Black Panther: Wakanda Forever film review — Letitia Wright rises to the sombre occasion

Not everything is as simple as conquering the film industry. For Marvel, Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Black Panther was a milestone after a decade of unbroken success. The movie quickly became a cultural landmark too — a comic-book epic hinged on black talent — and a billion dollar hit ($1.34bn, to be exact). But humanity is more vulnerable than superheroism. Two years later, in August 2020, the film’s gifted star, Chadwick Boseman, died from a cancer he had kept private. Now the sequel arrives with a freighted remit. How does a crowd-pleaser double as an elegy?

Kudos to Coogler for wrangling the impossible this gracefully. The death of Boseman’s King T’Challa is the starting point, tech-whizz kid sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) dazed with grief. But it soon becomes clear that the shadow of loss will fall over the movie even when not directly addressed. As the plot rolls into motion, we realise this must be the chassis of the movie Coogler first scripted for Boseman to star in.

Instead, T’Challa’s mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) appears before the international community. World leaders tut about the dangerous potential of lone African state Wakanda having a monopoly on the super-metal vibranium. A glacial Bassett tells them what worries her: “The dangerous potential of you.” The zinger zings.

And somewhere, the cursor flashes again on an already long thesis about the geopolitics of Marvel movies. But Coogler does better than window dressing. As well as the fog of grief, the chill of history pervades. US power has a cameo but the movie turns mostly on relations between Wakanda and the Talokan, a sub-aquatic nation with a Mesoamerican back-story.

Truth be told, the sight of massed gill-men tips the scales into pulp silliness more than Coogler might have intended. But the postcolonial revenge movie also goes in surprising directions, with a subtlety you don’t take for granted in a film of this scale. And, like the original, the sequel has a knack of meeting the real-world moment. Visions of deluges have overtones of climate crisis; a key scene suggests Coogler knows the Russian antiwar masterpiece Come and See.

And out of the water, the spectacle is fine. Even in a less mournful context, no second instalment could muster the sheer novelty of Black Panther’s gleeful Imax Afrofuturism. But as blockbuster, the movie still packs a bassy punch, with little of the sense Marvel sequels often have of the contractually obliged glancing at their watches.

It does also sprawl out of focus. A girl-genius undergrad from MIT is drawn into the story, then left to loiter like a work experience person between coffee runs. And even by Marvel’s overcrowded standards, a cast is too big when Lupita Nyong’o and Michaela Coel become spare parts.

But Wright, crucially, is the ace in the pack. Her bruised gravity is what lets the movie finally strike a note of triumphant uplift without the awful clang of insincerity.

In the end, though, all roads lead back to Boseman. If Black Panther was one kind of watershed, Wakanda Forever can’t help being another. Tragedy has always been an easy win for Marvel, laying waste to worlds so that chiselled heroes can gaze damp-eyed into the middle distance. Now, real life has shocked the glib out of the operation. For the first time in the company’s history, the tears actually mean something.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from November 11