Panther? I hardly know 'er!
To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 in the summer of 2020, not very long before a sequel to that film was set to go into production, and his death made such a sequel impossible: cancel the film and you're leaving God knows how much money on the table as you drop the biggest sub-franchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe outside of The Avengers; recast the role and every critic and fan in the United States would band together to murder you; making the film about Boseman's absence and the whole thing becomes a kind of lumpy, shapeless anti-story, defined by its lack of protagonist - a Black Panther without a Black Panther.
They took the third route, obviously, and while it's easy to see why this didn't work out, that's an explanation, not an excuse. Because it didn't work out: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a stunning drop-off in quality from what remains, over four years later, the most recent high-water mark of the MCU, and a continuation of what has been a wholly inexplicable implosion of what used to be some of the most reliable quality control in 21st Century Hollywood. Reliable for, among other things, grinding every movie it touched into uniformly-flavored grey paste, but at a certain point grey paste starts to seem like a nice target to aspire to, as the franchise swings from one misfire to another.
Most of Wakanda Forever's woes can indeed be laid squarely at the foot of the damage control Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole had to do in order to make a superhero movie without a superhero. You can still see the bones of the original concept, poking jaggedly through the flesh of the story, and meshing not at all with the new material about grieving and coming to grips with loss: the characters grieving for the dead King T'Challa of the hyper-advanced and formerly hidden African nation Wakanda, the cast and crew grieving for Boseman. That old concept involved Wakanda coming into conflict with another hidden super-advanced nation that has control of a massive supply of the incomparably rare element vibranium, but has removed itself from the world in an effort to safeguard itself against centuries of European colonialism; it is not entirely clear why the two nations would be natural enemies rather than natural allies, but comic book logic has gotta comic book logic, I guess. The nation in question is Talokan, a name adapted from the Aztec myth of Tlālōcān, while the Talokanders'* culture is said to be based in the Mayans, and it is regardless something that has been patched onto the Marvel comics' concept of Atlantis, as ruled by the very first Marvel superhero (he premiered in 1939), Namor the Submariner. The film's Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta Mejía, bears very little resemblance to the comics version other than sort of the name (the emphasis is on a different syllable to reflect a Mesoamerican origin, though in practice this is something honored more in the breach than the observance), and the fact that his kingdom is underwater; in a rare example of the DC film universe beating its competition to the punch, Aquaman is now four years old, and did a Namor-esque figure better than the MCU was apt to be able to match.
The movie Namor, known to his subjects as K'uk'ulkan (which gets us back to the Mayans) is nowhere near as campy and goofy as Jason Momoa's Aquaman, in large part because Wakanda Forever is a broadly mirthless film. And that's just as well, given the MCU's droning sense of humor, which arguably reached its tone-deaf nadir in the first Black Panther. No indeed, this is a very glum Namor, lashing out at the attempted exploitation of his vibranium by the United States government at exactly the same time the rudderless Wakandans, presently being ruled by Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) are lashing out at the French for attempting to do the same. In a development whose logic can best be summarised as "look, we had to motivate the fucking plot somehow", Namor appears to the grieving queen and her even more distraught daughter, Shuri (Letitia Wright), informing them that he expects them to find the American scientist responsible for building a vibranium detector, or else he shall use his water powers to invade and destroy Wakanda. And they do this, finding said scientist to be 19-year-old MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), whose extremely transparent role in the story is to tease the 2023 Disney+ miniseries Ironheart, where she will star. And if that means she'll stay securely in the TV half of the universe, terrific, because Thorne's performance is extremely bad, in the midst of a movie where one of the few unabashed strengths is that it is generally in possession of some extremely good acting.
Anyway, I've given you one tendril of the plot of Wakanda Forever, and I'd like to not bother giving any more, because there are oh so many of them; Coogler & Cole have put a lot of pieces on the board, and upon doing so, seem to have largely given up. There are MCU films with muddier scripts than this, but few if any that are so utterly shapeless, tossing elements out left and right and then tossing out a few more in the hopes that it will seem like they're developing things. The most blatant dead-end is a subplot involving dueling CIA agents and exes, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), whose presence is presumably setting up some runner that will be picked up in one or another upcoming MCU project, though I don't know which one it might be, and I can't imagine what it might consist of, given that there's not anything actually happening in their scenes. They're just kind of hanging out, securely isolated in a little hermetic bubble, where they don't impact the actual plot and the actual plot doesn't impact them. It makes me realise that it's actually been quite a while since the MCU has been actively obnoxious in seeding future projects inside go-nowhere subplots of a current project; a real pity that they shanghaied a Black Panther movie to do that, since one of the real strengths of the first one was how confidently it stood as a standalone project.
On the other hand, it sort of makes sense, since basically every single screenwriting choice here seems to be motivated strictly by obligation and crude, never by organic, natural storytelling. Over the course of 161 paralyzingly slow minutes, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever can hardly go three scenes in a row without hitting at least a line of dialogue, if not an entire story beat, where you can almost see the creased post-it note on the writer's wall, pointing out that they need to motivate this in order to make sure that happens. The movie has an unrelenting need to explain itself to us, mechanically filling in the corners of the script with little asides that do nothing but shove some piece of information at one of the characters, generally Shuri, who is the de facto protagonist in a film that is at a complete loss how to structure itself.
The dead-eyed writing, and blunt-force editing that does nothing to shape scenes into anything other than dialogue-delivery boxes, hasn't damaged the cast, who are giving it everything they've got: the positive side-effect of Boseman's absence is that the large ensemble from the first movie now has more room to breathe. This gives Bassett, especially, a chance to give a real honest-to-god Performance this time, not merely standing regally in the background but roaring her way around scenes with the imperious authority of a royally pissed-off royal. Similarly, Wright and Danai Gurira, who were solid but limited in the first movie, have a chance to play fully worked-out arcs this time (the film is at a bit of a loss what to do with Lupita Nyong'o, sadly; and it has nothing better for Winston Duke than have him play a robustly arrogant comic foil, which he does extremely well). The only one of the film's many ideas that actually lands is to build this around several competing versions of the grieving process, making Black Panther's absence a way of focusing all the characters around that absence, defining themselves relative to a lack, and while this hardly give it anything it can use as a story, it at least results in some very solid character moments.
Still, 161 minutes is a shitload of movie to not have a story - or, rather, to have something like five different stories, wherein it always feels like the one we're watching in any given moment can't possibly be the most compelling one. And this is compounded by some of the most shockingly bad craftsmanship in the history of this franchise: most notably, this surely must have the worst cinematography of any the 30 films to date in the MCU, perpetrated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who got the job on the back of shooting the first season of the Disney+ show Loki. Prior to that, she made her name in the realm of deliberately scruffy lo-fi indie films, like Palo Alto and The Sun Is Also a Star and Mainstream, the kind of thing where you can say "well that looks extremely shitty!" and plausibly mean it as a compliment. I don't see how you can mean it as a compliment in discussing a $250 million tentpole action film, and Wakanda Forever looks almost literally unwatchably shitty. Much of the film takes place in the water, and some of it takes place at night, and both of these locations are are filmed in murky light with practically no contrast, leading to images that appear as smears of grey against smears of somewhat lighter or darker smears of grey. Whole scenes underwater basically feel like radio plays; sometimes there's bright shiny blue stuff, which means vibranium, and it's very exciting because you can conclusively declare that there's a specific object. Above water and during the day, it's at least possible to say that everything is sharp and in focus and legible, but we're a very, very long way from the hazy atmosphere and vivid of Rachel Morrison's excellent work in the first film.
And it's not only the cinematography: Wakanda Forever also has some of the very worst CGI in MCU history, and the MCU has not ever flirted with the upper bounds of what CGI is capable of. There's a particular shot of Namor leaping through the air using his water magic that is, I say without a trace of hyperbole, the single worst-composited image in the 30 films and 14 years of this franchise. To say it looks like a cartoon would be a gross insult to cartoons. We know, thanks to some very spicy investigative journalism, that Marvel has been in the business of trying to get as much CGI as it can from horribly overworked effects artists making not remotely enough money, and that's led to quite a lot of whiffy effects work, but this is truly some next-level ugliness.
All of it combines to even rob Hannah Beachler's production design and Ruth E. Carter's superb costumes (Carter is, I think it's easy to say, the MVP of the whole movie) of their inherent visual appeal; the foggy desaturation and chintzy digital filigree of the cinematography and effects have a way of making everything in this surpassingly expensive motion picture look like a somewhat - but not exceptionally! - well-heeled TV program. Absolutely none of this looks spectacular, and a 161-minute action movie had god damned well better be able to prove spectacle if it plans to be so incapable of providing a cohesive, well-told story. Given the catastrophe that befell it so late in pre-production, I'm hardly surprised that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a mess, and I don't think it's entirely fair to hold this against the very talented Coogler, who will, I assume make more very fine movies in the future. But there's not point in pretending that just because it was nobody's fault, that means this didn't result in a messy, jerry-rigged trudge, a bloated carcass of a movie that is precisely one Eternals away from being the single most ungodly boring film in the history of the MCU.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 4)
Black Widow (Shortland, 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton, 2021)
Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts, 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi, 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I know that Marvel has released an official demonym for the residents of Talokan, and I would not be bothered to look it up for love or money.
They took the third route, obviously, and while it's easy to see why this didn't work out, that's an explanation, not an excuse. Because it didn't work out: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a stunning drop-off in quality from what remains, over four years later, the most recent high-water mark of the MCU, and a continuation of what has been a wholly inexplicable implosion of what used to be some of the most reliable quality control in 21st Century Hollywood. Reliable for, among other things, grinding every movie it touched into uniformly-flavored grey paste, but at a certain point grey paste starts to seem like a nice target to aspire to, as the franchise swings from one misfire to another.
Most of Wakanda Forever's woes can indeed be laid squarely at the foot of the damage control Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole had to do in order to make a superhero movie without a superhero. You can still see the bones of the original concept, poking jaggedly through the flesh of the story, and meshing not at all with the new material about grieving and coming to grips with loss: the characters grieving for the dead King T'Challa of the hyper-advanced and formerly hidden African nation Wakanda, the cast and crew grieving for Boseman. That old concept involved Wakanda coming into conflict with another hidden super-advanced nation that has control of a massive supply of the incomparably rare element vibranium, but has removed itself from the world in an effort to safeguard itself against centuries of European colonialism; it is not entirely clear why the two nations would be natural enemies rather than natural allies, but comic book logic has gotta comic book logic, I guess. The nation in question is Talokan, a name adapted from the Aztec myth of Tlālōcān, while the Talokanders'* culture is said to be based in the Mayans, and it is regardless something that has been patched onto the Marvel comics' concept of Atlantis, as ruled by the very first Marvel superhero (he premiered in 1939), Namor the Submariner. The film's Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta Mejía, bears very little resemblance to the comics version other than sort of the name (the emphasis is on a different syllable to reflect a Mesoamerican origin, though in practice this is something honored more in the breach than the observance), and the fact that his kingdom is underwater; in a rare example of the DC film universe beating its competition to the punch, Aquaman is now four years old, and did a Namor-esque figure better than the MCU was apt to be able to match.
The movie Namor, known to his subjects as K'uk'ulkan (which gets us back to the Mayans) is nowhere near as campy and goofy as Jason Momoa's Aquaman, in large part because Wakanda Forever is a broadly mirthless film. And that's just as well, given the MCU's droning sense of humor, which arguably reached its tone-deaf nadir in the first Black Panther. No indeed, this is a very glum Namor, lashing out at the attempted exploitation of his vibranium by the United States government at exactly the same time the rudderless Wakandans, presently being ruled by Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) are lashing out at the French for attempting to do the same. In a development whose logic can best be summarised as "look, we had to motivate the fucking plot somehow", Namor appears to the grieving queen and her even more distraught daughter, Shuri (Letitia Wright), informing them that he expects them to find the American scientist responsible for building a vibranium detector, or else he shall use his water powers to invade and destroy Wakanda. And they do this, finding said scientist to be 19-year-old MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), whose extremely transparent role in the story is to tease the 2023 Disney+ miniseries Ironheart, where she will star. And if that means she'll stay securely in the TV half of the universe, terrific, because Thorne's performance is extremely bad, in the midst of a movie where one of the few unabashed strengths is that it is generally in possession of some extremely good acting.
Anyway, I've given you one tendril of the plot of Wakanda Forever, and I'd like to not bother giving any more, because there are oh so many of them; Coogler & Cole have put a lot of pieces on the board, and upon doing so, seem to have largely given up. There are MCU films with muddier scripts than this, but few if any that are so utterly shapeless, tossing elements out left and right and then tossing out a few more in the hopes that it will seem like they're developing things. The most blatant dead-end is a subplot involving dueling CIA agents and exes, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), whose presence is presumably setting up some runner that will be picked up in one or another upcoming MCU project, though I don't know which one it might be, and I can't imagine what it might consist of, given that there's not anything actually happening in their scenes. They're just kind of hanging out, securely isolated in a little hermetic bubble, where they don't impact the actual plot and the actual plot doesn't impact them. It makes me realise that it's actually been quite a while since the MCU has been actively obnoxious in seeding future projects inside go-nowhere subplots of a current project; a real pity that they shanghaied a Black Panther movie to do that, since one of the real strengths of the first one was how confidently it stood as a standalone project.
On the other hand, it sort of makes sense, since basically every single screenwriting choice here seems to be motivated strictly by obligation and crude, never by organic, natural storytelling. Over the course of 161 paralyzingly slow minutes, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever can hardly go three scenes in a row without hitting at least a line of dialogue, if not an entire story beat, where you can almost see the creased post-it note on the writer's wall, pointing out that they need to motivate this in order to make sure that happens. The movie has an unrelenting need to explain itself to us, mechanically filling in the corners of the script with little asides that do nothing but shove some piece of information at one of the characters, generally Shuri, who is the de facto protagonist in a film that is at a complete loss how to structure itself.
The dead-eyed writing, and blunt-force editing that does nothing to shape scenes into anything other than dialogue-delivery boxes, hasn't damaged the cast, who are giving it everything they've got: the positive side-effect of Boseman's absence is that the large ensemble from the first movie now has more room to breathe. This gives Bassett, especially, a chance to give a real honest-to-god Performance this time, not merely standing regally in the background but roaring her way around scenes with the imperious authority of a royally pissed-off royal. Similarly, Wright and Danai Gurira, who were solid but limited in the first movie, have a chance to play fully worked-out arcs this time (the film is at a bit of a loss what to do with Lupita Nyong'o, sadly; and it has nothing better for Winston Duke than have him play a robustly arrogant comic foil, which he does extremely well). The only one of the film's many ideas that actually lands is to build this around several competing versions of the grieving process, making Black Panther's absence a way of focusing all the characters around that absence, defining themselves relative to a lack, and while this hardly give it anything it can use as a story, it at least results in some very solid character moments.
Still, 161 minutes is a shitload of movie to not have a story - or, rather, to have something like five different stories, wherein it always feels like the one we're watching in any given moment can't possibly be the most compelling one. And this is compounded by some of the most shockingly bad craftsmanship in the history of this franchise: most notably, this surely must have the worst cinematography of any the 30 films to date in the MCU, perpetrated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who got the job on the back of shooting the first season of the Disney+ show Loki. Prior to that, she made her name in the realm of deliberately scruffy lo-fi indie films, like Palo Alto and The Sun Is Also a Star and Mainstream, the kind of thing where you can say "well that looks extremely shitty!" and plausibly mean it as a compliment. I don't see how you can mean it as a compliment in discussing a $250 million tentpole action film, and Wakanda Forever looks almost literally unwatchably shitty. Much of the film takes place in the water, and some of it takes place at night, and both of these locations are are filmed in murky light with practically no contrast, leading to images that appear as smears of grey against smears of somewhat lighter or darker smears of grey. Whole scenes underwater basically feel like radio plays; sometimes there's bright shiny blue stuff, which means vibranium, and it's very exciting because you can conclusively declare that there's a specific object. Above water and during the day, it's at least possible to say that everything is sharp and in focus and legible, but we're a very, very long way from the hazy atmosphere and vivid of Rachel Morrison's excellent work in the first film.
And it's not only the cinematography: Wakanda Forever also has some of the very worst CGI in MCU history, and the MCU has not ever flirted with the upper bounds of what CGI is capable of. There's a particular shot of Namor leaping through the air using his water magic that is, I say without a trace of hyperbole, the single worst-composited image in the 30 films and 14 years of this franchise. To say it looks like a cartoon would be a gross insult to cartoons. We know, thanks to some very spicy investigative journalism, that Marvel has been in the business of trying to get as much CGI as it can from horribly overworked effects artists making not remotely enough money, and that's led to quite a lot of whiffy effects work, but this is truly some next-level ugliness.
All of it combines to even rob Hannah Beachler's production design and Ruth E. Carter's superb costumes (Carter is, I think it's easy to say, the MVP of the whole movie) of their inherent visual appeal; the foggy desaturation and chintzy digital filigree of the cinematography and effects have a way of making everything in this surpassingly expensive motion picture look like a somewhat - but not exceptionally! - well-heeled TV program. Absolutely none of this looks spectacular, and a 161-minute action movie had god damned well better be able to prove spectacle if it plans to be so incapable of providing a cohesive, well-told story. Given the catastrophe that befell it so late in pre-production, I'm hardly surprised that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a mess, and I don't think it's entirely fair to hold this against the very talented Coogler, who will, I assume make more very fine movies in the future. But there's not point in pretending that just because it was nobody's fault, that means this didn't result in a messy, jerry-rigged trudge, a bloated carcass of a movie that is precisely one Eternals away from being the single most ungodly boring film in the history of the MCU.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 4)
Black Widow (Shortland, 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton, 2021)
Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts, 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi, 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I know that Marvel has released an official demonym for the residents of Talokan, and I would not be bothered to look it up for love or money.
