“Without the Black Panther, Wakanda will fall.”
-Namor, king of Talokan
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This post is about the Black Panther sequel. For the original, please click here.
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In loving memory of Chadwick Boseman (1976-2020)
Long live the King.
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Welcome back, and welcome to the next instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Today on the review table we have Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the highly-anticipated sequel to the 2018 classic. Sometime after the Blip, King T’Challa of Wakanda is dying from an unknown illness. As he was brought back from the brink of death before by the heart-shaped herb, his sister Princess Shuri frantically tries to synthetize a replacement as there are no more herbs remaining after Killmonger ordered the rest of them to be incinerated during his tenure as king. Unfortunately, she is unsuccessful and T’Challa, the Black Panther and the beloved King of Wakanda, passes away. One year after the King’s death, Wakanda faces international pressure to share their vibranium resources with the world, but Queen Ramonda staunchly refuses, knowing full well the harmful potential of the material if used by the wrong hands. Several parties, including United States government agencies, use a vibranium detector to locate a deposit at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, previously thought impossible as vibranium is only found in Wakanda. The mining party is mysteriously wiped out by a race of sea-dwelling superhumans led by the long-lived mutant Namor, who is running his own agenda and whose underwater kingdom of Talokan is now threatened by the undersea race for vibranium. As the world awakens to this new threat, Wakanda prepares to face it, for the first time, without their protector the Black Panther to guard them.
It’s tough to talk about Wakanda Forever without mentioning some heavy spoilers since a lot of the interesting things about it involve talking about its story and how that turned out. I’ll save that for the Extras episode, so for now I’ll give this movie the same treatment as I have Avengers: Infinity War. This’ll be a purely technical review since written reviews these days are supposed to be spoiler-free. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will be in theaters for a long time to come, so I don’t expect everyone going to see it just yet. Still, given how restricted I am in terms of discussion here, I expect this review to be quite short. The first thing I am going to mention is one of the things that made the original Black Panther so attractive and that is the visual look it has. I know the CGI from the first movie received some criticism, especially with the imagery of the Black Panther habit, but for now what I mean when I say visual look is the set design and the cinematography. Marvel has long had a habit of showing off landscape designs especially when it comes to futuristic or otherworldly cultures and places and their city designs. There have been intricate metropolitan and rural landscapes such as the city of Asgard, the temple at Kamar-Taj, Sakaar, Knowhere and Xandar, ancient Babylon, the village of Ta Lo, the variant Earths in the Multiverse, Omnipotence City and of course, the shots of rural and metropolitan Wakanda. The MCU has long showed these off with wide, sweeping and perspective shots and every single time I’m left in awe and simply wondering what it would be like to live in such a place. It’s no different in Wakanda Forever, with the Wakandans’ Golden City being put on full display. As far as cityscapes go, there isn’t much we have not seen before, apart from a few new districts by the riversides, but the film’s newest trick is the undersea realm of Talokan. I won’t say much, but when I saw the film’s promotional materials and that there would be an underwater kingdom rivaling Wakanda, I thought that it was Marvel’s version of Atlantis. Instead, it is the Mesoamerican-themed Talokan. I was expecting it to be a terrestrial society underwater- meaning that it was located in a sealed environment at the bottom of the ocean, much like how Atlantis was portrayed in the animated Justice League TV show or in Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. No, instead Talokan is a fully-submerged society inhabited by a race of water-breathing merfolk. Considering that visually, the shots of them were blurred by being underwater, it turned out very well, and we are all expecting advancements in such underwater CGI with the release of Avatar: The Way of Water in December.
Now we get to the tangibles of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which include everything we can touch, especially the costume and prop design. When Black Panther came out I talked a lot about how much I liked the costume design, especially how well it was used to reflect the differences between the five Wakandan tribes. The tribes of Wakanda are kind of like different province groups in China, Japan and other places in the world. When you look at them they are unmistakably Wakandan but also distinctive in their own ways. The blues of the Merchant Tribe are more heavily-jeweled to differentiate them from the blues and mountain browns of the Border Tribe. The bright and deep reds of the Mining Tribe contrast the cooler greens and yellows of the River Tribe, with the red-and-gold uniforms of the Dora Milaje shining next to the purples of the priests and priestesses of the heart-shaped herb. And that’s all before the fur-clad, wood-wielding, white face-painted Jabari show up. The showpiece scenes from Black Panther that showed off these costumes so well were the tribes’ gathering at the Warrior Falls, T’Challa’s challenge by M’Baku and subsequent coronation and the city streets during T’Challa’s first day as king. We see more of the same in Wakanda Forever. The influences came from a large number of African peoples, including the Maasai, Zulu, Xhosa, Suri, Tuareg, Himba and many others, along with regional inspirations from real-life places such as Lesotho and the Congo for the set designs. In Wakanda Forever, I found the influences of the newcomers just as interesting if not more. Talokan is descended from the peoples of pre-conquest Mesoamerica, especially the Mayans and Aztecs, with the name “Talokan” coming from the term Tlālōcān, meaning place of Tlālōc. According to Aztec mythology, Tlālōcān was a paradise ruled by Tlālōc, the deity of rain, thunder and lightning. It was very nice to see these influences in the design of Talokan, especially in the costumes and the jewelry, and I’ll bet that Wakanda Forever has already spurred a renewed interest in Mesoamerican cultures because of it.
Just to go over the story in very vague terms…the world, both in-universe and in real life, have been shocked by the sudden death of beloved star Chadwick Boseman. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2016, yet continued to act in very physical roles in the MCU despite his illness and he never stopped fighting. For the fans, he has done so much, not only in bringing such a highly-entertaining character to life but also to give empowerment and attention to Afro-American and African cultures as well. The King is dead, having passed away at the age of 43. May he rest in peace. So for Wakanda, what does this mean? With their protector, the last Black Panther, gone, the nation finds itself assailed on all sides politically by surface nations and militarily by Talokan. Queen Ramonda finds herself and her country in a precarious situation and she is determined to defend her people’s ways and principles in remembrance of the strength which her son and husband did the same. Her daughter, Shuri, is consumed with grief at her brother’s death and her failure to save him, and has abandoned her research on heart-shaped herb synthesis, believing the Black Panther to be an obsolete relic of the past. The story told in Wakanda Forever is not wholly original, but it is compelling. It uses recent real-world events very smartly and eulogizes Chadwick Boseman in a very meaningful and respectful way. This is all before we are introduced to Namor, the king of Talokan, and his personal motivations in protecting his own people, whose story is also one of tragedy and loss. The only downer is that in trying to handle all these plotlines, the movie overran a bit at two hours and forty minutes.
I’ll leave you to discover these stories yourself. I hope you have enjoyed Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in theaters yourself and if you haven’t, I hope our written review has convinced you to watch it. I’ll say that Wakanda Forever is not as well-liked as the original was simply because of the absence of Chadwick Boseman, but for what it does in the time it took to do it, it still stands as one of my favorite post-Infinity Saga MCU entries. I am so glad to be able to return to Wakanda, and with the upcoming series for Disney+, I hope we can go back sooner rather than later.
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THEATRICAL RELEASE TRAILER
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