’s cut from the fabric of classic MCU anti-heroes. Like Wanda. Like Kang. Namor is seen as regal in his paradox and not entirely without cause in his rage. It’s all because of how nicely constructed his behind-the-scenes story is: He’s a descendant of a 16th-century Meso-American tribe that fled enslavement and was forced to seek refuge in the water. . His morals carry weight.
