S M G
Ryan Coogler’s latest instalment in the Black Panther saga comes with a weighty set of requirements and expectations. For Marvel, it has to progress the next phase of their overarching franchise, while finding a way forward for a movie series that has lost its star. The passing of Chadwick Boseman leaves both a massive hole in, and yet purpose for, Wakanda Forever.
For audiences, we are being asked to invest in a whopping (and too long) 2 hours 40 minutes of our time in the hope Black Panther can be reborn. That the producers have found a way to deliver despite the offscreen drama in everyone’s minds as the opening credits roll.
I have to say for the first third of the movie I wasn’t at all sure they had found their way – the padded plot has superfluous side strands and lacks the central charismatic performance of Bosewick. However, once the central drama emerges, the movie finds its focus and delivers both the action and emotional beats it needs to.
That drama itself, revolves around the political tensions around Wakanda’s unwillingness to share its Vibranium. This results in the search for other sources, bringing the spotlight onto a hitherto undiscovered empire. When Princess Shuri meets the leader of this empire, Nomor, the question becomes will they unite over their shared desire to protect their races and countries from exploitation and colonisation, or will the leaders fears and worries pit them against one another? Those are some pretty interesting themes to wrestle with involving topical themes of resource misuse and attitudes from and to people of different ethnicities, and even though the film never particularly makes much of them in the end, it is enough to add some emotional investment beyond the expected special effects action spectacular. The theme of the country and main characters determining their sense of identity in a post Black Panther world, wondering if a new Black Panther can be reborn, nicely mirrors what the movie has to achieve offscreen.
Where it works then, is in the way it honours Chadwick’s legacy, with some touching moments memorialising his passing. And something else Marvel does well when it’s on its ‘A’ game is the development of a believable enemy / anti-hero with whom we can feel some sympathy or understanding – that is the case here with the introduction of Nomor and his undersea empire (even if I struggled with the physics / biology/ aerodynamics of his character!). Where it fails, is to recapture that feeling of narrative freedom the previous Wakanda outings had. There is too much to ‘do’ as a Marvel movie, for the Black Panther movie within to shine. You can feel the machinations and hoops the movie has to maneuver through, and this serves to make it much more difficult to engage wholeheartedly.
Somehow despite being way overlong, narratively stifled and lacking the central charismatic performance that defined the previous outing, I still admired much in the movie, not least a winning performance from the leads. I just didn’t love it.
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