The last thing that we see Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa do in 2018’s “Black Panther” is appear before the United Nations, where he reveals to the world that his African nation of Wakanda has secretly been a superpower for several thousand years. While the character would go on to appear in some other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies before the actor who played him succumbed to colon cancer in August 2020 — an illness that Boseman had endured with almost Wakandan privacy — T’Challa’s mid-credits declaration has since assumed the haunted urgency of a man’s dying wish.
T’Challa’s defining act as the king of his country was to puncture the bubble that had protected Wakanda since that fateful day when a meteorite full of vibranium crash-landed onto its shores. Through his fight with Erik Killmonger, a villain forged by colonialism and the abandonment of his own people alike, T’Challa came to accept that the citizens of Earth are inextricably connected to each other, for better or worse. He believed that it was still possible for “better” to win out in the end.
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which began production just a few short months after the unexpected death of its leading man and forced screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole to radically overhaul the story it would tell, is a film about how narrow the margins of that victory can be. It’s a film that watches its grieving characters as they grapple with the ripple effects of T’Challa’s last wish (a process that forces more than one of them to revisit the late king’s dilemma between honoring his father and ruling on his own terms).
It’s also a film that internalizes those ripple effects within itself. “Wakanda Forever” reluctantly opens itself up to the rest of the MCU over the course of its 160-minute running time, continuing to do so even as every scrap of mega-franchise synergy eats away at the self-contained identity that allowed “Black Panther” to silo itself away from so much of the usual bullshit and deliver a blockbuster in which amazing craft and active engagement with history saw it tower above most of the spandex-and-CGI spectacles that pass for movies these days.
A movie drenched in so much love and passion, even its glaring flaws never fully sour the experience. This is not to imply the bad outweighs the good, because there’s so much Wakanda Forever gets right. Coogler doubles down on the world building and absolutely nails it- Talokan is bursting with life and Namor owns every second he’s on the screen, easily one of the better MCU villains in some time. Its real issue is that it attempts to take on too much so inevitably certain characters and themes feel like an afterthought.
In the end, it’s unquestionably the most emotional MCU film to date and while the balance between honoring Chadwick Boseman and telling its own story is sometimes uneven, the movie ultimately succeeds in achieving a harmony that pays a touching tribute while setting the stage for a promising future.
