The fictional African state of Wakanda becomes a matriarchy in a fervent, yet understandably subdued new Black Panther movie whose exuberant and mournful impulses are at odds with each other. We can also see, almost in real time, a franchise coming to terms with loss at the same as its fictional characters. Chadwick Boseman, who in the previous adventure had played T’Challa, king of Wakanda, died of cancer two years ago at just 43 years old. Now this new film pays a heartfelt and decent tribute to his memory in a drama shaped around this sudden blow, making an honest attempt to shape a superhero film around the subject of grief.
T’Challa’s sister Shuri now has to step up to a quasi-regency role alongside her grief-stricken mother Ramonda, who now becomes queen because T’Challa has suddenly died; here are two typically elegant and charismatic performances from Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett, with Wright’s Shuri now stricken not just with sadness but a new kind of bleak self-knowledge. Despite her renown as a scientist, she could do nothing to prevent or even understand T’Challa’s fatal illness.
Wakanda’s intelligence agent and valued counsellor Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) has gone into self-imposed exile in Haiti. On the home front, Ramonda and Wakandan warriors Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Aneka (Michaela Coel) have to deal with a truculent Jabari tribesman M’Baku (a formidable presence from Winston Duke) and also what they see as opportunist and predatory attacks from western powers including France and the US at the UN who, sensing weakness, now want to seize the Wakandans’ precious mineral reserve of vibranium.
And there is another sensational development: the CIA, in the form of careworn station chief Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) has employed brilliant young MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) to design a new vibranium detector, which discloses a new source of this precious substance under the sea – but this turns out to be the property of another unknown people from a secret undersea city called Talokan, led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta) with Mesoamerican connections. The US incursion into their property rights triggers a terrible conflict in which Namor’s people, instead of making common cause with the Wakandans, wages war on them and the overground “colonisers” alike. As for Shuri, her destiny and birthright still lie ahead of her – a new female power in the land – and she has to decide whether she will be inspired in her time of trial by the memory of wise T’Challa, or less salubrious figures.
As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing. And first among equals here is Wright. Shuri finds that that Wakandans’ great burden or even their tragedy is that they are fighting people who should be their allies – and this movie, like the previous one, can claim to be working with the themes of empire, oppression and even energy security. But I felt that there was a constraint at work, an understandable constraint given that the film is to some degree about grief and loss, but one which Wakanda Forever had not quite found a way of developing and absorbing. At all events, this is another star performance from Wright.
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is released on 10 November in Australia, and 11 November in the US and UK.
