The release Black Panther like nothing before it. The impact, immediate and lasting, is cosmic. That the film premiered during the Trump years, a backward period in 2018 when Black lives felt more precarious than usual and the call for Black superheroes to become more urgent, was gives the film’s message a special power. It was a triple phenomenon – a commercial, critical and cultural success.
King T’Challa is a new age hero in an uncertain new age. No stranger to larger-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, wearing a kind of sadness that cannot be ignored. MCU movies and series rarely convey the chaos of pain with such unflinching focus (WandaVision approach in a unique depiction of spousal pain 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 she has done her best to maintain the status of an African nation as a sovereign power. . As 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 a In the initial scene, French soldiers try to steal some and quickly get their donkey kicked by Dora Milaje’s secret agents). Greed is the root cause of all conflicts throughout history, and Cooler and Cole would love to start the story that way. The United States government begins a vibranium tracking operation in the Atlantic Ocean, but it is mysteriously thwarted by an unknown force — the people of Talokan, an underwater empire that is home to the only other source of vibranium in the world. 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 the wings on his ankles) – 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.
As it turns out, a fight isn’t quite as convincing as the living principles behind it. Like the U.S. government’s unrelenting thirst for global influence. Or the extreme rage that Shuri (Letitia Wright) feels at the loss of her brother, and the very real way it drives her to act. Or how Namor’s villain, if it should even be called that, is rooted somewhere deeper, somewhere more human. He is cut from the classic villains of the MCU. Like Wanda. Like Khang. Namor is glorified in paradox and not completely irrational in his rage. It’s all because of how nicely his plot is built: He’s the descendant of a 16th-century Chinese-American tribe that fled slavery and was forced to seek refuge. Underwater. His morals carry weight.
