A sequel will not be able to make up for the heartbreaking absence of Chadwick Boseman, who played King T’Challa in the first Black Panther movie and passed away in 2020 from colon cancer. Ryan Coogler wisely refrains from attempting to do so.
The death-related themes in earlier Marvel movies may be sidestepped if the filmmakers so choose, but Coogler uses the grief experienced by both Boseman’s fans and his coworkers to produce an unexpectedly somber movie that explores the grieving process.
The Wakanda kingdom is threatened by a race of cerulean-hued aquatic warriors, led by a mutant god by the name of Namor who is rather confusing and inconsistent in his reasons for conflict.
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However, even though not everything works, the emotional core is real, believable, and moving.
A passionate, yet understandably restrained new Black Panther film, whose jubilant and sad impulses are at odds with one another, transforms the fictitious African state of Wakanda into a matriarchy.
Additionally, we can observe a franchise dealing with loss alongside its fictitious characters in what seems to be real-time. T’Challa, the king of Wakanda, was played by Chadwick Boseman in the previous adventure. He passed away from cancer two years ago at the age of 43.
Now, in a narrative built around this unexpected blow, this new movie pays a sincere and decent homage to his memory, making a sincere endeavor to build a superhero movie around the theme of mourning.
Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett give their customarily elegant and charismatic performances as T’Challa’s sister Shuri and her grieving mother Ramonda, who now serves as queen after T’Challa’s untimely death and must weigh her grief against her responsibility to her people.
Wright’s Shuri is now not only overcome with sadness but also with a new kind of bleak self-knowledge. Despite being a renowned scientist, she was powerless to stop or even comprehend T’Challa’s terrible sickness. She is traumatized by the knowledge that her abilities in technology and science were inadequate to save her brother.
Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), an important adviser and intelligence agent for Wakanda, has fled to Haiti for a self-imposed exile. Ramonda and the Wakandan warriors Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Aneka (Michaela Coel) must contend with a ferocious Jabari tribesman named M’Baku (an imposing role played by Winston Duke), as well as what they perceive to be opportunistic and predatory attacks from western powers like France and the US at the UN who now want to seize the Wakandans’ precious mineral reserve of vibranium.
Riri (Dominique Thorne), an MIT undergraduate who has created a vibranium detector and unknowingly signed her own death warrant at the hands of the enraged blue fish people, steps in to fill the void left by a teenage girl science prodigy.
She is hired by the CIA to design a new vibranium detector, which reveals a new source of this priceless material under the sea.
However, it turns out that this device is the property of another unidentified person from a secret undersea city called Talokan, led by the mutant Namor (Tenoch Huerta) who has connections to Mesoamerica.
When the US violates their property rights, it starts a horrible battle in which Namor’s people, rather than siding with the Wakandans, wage war on both of them and the overground “colonizers” as well.
As a new female power in the land, Shuri still has her destiny and birthright to fulfill. She must choose whether to draw strength from less honorable figures or from the memory of the sage T’Challa during this trying time.
Similar to the first movie, there are bold, lavish spectacles, and each of the actors—Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira, and Thorne—delivers a strong performance, raising the intensity on screen just by being present. Wright is the first among equals in this case.
The main burden or even tragedy of Wakandans, in Shuri’s opinion, is that they are at war with people who ought to be their allies. This film, like the one before it, can be said to be dealing with the themes of empire, oppression, and energy security.
However, I felt that there was a restriction at play (which is the death of their star character, Chadwick Boseman), one that Wakanda Forever had not quite managed to grow and internalize even though the movie is, in part, about mourning and loss. In any case, Wright delivers another noteworthy performance.
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