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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a worthy successor to marvel's most successful film. But it isn't perfect. IN this video we break down some of the movie's problems and celebrate what made it work.
Featuring:
Matt Singer: / mattsinger
Greg Alba @ReelRejects
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Written and Hosted by Ryan Arey ( / ryanarey )
Edited by Harriet Lengel-Enright, Randolf Nombrado, Brianna McLarty, Sean Martin, and Ethan Lavinsky
#WakandaForever #marvel #Review
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was a hard movie to watch. Not saying that because it was bad-it wasn;t perfect, but I’ll get into that in a minute. For a movie about magic plants and people living underwater and mutants-it has a real emotional heart at its core. Because everyone in the audience is mourning the loss of Chadwick boseman-just like the characters on screen are mourning T’Challa. It’s the kind of personal connection to a movie that you don’t usually get, apart from documentaries.
In a franchise that was not the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they probably would have delayed this movie for a few years But, that’s not reaLly an option with Marvel, because this film exists in part, to set up more movies and TV shows. That’s actually this movie’s biggest drawback that I'll talk about in a second.
Writer Director Ryan Coogler stopped into this movie with a broken heart, mourning his friend-and I think they found the perfect way to write T’Challa out of the franchise. For one, it was brilliant to give T’Challa a mysterious disease that he kept hidden from everyone-because this is a reflection of Chadwick Boseman’s life, and makes the onscreen death more tragic.
I mean think about it, there are hundreds of ways they could have handled this that would have just felt off. T’Challa could have been attacked and killed by Namor’s people in the first scene. Or he could have been assassinated by some splinter group loyal to Killmonger. Or hell, they could have had the character go into space only to return as a different actor in the future.
Instead they used the character’s death to motivate the character, and not plot. Shuri is the focus of this film. She begins the move with a prayer, and she ends it by sparing Namor’s life. She is angry at T'Challa;s death. Angry at Killmonger for destroying the herb, angry at herself for failing to save him-and probably, angry at her brother for keeping his illness a secret.
That rag drives Shuri’s heart through the whole story, as she has to eventually answer the question: what kind of ruler is she going to be?
And Ryan Coogler also, once again, gives us one of the best-if not the best-MCU villain in namor. Namor in the comics has never been a household name. Even though Aquaman debuted later, Namor doesn;t have that name recognition. No comic readers know that he is a badass-sometimes a good guy, sometimes a bad guy-but always an a-hole who’s trying to bone Mr Fantatsic;s wife.
Aquaman comics even borrowed Namor’s edginess into the 90s. Reviving him into the king of the bro-cean that Josn Mamoa embodies. So namor was ripe for reinvention on the big screen, and this was perfect. Killmonger was reimaged as a villain who carried the scars of slavery and poverty-a perfect counterpoint to wakanda’s isolated civilization.
Namor is another reflection of wakanda. What if the heart shaped herb was found by people who were already oppressed? People who wanted nothing to do with the colonizers. In the comics, namor is always mad about humanity spoiling the seas. But in this movie, the reaction is to something less ambiguous-he is protecting his people form genocide.
He’s a Moses figure, leading his people away form slavery and genocide-or imagine if superman was able to lead survibirs of kpyon into a afe location.
Okay, yeah, like Kandor. So talocan and wanda are flip side of each other. In the comics wakanda and atlantis were both always secret societies, but this movie’s brilliance is the reason those societies each stayed secret. Talacon felt like a real place, filled with real people-a million times better realized than the Atlantis we got in Aquaman.