"People don't make $140 million movies starring black and brown people," opined Chadwick Boseman when asked about his appearance in Gods of Egypt, as the only person of African descent in the (ill-fated) 2016 blockbuster's principal cast.
That was before Black Panther.
Marvel's all-in take on Afrofuturism, in which Boseman played the titular king-cum-superhero, blew up the global box office in 2018 – coming second only to Avengers: Infinity War, which also featured Boseman's Panther.
It proceeded to charge the annual awards circuit, boldly going where few comic book movies had ventured before: to the Oscars, boasting an unprecedented best picture nomination to boot. (And the award went to…Green Book.)
With Boseman's unexpected passing in 2020 – leaving the fictional African nation of Wakanda without its protector, the stately centre of Ryan Coogler's film – the question became one of how to make a Black-powered blockbuster without him.
Because, as is iterated by the sequel's title, the franchise stops for no man: 'Wakanda Forever,' declares Coogler, back in the director's chair and flanked by returning key cast members including Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett, comprising the remaining royal family, as well as Lupita Nyong'o as T'Challa's former love Nakia and Danai Gurira as Okoye, head of Wakanda's armed forces.
Meeting head-on the complexities of the occasion – the necessity of both mourning the fallen regent and demonstrating that his nation still has plenty to offer audiences without him – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever proves to be one of the more effective recent chapters in the never-ending Marvel story. (It doesn't hurt that it comes on the heels of the overstuffed, undercooked Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the stilted goofiness of Thor: Love and Thunder.)
If the film doesn't manage to recapture the galvanising rush of that first gaze through the WakandaVision lens, CGI sun rays flaring, then it's still a far cry from looking like it was shot in a Best Buy parking lot.
Rather than recast the role of King T'Challa or attempt to resurrect him via CGI (à la Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin in 2016 Star Wars instalment Rogue One), Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole go the classier route of embracing his absence as a structuring factor.
The film opens in the thick of a last-ditch attempt to rescue him, with Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), Wakanda's foremost tech whiz, skittering between stations in her lab while her older brother ails off screen, his fate foregone and imminent.
Previously Black Panther's most hiply effervescent personality, Shuri's temperament has hardened with her brother's decline; this time around, witticisms (or rather, what pass for witticisms in a Marvel film) are mostly dealt by M'Baku (Winston Duke), leader of the Jabari Tribe, and new gal Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a teenage scientist savant who gets recruited to the Wakandan crew.
To revive T'Challa, Shuri needs the Heart-Shaped Herb (a plant infused with the powers of vibranium, the precious metal that fuels Wakanda's techno-utopia) – the supply of which, as Black Panther viewers will recall, was torched by order of Michael B. Jordan's vengeful Killmonger. But she can't get her synthetic versions of the plant, issued by some kind of 3D printer, to give off that vibranium glow. (You can't fake a Heart-Shaped Herb, much as you can't fake a Boseman.)
Unfortunately for the Wakandans, the Herb deficit also prevents them from initiating a new Black Panther, as the superhuman strength that comes with the role derives from that same restorative purple goo.
This means it's a particularly vulnerable time for the nation – so naturally some new potential threat is about to come into view.
Specifically, he emerges from the depths of the Atlantic: Namor, the wing-footed denizen of Atlantis, a character who made his comic book debut in 1939, is incarnated here by the Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta. His teal swimming trunks are newly complemented with hunks of turquoise and gold jewellery, in keeping with a retrofitted backstory that re-imagines him – in an unsubtle bid for relevance – as a Mesoamerican deity and a descendant of a 16th-century tribe first driven underwater by the arrival of Spanish conquistadors.
Namor confronts Shuri and her mother, Queen Ramonda (the always-regal Bassett), with the shocking news that theirs is not the only secret kingdom running on vibranium.
Thanks to the end of Wakanda's historical isolationist policy, as enacted through an address to the United Nations made by T'Challa in the post-credits sequence of the 2018 Black Panther, the world at large has been alerted to the existence of this highly desirable metal.
With Wakanda unwilling to part with any (given its potentially nefarious uses), one world power in particular has been poking around in the ocean for an alternative cache, invoking Namor's ire.
Namor proposes a joining of forces with Wakanda against what he calls "the surface world", at the cost of a single life: he wants the teenaged Riri, whose invention is unwittingly abetting the Americans in their quest for vibranium, destroyed.
That this proposed treaty is swatted away is of a piece with the film's disavowal of anger or retribution as justifications for violence – an extension of the message of the first film, albeit one that hits differently, functioning almost as chastisement, in light of the racial discord that has characterised the intervening four years.
Ideological positioning aside, however, it is noteworthy that this film sees the once hidden kingdom of Wakanda prised a little further open, and so further integrated into the sprawling, omnidirectional tapestry of the multiverse. This assimilation is in itself political on some level, and evokes a debate around how minority communities should aspire to position themselves within a broader one.
What made the first film feel special within the Marvel canon was the distinctiveness of its aesthetic and its story-world, as befit its status as a landmark of Black representation.
Going forward, the Black Panther can only become less singular – increasingly deployed as merely one of many (so many) Avengers. That may be the goal, but it also suggests diminishing returns.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is in cinemas now.
