BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

If there's one good thing about the long run-time of FOREVER-- which is what I'm sure some people felt it lasted, watching it in the theater-- it's that it finally gave us a MCU movie that didn't have a stupid joke for at least the first twenty minutes. (This in contrast to THOR DUMB AND DUMBERER, which describes Thor's loss of his father, brother and realm as if a litany of Seinfeldian mishaps.) 

So once the movie has delivered its respectful eulogy to the character of T'Challa the Black Panther-- who had to die in concert with the real-life passing of actor Chadwick Boseman-- it's time to get down to the movie's real agenda: the promotion of more girl-boss characters in the MCU. First, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) assumes control of Wakanda, and one of the first actions taken against her reign is a bunch of mercenaries trespassing on the realm to steal vibranium. The always tedious spear-tosser Okoye (Dainai Gurira) foils the incursion, and Ramonda embarrasses one of the colonizer nations in the U.N., lecturing them about what a danger they all present to the world. (Of course her nephew Killmonger almost unleashing a world war doesn't count in the scales.) 

A year after T'Challa's passing, Ramonda makes noises about daughter Shuri (Letitia Wright) trying to duplicate the Black Panther power-herb and assuming the Panther mantle, despite the fact that all previous depictions show Shuri as a miracle-making scientist with no combat experience. Shuri demurs. Meanwhile, a CIA-backed expedition, looking for vibranium in the sea, is wiped out by a squad of blue-skinned water-warriors-- and sadly, it's at that point that FOREVER starts to become another dopey over-politicized Marvel movie.

Since no witnesses are left behind, the evil colonizer nations suspect Wakandans of the retaliation. And though the Africans are innocent of the deed, the leader of the water-warriors seeks out the Wakandans to force them to implicate themselves. Said leader (Tenoch Huerta) is the MCU's "through-a-glass-dumbly" version of Marvel's Namor the Sub-Mariner, more on whom later. Namor tells Ramonda and Shuri that he somehow knows that there's a single scientist responsible for the CIA's vibranium-detection machine, and he wants Wakanda to find and capture the scientist for him. Apparently Namor's kingdom-- now called Talokan rather than Atlantis-- wants to use Wakanda as cats-paws in order to keep their subsea existence secret. Later dialogue suggests that Namor also wants to back the African nation into a corner, so that they join Talokan in making war on the surface world.

Despite the gravity of this international situation, Okoye talks Ramonda into letting Shuri accompany the spear-lady as she looks for the scientist, as if it's a cake-walk that will help Shuri get over his mourning for her lost brother. The two Wakandans find the scientist, who is yet another girl boss, scientific prodigy/Black American Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). It's not certain whether or not the two Wakandans intend to surrender the American teenager to Namor, but it becomes academic. Somehow, both the CIA and the Talokans monitor the Wakandans' movements, resulting in a cookie-cutter car chase and Okoye being defeated by the water-warriors, who take Shuri and Riri prisoner.

In theory, once Namor has custody of Riri, he ought to want to kill her to keep her from disseminating her vibranium-detection device to the colonizers. Shuri pleads that Wakanda could keep her out of the hands of the CIA (though since the Americans stole the tech from Riri, Riri's death would have no effect on their access to the tech.) Possibly Namor always meant only to use Riri as a bargaining chip to make Wakanda play ball, though there were certainly a lot of better ways to have done so. In any case, after Namor has told Shuri the sad story of his Mayan people's emigration to the sea to escape Spanish persecution, Shuri and Riri escape Talokan. Namor doesn't like having his captives escape, and he unleashes an attack on Wakanda that costs the life of Ramonda. This, at least, is the straw that breaks Shuri's reluctance, and she determines to take up the mantle of the Black Panther to foil Namor.

As indicated above, one of the basic plot-problems of FOREVER is the needless insertion of the Riri Williams character, who originally appeared in 2016 as the Marvel comics-character Ironheart, more or less a female version of Iron Man. An IRONHEART TV project is bruited to be due in 2024, but as far as the movie is concerned, Riri is even flatter and less interesting than all of the other girl-bosses. Even the minor support-character Nakia (Lupita N'yongo), returning from the first film, has more charisma, although she too is a needless insertion.

There's also an extended "spiritual communion" between Shuri and the spirit of the first film's villain Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), and even in a post-death scene, the scripters-- the same ones who wrote BLACK PANTHER-- find it impossible to seriously denounce this ruthless Black revolutionary. This reluctance to decry revolutionaries when they're "intersectionally correct" is mirrored in the treatment of the MCU Namor. Whereas the comic-book Namor makes war upon surface-dwellers, he never tries to dragoon other nations into a forced alliance. The MCU Namor is as despicable as Killmonger, but the movie-makers cannot condemn him, as it can the "colonizers," because he belongs to a non-White race.

Minor points: Winston Duke has a fair assortment of scenes reprising the M'Baku character, and he steals every scene he's in. Martin Freeman reprises the role of Everett Ross, the White guy who gets dumped on to compensate for the filmmakers not being able to dump on all persons of White ancestry, as they might prefer. A few other Marvel characters from the SUB-MARINER franchise-- Fen, Attuma and Namora-- are tossed into the mix, but contribute nothing of importance.

Production values are high but director Ryan Coogler is no better than average both in terms of action-choreography and dramatic interactions. Like the first movie, FOREVER is symbolically significant for depicting the fantasy of an African techno-wonderland, though the introduction of the sketchy Talokan realm detracts from the various Afrophilic motifs seen in the first film.