Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

 

Marvel's original Black Panther film (2018) was unabashed in its politics. In it, director Ryan Coogler laid out for audiences a worldview that contrasted with the reality of the daily experiences of many -- especially people of color.

Empowerment and self-governance were at the heart of that movie's story of an isolated but technologically advanced African kingdom that eschewed the ways of the rest of the world -- for the most part -- to tend to its own people and grow its wealth, without interference from outsiders and colonizers.

Chadwick Boseman played the youthful king of Wakanda, T'Challa, who inherited the throne after his father's assassination and sought more openness for his nation’s borders. T'Challa ruled with wise moderation and defended the country from mortal threats in the guise of the costumed superhero Black Panther, his strength and agility enhanced by a mysterious elixir passed down through the generations.

Coogler's sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, picks up a few years after the original. T'Challa has died from some unaccountable ailment, leaving the nation in the stewardship of his mother, Ramonda (a regal Angela Bassett) who is aided by her scientist daughter Shuri (the always-winning British actress Letitia Wright).

Ramonda's leadership is tested when Namor, the mutant leader of a vast underwater kingdom of blue beings (Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta) comes to Wakanda to warn of unwelcomed human intrusion into his water world. The surface people, mostly Americans, are searching for the same valuable substance that has given Wakanda its outsized standing among nations. Namor is himself not blue, but Brown, descended from the native people of the Yucatan.

The meeting between Ramonda and Namor and subsequent encounters lead to an ultimatum -- help Namor kill the intruders or suffer the same fate they will once Namor unleashes his warriors on the surface nations.

It will not be lost on astute observers that Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole are presenting a story in which the existentially marginalized are set against one another with the very likely outcome being the annihilation of all, thus leaving their wealth for other nations to plunder and their people to enslave.

Coogler's Wakanda Forever is most certainly an elegy to Boseman, who died of cancer two years ago but appears in a few tribute montages, but it is also, perhaps mainly, an affirming statement of the power of unity and grace in a world seemingly overrun with corruption and greed.