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The center of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—the sequel to the hugely popular “ Black Panther ,” and a tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman —is sincere, even if the overall film feels manufactured. It begins with a funeral for the recently deceased King T'Challa. Shuri ( Letitia Wright ) and Queen Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ) are dressed in white, following the black coffin, whose top features a silver emblem of the Black Panther mask and the crossed arms of the Wakanda salute. Their mournful procession, winding through the kingdom, is contrasted with slow-motion tracking shots of dancers jubilantly dancing in memory of their fallen king. After the coffin arrives at a clearing, where it ceremoniously rises to the sky, we cut to an earnest, emotional montage of Boseman as T'Challa. The solemn, aching continuum of images soon forms the “Marvel Studios” logo, announcing that this is still a Marvel movie. And “Wakanda Forever” is all the worse for it. 

What was the secret ingredient for the success of “Black Panther”? Similar to the resplendent, secluded African nation of Wakanda, “Black Panther” existed just outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It mostly stood on its own without the crushing requirements felt by every other film: The humor existed between the characters, not as random references to another property; the characters (with Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue as an exception) were particular to the story; the concerns rarely drifted toward franchise building aspirations.

But writer/director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole don't possess the same kind of freedom with this melancholy sequel. Some limitations aren't within their control, such as the tragic death of Boseman. Others feel like a capitulation to assimilate into a movie-making machine. 

The hulking script is chock-full of ideas and themes. Rather than fighting their common enemy (white colonists), two kingdoms helmed by people of color are pitted against each other (an idea that never thematically lands), and the film must delve into the cultural pain that still exists from the historical annihilation of Central and South America’s Indigenous kingdoms. It must also contend with a bevy of other requirements: setting up the Marvel TV series “Ironheart” (in which Dominique Thorne will star), acknowledging The Snap, grieving Boseman’s death, and finding a new Black Panther. These competing interests are no less smoothed out by MCU’s blockbuster demands (that this must be a mainstream hit and usher in the next phase of the cinematic universe) and the weight of satiating Black folks who feel seen by the fantastical confirmation of Black regalism. It’s too much for one movie. And you get the sense that this should’ve been two.     

At nearly every turn, "Wakanda Forever" fails, starting with its setup. Colonist countries, now afraid of an African superpower, are scouring the world, from sea to sea, searching for vibranium (the metallic ore that powers the African kingdom). A young scientist named Riri (Thorne, treated as a plucky afterthought) plays a role in a search that leads mercenaries deep underwater where they encounter Namor/Kukulkan (a menacing and bold Tenoch Huerta ), the king of Talokan, and his people, who are none too happy with the surface world. They want to destroy it. The godly Namor, his ears pointed to the sky, his winged feet fluttering, later surfaces in Wakanda. With water still dripping from his jade earrings and glimmering, vibranium-pearl-gold necklace, he approaches a still mournful Ramonda and a bitter Shuri with a threat masquerading as an alliance. His appearance causes Wakanda to turn to Everett Ross ( Martin Freeman ), which leads to other cameos and subplots that weigh down the entire film with franchise expectations. 

What’s imperative to “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is the way Coogler centers righteous rage. Ramonda’s first big scene is her admonishing the United Nations for expecting her to share vibranium with the world, even as they try to steal the resource from her nation. Bassett, with a capital-A, acts in a sequence where her voice booms, her gaze is fixed and unforgiving, and the venom is felt. And yet, Shuri, who has buried herself in her lab, developing dangerous weapons, feels worse. She wants to see the world burn. Their shared anger forces a spew of short-sighted decisions that lead to further escalations with Namor—who desperately angles to avenge his mother and his ancestors. The film attempts to position the trio as different stages of grief, but in trying to get viewers up to speed on the atrocities experienced by Namor, it becomes slow and overblown. 

Maybe somewhere a way existed to connect these arcs. But that would require better visual storytelling than the movie offers. Far too often, the dialogue stays on the surface, either by providing reams of exposition, externalizing exactly what’s on the character’s mind or by trying to meld together the real-life loss felt by the actors with that of the characters. The latter certainly offers these performers a necessary chance to process their hurt on screen, but when did filmmakers forget how to show without telling? Why are contemporary blockbusters so enamored with holding the audience’s hand by providing every minute detail? At one point, after Namor explains his entire backstory, Shuri responds with, “Why are you telling me all of this?” It feels like a note Coogler gave to himself.  

The shortcomings in dialogue and story, and how often “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” bows to IP-driven needs, would be easier to stomach if the visual components weren’t so creaky. The jittery fight sequences are too difficult to follow: inelegant compositions blur into an incomprehensible sludge with every cut by editors Michael P. Shawver , Kelley Dixon , and Jennifer Lame . Admittedly, there were projection issues with my screening of the film, so I will refrain from totally dismissing the all-too-dark lighting, but the actual framing by cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, working with the film’s copious visual effects, lacks a sense of space anyways. Scenes of everyday life in Wakanda—Black folks shopping, communities laughing and enjoying each other’s company—that once filled the viewer with joy feel artificial here. The vast landscapes of the nation, which once were filled with splendor, are now murky backgrounds. Some of that awe is recaptured when we see Talokan and its immense Mayan architecture and decorative wall paintings. But you wish, much like “Black Panther,” that Namor was first given his movie where these scenes could breathe, and we could become as integrated into this kingdom as we became in Wakanda. 

Ultimately, this film attempts to set up the future through Shuri. Wright is a talented actress with the ability to emotionally shoulder a movie when given good material. But she is constantly working against the script here. She fights past a cringe cameo; she fights past clunky jokes; she fights past an ending that feels all too neat. An assured and charismatic Winston Duke as M’Baku is there to help, and a misused Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia is there for assistance. Okoye, played by Danai Gurira , provides resilience. And new addition Michaela Coel (“I May Destroy You”) as Aneka, a quirky character who tonally doesn’t work in this somber ensemble, is there for comic relief ... I guess? In any case, the collective front of these performers isn't enough to stem the tide of a movie that relies on shouting matches and broad visual and political metaphors that have been boiled down to their uncomplicated essence rather than their complex truths (which isn’t unlike Rihanna’s turgid soundtrack offering “Lift Me Up”). 

A major sea battle ensues, new, ropey gadgets are employed, and loose ends are inarticulately tied. Another montage dedicated to Boseman occurs, and while the film is messy, you’re relieved that it begins and ends on the right foot. That is, until the saccharine post-credit scene. I’m not sure what Coogler was thinking. He had more weight on him for this movie than any filmmaker deserves. But when this scene occurred, I audibly groaned at what amounts to a weepy, treacly moment that’s wholly unnecessary, emotionally manipulative, and partially unearned. It’s one of the many instances where “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” might have its heart in the right place but is in the wrong mindset and the worst space—at the center of a contrived cinematic universe—to mourn on its own terms.  

Available in theaters on November 11th.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film credits.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language.

161 minutes

Letitia Wright as Shuri / Black Panther

Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia

Angela Bassett as Ramonda

Danai Gurira as Okoye

Winston Duke as M'Baku

Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams / Ironheart

Tenoch Huerta as Namor

Florence Kasumba as Ayo

Michaela Coel as Aneka

Martin Freeman as Everett K. Ross

Mabel Cadena as Namora

Alex Livinalli as Attuma

Danny Sapani as M'Kathu

Isaach de Bankolé as River Tribe Elder

Gigi Bermingham as French Secretary of State

• Ryan Coogler

Writer (story by)

• Joe Robert Cole

Cinematogapher

• Autumn Durald Arkapaw
• Jennifer Lame
• Michael P. Shawver
• Kelley Dixon
• Ludwig Göransson

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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Review: Women on the Home Front

Shadowed by Chadwick Boseman’s death, this sequel focuses on King T’Challa’s mother and the women helping her to contend with a slippery new villain.

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By A.O. Scott

The first “Black Panther” movie opened in February 2018. A lot has changed since then, both in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in the one that most of us non-superheroes are compelled to inhabit.

The most tragic and consequential change was surely the death, in 2020, of Chadwick Boseman , whose performance as King T’Challa had seemed to signal the arrival of a franchise-defining new star. Even before that, the Marvel/Disney corporate strategy was shifting into a post- “Avengers” phase, as the familiar heroes were dispersed into a multiplatform multiverse of stories, sometimes joined by alternative versions of themselves. And of course, here in the real world…

Let’s not even go there. The political situation in the fictional African nation of Wakanda is complicated enough. In “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the director Ryan Coogler feeds his own and the public’s grief into the story, infusing the movie with somber notes of family loss and collective mourning. There is also a sense of the disorder that follows in the wake of a charismatic, unifying leader.

T’Challa’s mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), has assumed the throne, at least for the moment. His younger sister, the scientific prodigy Shuri (Letitia Wright), scrambles to honor her brother’s memory and fill his shoes. The center is holding, but the kingdom nonetheless seems vulnerable, as the outside world conspires to gain access to Wakanda’s reserves of vibranium, a rare mineral with daunting military and industrial uses. The benevolent global order that T’Challa led his nation into has given way to one based on deceit, subversion and exploitation.

Thanks to Ramonda’s regal diplomatic skills and the fighting prowess of the Jabari, led by M’Baku (Winston Duke), and the Dora Milaje, led by the mighty Okoye (Danai Gurira), Wakanda can hold its own against the United States and France. The real threat comes from under the sea, where the long-isolated aquatic nation of Talokan controls the planet’s only other source of vibranium.

The king of Talokan, who goes by Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is a demigod with pointy ears and wings on his ankles. Comic-book fans will recognize him as the Sub-Mariner, a complicated hero whose pedigree stretches all the way back into late-1930s Marvel prehistory. For the purposes of “Wakanda Forever,” he is a villain, albeit one with a legitimate grudge and a coherent political argument.

His subjects are descendants of a Meso-American tribe who took to the water to escape Spanish colonizers in the 16th century. His mistrust of “the surface” is based on a history of enslavement, infection and persecution, and he proposes a mutually protective anti-imperialist alliance with Wakanda. Which sounds nice, except that the alternative Namor offers is war, and also the murder of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a precocious M.I.T. student who has invented a vibranium-detecting machine.

If this sounds like too much plot summary, that’s because “Wakanda Forever,” like many Marvel movies, has too much plot. There are a lot of characters to keep track of. Shuri has acquired a sidekick in the person of Riri, while Okoye has one in Aneka (Michaela Coel). The Wakanda-sympathizing C.I.A. man Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) is back, and spends some time squabbling with his boss (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who is also his ex-wife. Since this is, above all, a special-effects-heavy action movie, there are fistfights, vehicle chases, underwater and midair battles, high-tech suits and seat-rattling explosions.

A Marvel movie, for sure. But a pretty interesting one, partly because it’s also a Ryan Coogler film, with the director’s signature interplay of genre touchstones, vivid emotions (emphasized by Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally tooth-rattling score) and allegorical implications. Because the Avengers have, for the moment, disassembled, it’s no longer necessary to slot Wakanda and its heroes into a larger cosmic ensemble, which gives the busy narrative a welcome degree of focus and specificity. As in “Black Panther,” the questions of Wakandan identity — who will lead it, and what kind of a country will it be — are brought into relief by an apparent bad guy with a good or at least plausible answer.

Namor has in common with T’Challa’s nemesis Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) — and also with Magneto from the X-Men films and Koba from the first chapters of “Planet of the Apes” — a grievance-based radicalism that the movie struggles to refute. Huerta’s performance is weighted more with sorrow than anger, and his people, with their blue skins and gill-like masks, are beautiful and mysterious. Talokan, a kind of Mayan Atlantis, adds a new aesthetic element to the Marvel palette, extending the Afro-futurist visions of Hannah Beachler’s production design and Ruth Carter’s costumes into something wondrously cosmic and cosmopolitan.

In T’Challa’s absence, Wakanda has become, at least for the moment, a matriarchy, and “Wakanda Forever” displays a matter-of-fact superhero feminism grounded in the personalities of the performers and their characters. Bassett, Wright, Gurira, Williams and Coel — rejoined by Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, who shows up a bit late in the action — form the kind of fractious, formidable ensemble that should be a franchise in its own right. And quite possibly will be. It’s called “Wakanda Forever,” and in the Marvel Universe that sounds less like a slogan than a terms of service guarantee.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Rated PG-13. The usual bloodless comic-book slaughter. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misspelled an actress’s given name. She is Dominique Thorne, not Dominque.

How we handle corrections

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Black panther: wakanda forever, common sense media reviewers.

Epic, women-led sequel is part tribute, part intense battle.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes collaboration, diplomacy, and partnership

Queen Ramonda, Okoye, Nakia, and Shuri are strong,

Ensemble cast is largely Black, as is writer-direc

Begins with off-camera death of King T'Challa. Ano

References to T'Challa's romantic relationship wit

Infrequent use of "s--t," "bulls--t," "treacherous

Apple iPhone, MacBook, Lexus, Louis Vuitton. Part

Parents need to know that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the sequel to Marvel's massively popular Black Panther . After the death of the beloved King T'Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman), the kingdom of Wakanda must regroup to protect itself against those who hope to destabilize the country and…

Positive Messages

Promotes collaboration, diplomacy, and partnership, particularly among historically oppressed people. Explores how grief and loss can be overwhelming and require reflection and rest to process. Like first film, encourages teamwork, communication, loyalty, integrity, courage, friendship. Highlights the abilities of women and people of color in positions of power (and leading roles). Explores idea of resource hoarding, what happens when an oppressed community becomes the oppressors. Duty, ritual, justice, and tradition are very important to the Wakandans. Idea that revenge is temporarily satisfying but ultimately destructive is a major theme.

Positive Role Models

Queen Ramonda, Okoye, Nakia, and Shuri are strong, smart, capable, brave. Shuri reluctantly takes on mantle of leadership. Her inventive tech genius helps Wakanda protect itself. Even the main villain is complicated and thought-provoking, making good points about collaboration and alliances.

Diverse Representations

Ensemble cast is largely Black, as is writer-director Ryan Coogler. Women run Wakanda, have agency, are shown to be strong, smart, capable, brave. Another group of people are underwater descendants of Mesoamerican Mayans, who maintain their Yucatec language and aspects of Mayan culture, such as their dress and the ball game pok-a-tok. Although they're depicted as antagonists, the Talokanil are normally peace-keeping people who want to be left alone. Soundtrack includes tracks by Mexican and Indigenous Mexican artists.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Begins with off-camera death of King T'Challa. Another death is particularly emotional later in the movie. Lots of intense action violence, chases, and hand-to-hand and weapons-based fights, including spears, water bombs, guns. People are drowned, shot, speared. An underwater group of people can chant a siren song that lures people to throw themselves into the sea. They have the power to destroy submarines and sink helicopters and ships.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

References to T'Challa's romantic relationship with Nakia.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "s--t," "bulls--t," "treacherous," "son of Satan" and "demon" (subtitled).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Apple iPhone, MacBook, Lexus, Louis Vuitton. Part of the MCU franchise.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the sequel to Marvel's massively popular Black Panther . After the death of the beloved King T'Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman ), the kingdom of Wakanda must regroup to protect itself against those who hope to destabilize the country and steal its vibranium. There's also a new threat in the form of a superhuman, underwater-dwelling people descended from Mesoamericans. Expect action-packed fight scenes, law enforcement pursuits, hand-to-hand combat, weapons use, and potentially disturbing scenes of people throwing themselves into the ocean while hypnotized. People die from fatal injuries during battles and from drowning. One death is especially upsetting, as it leaves a character without any family. Language includes just a few uses of "s--t" and "bulls--t," and there's no romance. Viewers looking for applications to the real world can discuss the importance of diplomacy and collaboration, as well as the idea of intergroup understanding among people of color. The movie is dedicated to Boseman, and it fittingly deals with grief and loss even more than the first film. Stars Letitia Wright , Angela Bassett , Lupita Nyong'o , and Danai Gurira all reprise their roles from the first film. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 25 parent reviews

MCU manages to pull together to make one of the best MCU movies out there!

Great movie, but no movie is safe., what's the story.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER begins with the off-camera death of King T'Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman ) after an undisclosed illness that even his genius little sister, Shuri ( Letitia Wright ), can't troubleshoot and fix. And since Erik Killmonger ( Michael B. Jordan ) had all of the sacred heart-shaped herb destroyed in Black Panther , a new Black Panther cannot be named after T'Challa's passing. A year later, Queen Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ) makes a statement to the international community asserting that T'Challa's absence doesn't mean that Wakanda can be weakened or destabilized by rogue mercenaries or jealous superpowers who want to steal vibranium. So when an American military operation to mine for vibranium underwater ends with everyone involved being killed, the CIA assumes that Wakandans are the assassins. But the culprit is actually the Talokanil, a group of mysterious, blue-skinned underwater mutants descended from Mesoamericans. Their leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), can fly, has pointed/elven ears, and can -- unlike his people -- breathe outside of the water. He tries to convince the queen to join forces with him, oppose the sharing of vibranium, and secretly turn over the American scientist responsible for a machine that can detect vibranium underwater. But it turns out that when Shuri and General Okoye ( Danai Gurira ) track down the scientist, she's just a 19-year-old MIT undergraduate named Riri (Dominique Thorne) who reminds Shuri of herself. Unwilling to give Riri to Namor, the Wakandans must prepare to fight the Talokanil -- with or without a new Black Panther.

Is It Any Good?

Writer-director Ryan Coogler 's sequel, led by an excellent ensemble of women, pays tribute to the hard loss of Boseman/T'Challa by exploring how grief (and revenge) can be all-consuming. It feels like Shuri is speaking for the fans when she cries out and wonders how life can go on without her brother. But, step by step, the influential women of Wakanda (with backup from Winston Duke's M'Baku and Martin Freeman 's Agent Ross) manage to safeguard their homeland and prepare for yet another battle -- not for leadership of the kingdom, but for its very existence. Bassett and Wright do a beautiful job with their emotional scenes as mother and daughter, queen and princess. There's an authentic tenderness to their interactions that's mirrored in all of the women's relationships, even Nakia ( Lupita Nyong'o ), who's now the headmistress of a school in Haiti but agrees to help Wakanda defeat Namor. Although W'Kabi's ( Daniel Kaluuya ) absence is felt nearly as keenly as T'Challa's, at least his possible return to the franchise is left open. Meanwhile, award-winning TV star and comedian Michaela Coel joins the cast as another fierce and funny member of the Dora Milaje.

Coogler's interpretation of the canonical characters may not appeal to hardline comic book purists, but viewers who are more familiar with Marvel through the movies will appreciate the director's inclusion of complicated, morally gray antagonists who, while villainous, often make thought-provoking points. When Namor suggests an alliance between Black and Brown nations against the threat of greedy, colonizing forces, it frankly makes sense. Make friends, not foes, he says to Ramonda, even as he blackmails her with an ultimatum. Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth Carter and composer Ludwig Göransson do a phenomenal job of adding Mayan-inspired costumes and music to the proceedings (the soundtrack includes tracks in Spanish and Mayan, as well as "Lift Me Up," a lovely Rihanna ballad). Mexican actor Huerta gives a nuanced performance as the intense Namor, but ultimately this movie belongs to the women of Wakanda, who pull off the nearly unimaginable feat of proving that the story can go on.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the filmmakers handled the continuation of the Black Panther series without Boseman as T'Challa. Do you agree with the decision not to recast the role in Wakanda Forever ?

Why is representation important in movies, shows, and books? What progress have superhero movies made when it comes to diverse characters? What do you think of the racial and gender representation in this movie compared to that of other superhero films?

How does the movie explore issues related to race? What do you think of the story pitting Black Africans and Indigenous Mexicans against one another? What's the message about what happens when Black and Brown people fight instead of collaborate?

Discuss the role of women in the movie. How are Ramonda, Shuri, Okoye, Nakia, and the other Dora Milaje unique in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Why is it still uncommon for women to hold positions of power in movies (not just superhero movies)?

Talk about the theme of grief and loss in the story. Was it necessary? Do you think there should be another Black Panther movie?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 11, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : February 1, 2023
• Cast : Angela Bassett , Letitia Wright , Tenoch Huerta , Danai Gurira
• Director : Ryan Coogler
• Inclusion Information : Black directors, Female actors, Black actors, Black writers
• Studio : Disney/Marvel
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Superheroes
• Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 161 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of strong violence, action and some language
• Awards : Academy Award , Common Sense Selection , Golden Globe
• Last updated : March 14, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Reviews

The pacing, demons, and storytelling monsters take down the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 27, 2023

“Wakanda Forever” is an epic, emotional and profound film that examines the impact of collective anguish.

Full Review | Oct 26, 2023

Apart from the overarching themes of death, loss, revenge and owning your destiny, and all the eye-popping battles atop barnacle-crusted whales and dolphins no less, Black Panther 2 works in the smaller, intimate moments too.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

This was a fantastic way to wrap out Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

Coogler uses the sequel to similarly popularize Mayan Futurism with the sumptuous introduction of the Talokans, which makes the Wakandans seem quotidian in comparison.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever rises to a difficult challenge with strong characters, superb acting and visual effects that are a marvel.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2023

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is a powerful treatise on grieving, and how that process can seep into every thought and action, even subconsciously.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 9, 2023

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not quite measure up to its predecessor, but it leaves a proud, beautiful, silent tribute to the legacy of Chadwick Boseman, telling an emotionally powerful, resonant story about how grief can truly be love persevering.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

Plays with ideas and characters that initially intrigue, but drowns them in tiresome excessive Marvel lore and universe expansion.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 25, 2023

This sequel acts as an uplifting reminder that grief is real and losing someone close doesn't mean losing all hope in the power of community.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Beautiful tribute about Grief & the cycle of violence. Epic in almost all standards but slower in pacing to tell a different kind of story in the MCU.

As evocative as it is in the film, light pierces through every shot, every storyline, and every performance, making it a remarkable love letter to grief and healing.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2023

Wakanda Forever is the best Black Panther sequel it could have been, acting both as a tribute to Boseman and a poignant story about change and rebirth.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2023

We deserve a story about Africanness and Diasporic Blackness that’s not hampered by the white gaze that would refuse us peace, justice, unity and vengeance. In the MCU, no matter who’s at the helm, that’s just not possible.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Black Panther Wakanda Forever is undoubtedly one of the worst movies of the year and a clear indication for Marvel to start making movies again instead of peddling products that promote future products.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 20, 2023

"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" doesn't have the punch that the first movie did, but how could it? Sequels rarely do.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is constrained by its genre and studio from being a great film. It is nonetheless an entertaining one with intriguing characters and intense visuals.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

A disappointment, especially compared to its excellent predecessor.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 19, 2023

Wakanda Forever is very long and needed an intermission. You know it’s a Marvel movie because it’s steeped in boredom, with every scene threatening to not end.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

lack Panther: Wakanda Forever has the usual MCU mix of humour and fun action scenes but it's severely lacking a charismatic lead performer, and some of the lazy writing during the final third was frankly embarrassing. One of the weaker MCU efforts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2023

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a breathtaking and cathartic step forward for the franchise

Marvel’s Black Panther sequel is a moving farewell to Chadwick Boseman and a heady rumination on the many different forms grief can take in the wake of death.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Ryan Coogler’s first Black Panther film hit like a meteorite in 2018 and singlehandedly disproved the (still extant) notion that predominantly Black films can’t become global phenomenons that smash all kinds of box office records while also racking up critical acclaim . Even before Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death in 2020, the prospect of recreating the first film’s success was already a nigh-unimaginable task that led many to wonder how Marvel could ever hope to top itself with a sequel.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a bigger, more ambitious, and more stirringly poignant endeavor than its predecessor. But it doesn’t feel like the product of a studio merely trying to make a financially successful follow-up to one of its most popular and well-regarded films. Rather, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever plays like the triumphant celebration of an idea, the mournful farewell to an actual hero , and a promise of even greater things to come all rolled into one.

Set some time after the events of Avengers: Endgame and one year after the sudden death of King T’Challa (Boseman), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the story of how the vibranium-rich African nation and its people find the strength to keep going after the unexpected loss of their champion. Wakanda Forever stops just short of blurring the line between fiction and reality as the broad strokes of T’Challa’s death are detailed in its opening scenes that smartly and respectfully put much more focus on how his sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), and their mother, Ramonda (Angela Bassett), are devastated by his passing.

Much in the same way that Boseman was more than just an actor to many of his fans and peers, T’Challa was more than a superhero or a typical king to those who knew him, and Wakanda Forever centers that idea in a way that makes his legacy a central part of the film. A love for Chadwick and an undying reverence for T’Challa can be felt throughout Wakanda Forever . But the movie is careful to not be so bound up in those powerful emotions that it ever feels narratively inflexible or stuck in the past — a necessary choice that plays an important role in Wakanda Forever ’s ability to move the ongoing tale of the MCU’s Black Panther forward.

Though Wakanda Forever never lets you forget that Wakanda and her people are in a nationwide state of grieving, it uses that grief as a jumping-off point to explore a number of the complicated consequences of T’Challa’s death and his actions in the first Black Panther. After an alien invasion, super terrorist attacks, and all of the other wild things that have been happening in the MCU, Wakanda finds itself in the uniquely difficult position of being seen as both the solution to and the cause of the world’s problems because of its vibranium.

As always, Wakanda’s ready and overprepared to deal with whatever incursions onto their land foreigners try to make in pursuit of their valuable metallic natural resources. But with Wakanda now openly existing as a powerful political actor on the world stage, Ramonda, as its sitting leader, has to be particularly judicious about how the nation engages with its peers, not out of fear for her people but out of a desire to keep disputes from escalating to the point of all-out conflict.

Wakanda Forever never lets you forget that Wakanda is in a nationwide state of grieving

Geopolitics is rarely what people show up to superhero movies for, but it’s the subject of some of Wakanda Forever ’s most electrifying scenes that Bassett commands with a terrifying majesty and a significant part of what makes the movie vibrate with tension. Their presence is also one of the big ways that the movie organically creates space for characters like Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and M’Baku (Winston Duke) to take on larger roles as Wakanda’s various tribes grapple with what it means for there to be no sitting Black Panther.

One of the more truly impressive things about Wakanda Forever ’s story is how its plot involving lines of succession and tradition in the context of mourning could have made for a gripping, compelling Marvel movie in and of itself. But instead of resting on those laurels, Wakanda Forever both amps things up and hearkens back to some of Black Panther ’s most potent, challenging ideas by introducing the MCU’s takes on Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) and Namor (Tenoch Huerta).

In the same way that Killmonger’s villainy in Black Panther was shot through with a heartbreaking and genuine (albeit twisted) sense of justice, Namor’s entire character is defined by an unshakable love for his people and a willingness to do anything to protect them. Wakanda Forever establishes a fascinating connection between Wakanda and Talocan — the Mesoamerica-inspired underwater kingdom Namor and his fellow water breathers call home — that further upends the world’s balance of power in ways that make Namor a threat. But who that threat is truly posed toward is a question Wakanda Forever repeatedly poses and has different answers for as Namor and his generals, Namora (Mabel Cadena) and Attuma (Alex Livinalli), lead the charge to make contact with the surface world.

There’s a pointed critique of Western colonialism and the destruction of Indigenous people baked into the essence of Wakanda Forever ’s take on Namor and Talocan that is going to draw many comparisons to Killmonger. But whereas Michael B. Jordan played his villain as a wrathful man longing to become king, Huerta’s Namor is a king who sees his superhuman genetic gifts as signs of godhood.

There’s a critique of Western colonialism and the destruction of Indigenous people baked into Wakanda Forever

Huerta brings a raw magnetism to his performance as a Namor who’s always just as ready to charm as he is to murder while sizing up other monarchs he deems worthy of his recognition and presence. In particular, scenes between Namor and Shuri stand out not for their visually dazzling qualities but because of the crackling intensity of the current running between them — two conflicted figureheads of state trying to be strategic about how they interact.

Wakanda Forever lets loose a similarly explosive energy in each of its bombastic, breathtaking set pieces that escalate in scale and stakes as Wakanda and Talocan come to butt heads in unexpected ways. But even though the movie’s action sequences are a marked upgrade over the first film’s, they ultimately end up playing second string to Wakanda Forever ’s focus on the Wakandan royal family’s emotions — and the room it gives its cast to express what very much feels like their own unscripted sorrow for Boseman’s passing.

Tragic deaths that unmoor people from their sense of self are a fixture in comic books and the stories based on them . But it’s rare that you see a film choose to really spend time centering grief the way Wakanda Forever does: as an ongoing state of being that can take on new and surprising forms as people try to deal with their feelings. Wakanda Forever isn’t just two-and-a-half hours of people being sad and expressing their frustrations with how the life of someone they loved came to an end. That, along with a deep sense of clear-eyed hope for the future, is the core of the movie, and Wakanda Forever understands how holding space for both of those feelings simultaneously is key to its story being a cathartic one.

As wooly and uneven as Marvel’s Phase Four has often felt between its entry to the streaming space and its dalliances with the multiverse , Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ’s a thrilling reminder of how sharp and smart the studio’s tentpole features can be. Rather than one-upping Black Panther , Wakanda Forever continues its story with a grace and care that’s more moving than any comic book movie has the right to be.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also stars Florence Kasumba, Michaela Coel, Martin Freeman, and Lake Bell. The movie hits theaters on November 11th.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Review

A loving tribute, a choppy sea change..

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will hit theaters on Nov. 11. Below is a spoiler-free review.

In a cinematic universe where half of all living beings have already died and come back to life, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever reminds us that losing one person can feel just as devastating. The death of T’Challa - and actor Chadwick Boseman - weighs heavy on Wakanda Forever, with the fictional nation struggling to replace both their monarch and their champion, and Marvel Studios deciding how to honor a man it was clearly ready to work with for years and years to come. Wakanda Forever is an effective, emotional farewell to T’Challa - a meditation on forging one’s own future out of a painful past - but with a plot that has to introduce an entirely new nation and pave the way for a new wave of Marvel stories, it does struggle under the weight of all that expectation.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever wastes no time addressing Boseman’s passing, with a chaotic and tense opening scene leaving Shuri (Letitia Wright) feeling responsible for her brother’s death. The funeral procession that follows speaks to the incredibly fine line Wakanda Forever has to walk: even in their mourning, there’s joyous dancing and celebration of what T’Challa brought to the nation, but Shuri’s solemnity as she moves through holding T’Challa’s Panther helmet is a strong reminder of the conflicting emotions she and the movie at large have to balance.

Wright has mostly been used as comic relief up to this point, and Shuri’s character arc necessitates refocusing that energy into how she processes her pain. Everyone in Shuri’s life is urging her to let T’Challa go, and her tendency to lash out in those cases goes a long way towards grounding Wakanda Forever during its frequent flights of fancy. It’s a sharp about-face, but Wright’s emotional availability and intensity carry Shuri through that fraught grieving process. Director Ryan Coogler builds Shuri’s slide into despair up to one of Wakanda Forever’s most jaw-dropping scenes: an unbearably tense moment of self-reflection that serves as reminder that a well-deployed exchange between two characters can be just as breathtaking as a grand battle for the fate of two nations.

It doesn’t take long for the power vacuum left by T’Challa’s death to incite a challenge to Wakanda from the outside world. With Killmonger having destroyed the Heart-Shaped Herb that granted T’Challa superhuman abilities, there’s no new Black Panther to rally behind – and even though T’Challa’s outreach program from the end of the first film remains in full effect, there’s immense political pressure for Wakanda to submit to regulations the country’s leadership fears will endanger the world. That ire is directed at Ramonda (Angela Bassett), who’s acting as steward to the throne until T’Challa’s replacement is named, and doing so in magnificent fashion. At once heartbroken and hopeful, Bassett delivers a commanding performance and, as King T’Chaka did for T’Challa, provides Shuri with a connection to her culture’s past. But though the United Nations’ ultimatum for Wakanda to relinquish control of its resources sets up Wakanda Forever’s themes of colonialism well, this storyline is largely abandoned after the conflict draws Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) and his underwater kingdom of Talokan into the fray.

Who do you think will be the new Black Panther?

As that society’s figurehead, Namor is an engaging antagonist - whipping a helicopter around like a shotput in midair 30 seconds into your introduction means the audience will at least wanna see what kind of havoc this guy wreaks on the battlefield. But while he’s a force to be reckoned with, Tenoch Huerta Mejía’s performance is at its best in Namor’s intense dialogue scenes with Shuri, as the two share much in common as important members of their monarchies’ royal families.

Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole infuse Talokan’s culture with Mesoamerican history, which gives Namor’s resolve to go to any lengths to protect his people’s home and resources a real richness. Talokan is an interesting society for the MCU to explore in the future, but Wakanda Forever doesn’t establish it quite as gracefully as Black Panther did Wakanda. Outside of a few establishing shots early during our introduction to Talokan, much of our understanding of it comes from narration during a rushed flashback of its origins, and some important details during that scene feel brushed over. Coogler and team took pains last time to dive into both the political and societal structures of Wakanda, and while Talokan’s past is interesting, what it’s like in the present remains a bit murky throughout, especially because there are only two other named Talokanil given any significant screen time.

Of course, an opposing force of a nation of undersea warriors provides Wakanda Forever ample opportunity for maritime mayhem, and gives the MCU a new palette for action. Wakanda Forever does, however, push its luck too far going into the climactic third act battle with a poorly conceived and logically baffling tactical choice. Still, credit where it’s due when it comes to the more personal side of that encounter: Coogler definitely seems to have taken the note on the first film’s digital effects-heavy final duel and Wakanda Forever’s corresponding final confrontation is much more grounded and effective.

Befitting Wakanda Forever’s outsized emphasis on community, T’Challa’s peers are called on to step into older sibling roles for Shuri, and the supporting cast rise to meet the moment. Danai Gurira’s Okoye is willing to put her career at risk to aid Shuri’s grieving process - and gets more dimension for herself, though Okoye’s standout scene is an emotional exchange with Ramonda.

Winston Duke’s M’Baku is a scene-stealer from the moment he saunters in whilst chomping on a vegetable. T’Challa’s positive influence is at its most visible in how the Jabari leader’s edges have softened, as M’Baku provides Shuri with surprisingly sensitive counsel in one of her darkest moments. As T’Challa’s love, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) ends up supporting Shuri through the most personal parts of her journey, and while she enters the story too late to make too much of an impact, she does facilitate some memorable moments in the movie’s latter half. Collectively, T’Challa’s friends are there to remind Shuri that life goes on, even if Shuri isn’t ready to accept that at first.

The other new additions to Wakanda Forever’s roster represent a tendency of Wakanda Forever’s to overindulge in the other ongoing plotlines the MCU is building out, with Dominique Thorne’s fiery, industrious Riri Williams as the best example. Riri’s personality is infectious, and her appearance certainly sets an intriguing stage for Disney+’s Ironheart series , but Wakanda Forever bends over backwards and burns valuable time on keeping her involved in the action far past the point of believability. The saving grace there is that Riri gives Shuri someone to act as an older sibling (or a Tony Stark) for as a means of celebrating T’Challa, something that Coogler takes maybe too light a touch in highlighting.

Marvel's Namor Explained: Who Is the Sub-Mariner?

Riri’s embedded with the main players, so she at least feels relevant, but Wakanda Forever’s aimless political subplot shows its hand as being almost pure MCU housekeeping as Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) is paired with an MCU up-and-comer with plenty on their plate. That character is a huge personality and though they bring a fun energy to scenes with Ross as he attempts to aid the Wakandans, they become more distracting and less essential as Wakanda Forever goes on. It may be the nature of making movies in this universe these days, but there’s a significant disconnect between scenes in Wakanda Forever that feel vital in how they develop characters and the ones that just feel more like homework for next time.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had to be a sequel to a cultural juggernaut, a tease of upcoming MCU adventures, and of course, a loving farewell. There are stretches where the struggle to balance those mandates scatters the focus of the story, but nuanced and committed performances from the returning cast keep it grounded when it counts. Tenoch Huerta Mejía’s Namor is a strong foil to Shuri, challenging both her ideology and her grieving process, and his nation of Talokan gets a thoughtful (if rushed) history to complement the film’s themes of colonialism. Director/co-writer Ryan Coogler’s efforts are at their most powerful when Wakanda Forever is in conversation with the loss of T’Challa – of Chadwick Boseman. The specifics of Wakanda Forever’s long-winded plot will likely leave little impact, but that doesn’t stop the new Black Panther from standing tall.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review – grief shadows superhero sequel

Shaped around the loss of its original hero Chadwick Boseman, this take pays tribute to the late actor with fiery performances and great spectacle

T he fictional African state of Wakanda becomes a matriarchy in a fervent, yet understandably subdued new Black Panther movie whose exuberant and mournful impulses are at odds with each other. We can also see, almost in real time, a franchise coming to terms with loss at the same as its fictional characters. Chadwick Boseman, who in the previous adventure had played T’Challa, king of Wakanda, died of cancer two years ago at just 43 years old . Now this new film pays a heartfelt and decent tribute to his memory in a drama shaped around this sudden blow, making an honest attempt to shape a superhero film around the subject of grief.

T’Challa’s sister Shuri now has to step up to a quasi-regency role alongside her grief-stricken mother Ramonda, who now becomes queen because T’Challa has suddenly died; here are two typically elegant and charismatic performances from Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett, with Wright’s Shuri now stricken not just with sadness but a new kind of bleak self-knowledge. Despite her renown as a scientist, she could do nothing to prevent or even understand T’Challa’s fatal illness.

Wakanda’s intelligence agent and valued counsellor Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) has gone into self-imposed exile in Haiti. On the home front, Ramonda and Wakandan warriors Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Aneka (Michaela Coel) have to deal with a truculent Jabari tribesman M’Baku (a formidable presence from Winston Duke) and also what they see as opportunist and predatory attacks from western powers including France and the US at the UN who, sensing weakness, now want to seize the Wakandans’ precious mineral reserve of vibranium.

And there is another sensational development: the CIA, in the form of careworn station chief Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) has employed brilliant young MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) to design a new vibranium detector, which discloses a new source of this precious substance under the sea – but this turns out to be the property of another unknown people from a secret undersea city called Talokan, led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta) with Mesoamerican connections. The US incursion into their property rights triggers a terrible conflict in which Namor’s people, instead of making common cause with the Wakandans, wages war on them and the overground “colonisers” alike. As for Shuri, her destiny and birthright still lie ahead of her – a new female power in the land – and she has to decide whether she will be inspired in her time of trial by the memory of wise T’Challa, or less salubrious figures.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing. And first among equals here is Wright. Shuri finds that that Wakandans’ great burden or even their tragedy is that they are fighting people who should be their allies – and this movie, like the previous one, can claim to be working with the themes of empire, oppression and even energy security. But I felt that there was a constraint at work, an understandable constraint given that the film is to some degree about grief and loss, but one which Wakanda Forever had not quite found a way of developing and absorbing. At all events, this is another star performance from Wright.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review: A sumptuous elegy for a king

The franchise loses its beloved star, but finds elegant, affecting new ways to expand the MCU.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Where can a superhero story that has lost its superhero go? Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (in theaters Friday) ultimately finds a new path forward, though director Ryan Coogler 's grand, somber requiem makes it clear in nearly every scene that the late Chadwick Boseman is irreplaceable, both on and off screen.

This is a movie very much in mourning for the man it lost — as a star, a colleague, and a friend — which seems like strange if not uncharted territory for a comic-book universe in which death is a Snap , and resurrection rarely less than another sequel or end-credits sequence away. The result still pounds with busy CG spectacle and, at just under three hours, more mythology than any non-Marvel head may strictly need. But it's also contemplative, character-driven, and frequently lovely: a faithful genre player imbued with a rare visual richness and real, painful poignancy.

King T'Challa's death from an unspecified illness takes place before the title card, leaving his sister Shuri ( Letitia Wright ), his mother Queen Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ) and a kingdom bereft. Global villainy, though, allows little time for bereavement, and even less for story exposition; within minutes, an American recon mission for vibranium — the precious, indestructible metal for which Wakanda is the only known source — goes fatally awry somewhere deep in the Atlantic Ocean, confounding the U.S. government. The hordes that destroyed their ship and mesmerized the crew don't seem like citizens of any country they've seen before: Their skin is tinged Avatar -blue, for one, and they appear to breathe easily underwater.

Their leader, Namor (the brooding Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta ), a formidable fighter with elfin ears and small, fluttering wings on his heels like a Greek god, turns out to have royal immortality in his blood, and intractable plans for Wakanda. As the ruler of an ancient deep-sea Mayan civilization called Talokan, he has his own people and resources to protect, and when he introduces himself to a still-grieving Ramonda and Shuri, he makes his terms clear: They can join him in defeating his land-bound foes, or be buried with them. There's also a teenage girl, an Einstein-brained MIT student named Riri ( Judas and the Black Messiah 's Dominique Thorne), whose precocious inventions, among them an Iron Man-like suit, make her both a target and an asset (and inevitably, a place-marker for yet another lucrative fragment of IP; Thorne will star as Riri/Ironheart in a Disney+ series slated for 2023).

Fending off these new threats means bringing Riri on board and marshaling the forces of the Wakanda diaspora, including Danai Gurira 's ferociously loyal general Okoye, Winston Duke 's towering warrior M'Baku, and Lupita Nyong'o 's retired spy Nakia, now living in self-imposed exile. Martin Freeman also returns as the Wakandans' best American ally, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus , with a vivid purple streak in her hair and an air of persistent Veep -y exasperation, drops in as the government honcho tasked with cleanup. ( I May Destroy You 's great Michaela Coel , alas, doesn't get to do much with her own warrior bit.)

Coogler, who cowrote the script once again with Panther scribe Joe Robert Cole, sets up several anchoring set pieces, clangorous air-land-and-sea battles that travel from Boston bridges and Wakandan city centers to the ocean floor. Levity comes in a few brief but well-placed moments of release, little garnishes of comic relief — just watch Duke eat a carrot — that mitigate the heavy mantle of grief and the obligatory MCU business of saving the world, one franchise installment at a time. (The rules of engagement seem more arcane, or merely very flexible; it's never completely clear what privileges various characters' powers confer unless you knew them coming in.)

The most striking thing about the movie, though, may be what a matriarchy it is, both by nature and nurture: Without their king, Wakanda has become a queendom from the top down, overseen by Bassett's regal, ageless Ramonda, the gorgeously daunting Gurira, and Wright, who rises to fill her dramatically expanded role with feline grace and vulnerability. Coogler also stacks his backline with talented women, including production designer Hannah Beachler and costumer Ruth E. Carter , who both won well-deserved Oscars for the first film.

Their shared vision of Afro-futurism feels lush and joyful and beautifully specific set against the usual white noise of Marvel fanfare, even (or almost especially) in darker moments, like the pristine rituals of a funeral scene. Wakanda is still clearly a Marvel property, with all the for-the-fans story beats and secondary characters its ever-expanding universe requires, but it also feels apart from any one that's come before. And while a Black Panther without Boseman is undoubtedly nothing like the film's creators or any of its cast wanted it to be, the movie they've made feels like something unusually elegant and profound at the multiplex; a little bit of forever carved out for the star who left too soon. Grade: B+

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Jason Parham

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Is Not Your Typical Marvel Movie

The release of Black Panther was like nothing before it. The impact, immediate and abiding, was cosmic. That the film premiered during the Trump years, a dystopian period in 2018 when Black life felt more precarious than usual and the call for Black superheroes more urgent, gave its message a special charge. It was a phenomenon three times over—a commercial, critical, and cultural triumph.

King T’Challa was a new-age hero for a new, uncertain time. No stranger to larger-than-life roles, Chadwick Boseman brought poise and charisma to the performance alongside an all-star ensemble that included Lupita Nyong’o and Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther had teeth, and it was smart enough to skirt the easy trap of representation in an industry starved for color and meaning. A credit to director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, the movie was about more than the miracle of being acknowledged; it was a measure of genuine progress. It spoke to us and we answered back. New Black futures—intricate and lush and free—were opening up.

Unforeseen in one of those futures was Boseman’s passing, in 2020, from colon cancer. Franchises are built on star power, and without Boseman, one of Marvel’s brightest and most promising, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is haunted by his absence , draped in the kind of sorrow that can’t be ignored. It’s rare for MCU films to channel the turbulence of grief with such unflinching focus ( WandaVision came close in its unconventional depiction of spousal heartache and its psychological aftershocks). The positioning is curious but effective. I hesitate to call Wakanda Forever a new kind of superhero blockbuster—it hasn’t totally reinvented the wheel—but it’s close. Coogler has equipped his sequel with a changed vocabulary: It speaks equally from a place of loss as it does triumph. Grief is its mother tongue.

The king is dead, and the eyes of the world are once again on Wakanda. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has assumed the throne, and, in the year since her son’s passing, done her best to maintain the African nation’s standing as a sovereign power. The only known nation to have it, Wakanda remains rich in vibranium—the mystical ore used to create cutting-edge weaponry and tech—and refuses to share its resources with allies (in one early scene, French soldiers attempt to steal some and quickly get their asses kicked by undercover Dora Milaje agents). Greed being the spark for all manner of conflict throughout history, Cooler and Cole are keen to jumpstart the story in such a way. The US government begins a vibranium-tracking operation in the Atlantic Ocean but it is mysteriously thwarted by an unknown power—the people of Talokan, an underwater empire home to the only other wellspring of vibranium on Earth.

Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is their wounded leader, and hell bent on keeping Talokan’s existence a secret. He's got mutant superpowers—heightened strength, aquatic regeneration, and flight (thanks to the wings on his ankles)—and commands his nation with a meticulous, if forceful, hand. (In the comics, Namor is known as the Sub-Mariner and hails from Atlantis.) The mining operation threatens to expose his oceanic utopia so he devises a plan to stop it: kill the genius scientist who built the vibranium-tracking device (Riri Williams, introducing Ironheart to the MCU) and align with Wakanda against the surface world. But Wakanda refuses. And the two nations find themselves staring down almost certain war.

A war, as it turns out, that isn’t quite as persuasive as the animating principles behind it. Like the US government’s relentless appetite for global influence. Or the all-consuming rage Shuri (Letitia Wright) feels from the loss of her brother, and the very real way it drives her to action. Or how Namor’s villainy, if it should even be called that, is rooted somewhere deeper, somewhere more human. He’s cut from the cloth of classic MCU antiheroes. Like Wanda. Like Kang. Namor is regaled in paradox and not completely unjustified in his wrath. It’s all in how nicely his backstory is propped: He is the descendant of a 16th-century Meso-American tribe that fled enslavement and was forced to find refuge underwater. He’s a survivor from a people who learned to survive under horrific conditions. His morals have weight.

Matt Jancer

Steven Levy

All of Coogler’s defining touchstones are present. He adopts the same diasporic hybridity that made the original Black Panther a singular feat (production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth Carter both returned for the sequel ). This time, beyond Wakanda’s emerald fields and swarming marketplaces, we are introduced to Namor’s aquatic eden. What Beachler and Carter devised is a visual elixir that pulls from Mayan folklore: the dress, speech, and architecture are all threaded with striking Indigenous details. One of the great failures of the movie, however, is that we don’t spend more time meandering through the underwater city, getting insight into its people and their culture.

I’ve been told before that trauma freezes at the peak. It demands that we temper our pace, that we take stock of the totality of what’s happened, the bleeding ache of it. Ramonda and Shuri do their best to shoulder unimaginable grief, to remember what they lost. The thing is, superhero films—the narrative logic of them—demand a certain momentum. They need to keep moving. They flicker like a comic book, pane by pane, never resting too long before the next scene. Grief asks the opposite of us. It wants us to pause, to slow our steps. This is where Wakanda Forever is most at odds: It has a hard time deciding just what it should feel, what emotion it wants to land on. But maybe that’s the truer film. The more honest one. It’s not as neat. It’s unseemly but more vulnerable as a result.

The central aspect that makes Wakanda Forever a unique Marvel movie—grief as its centerpiece—is also the aspect I find least satisfying about it. Of course, you can’t ignore it in a film like this. You can’t avoid the fog that arises and the pain that feels like it might never leave. You have to circle it. You have to face it head on. In some way, you have to make it the story.

And what that looks like, what it beautifully materializes into in a movie like Wakanda Forever , is what it has always looked like: capable and caring Black women—mothers and sisters and friends—making use of the grief they’ve been saddled with and not letting it make use of them. Even in Afrofuturist utopias a fact of Black life is stubbornly persistent: Not even our superheroes can outmaneuver death.

And when they don’t prove invincible—what then? Those who remain find a way to fight, to heal. It’s an age-old story, and tragically too real. It’s one you’ve probably heard before. It’s one that never loses meaning.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever First Reviews: Thoughtful, Spectacular Sequel That Raises the Bar for the MCU

Early reviews say wakanda forever honors the late chadwick boseman with a visually sumptuous, character-driven story that manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , marvel cinematic universe , movies

Hardly just another sequel in the MCU , Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has the pressure of following up the best-reviewed movie of the franchise — which was also up for Best Picture (and won three of its six other Oscar nominations). Of course, the second Black Panther feature is also missing its former lead, Chadwick Boseman , who sadly died of cancer in 2020. According to the first reviews of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever , though, the sequel manages to still live up to the original and meet expectations for another thrilling and culturally meaningful superhero blockbuster while feeling equally weighed down by and lifted up by Boseman’s legacy.

Here’s what critics are saying about Black Panther: Wakanda Forever :

Does the sequel live up to expectations?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had the highest of expectations and surpasses every one of them, and makes a strong case for itself as a Best Picture contender. – Travis Hopson, Punch Drunk Critics

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is under a lot of pressure, but Coogler lands it. – Princess Weekes, The Mary Sue

Marvel raised the bar on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever . – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

Rather than one-upping Black Panther , Wakanda Forever continues its story with a grace and care that’s more moving than any comic book movie has the right to be. – Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

What director and co-writer Ryan Coogler and the team have done with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is nothing short of outstanding. – Janet A. Leigh, Digital Spy

How does it fit into the MCU?

One of the most moving MCU entries so far, and one of the best films to come out of Marvel’s Phase Four. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Decisions that were made in Avengers: Endgame , Black Panther , and other spots of the Marvel Cinematic Universe pay off in ways that will surprise fans… You’re going to leave the theater with a ton of questions for Phase 5 and beyond. – Aaron Perine, ComicBook.com

When the film tries to remind the audience of how it connects to the rest of the MCU, especially when specific lines of dialogue seem forced in to do so, it loses itself. – Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

Wakanda Forever has a sense of self that extends far beyond its Marvel brand identity. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

(Photo by ©Marvel Studios)

Does it work without Chadwick Boseman?

The central character of this tale remains the one played by Boseman, who may not be around anymore, but his influence casts a long, deep shadow. – Neil Pond, Neil’s Entertainment Picks

Unavoidably, Boseman’s absence paradoxically has a presence of its own but in a way that feels wholly appropriate and is not distracting. – Janet A. Leigh, Digital Spy

While Wakanda Forever directly reflects Boseman’s death by almost replicating the circumstances in the story, it’s done so with reverence and never feels like exploitation. – Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

A love for Chadwick and an undying reverence for T’Challa can be felt throughout Wakanda Forever . But the movie is careful to not be so bound up in those powerful emotions that it ever feels narratively inflexible or stuck in the past. – Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

Every major character in Wakanda is left to determine whether T’Challa’s memory will be a blessing or a torment, and the movie around them is so wracked by the same tension that even its most formulaic moments are heavy with a human weight that blockbusters seldom have the strength to carry. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

How well does the movie honor his legacy?

The passing of T’Challa is handled with care, grace, and respect… Right off the bat, the viewer is set with the tone that this film is a love letter to Chadwick. – Jamie Broadnax, Black Girl Nerds

Not only is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever a love letter to Chadwick Boseman, but it is also an accurate depiction of how people cope with their remorse. – Britany Murphy, Discussing Film

The death of both the actor and the character he played is handled with incredible grace, sensibility, and honor… Fans will be relieved to see this dedication. – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

(Photo by ©Marvel Sudios)

How is Namor as the villain?

Played by Tenoch Huerta, Namor is an absolute powerhouse in every way. – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

Every time the film focuses on Namor, the importance of protecting his people, and his interactions with Shuri, the film excels. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

Tenoch Huerta’s Namor… might have a claim to the title of Phase 4’s most memorable “villain.” – Aaron Perine, ComicBook.com

It’s been a long time since a villain/anti-hero has felt so fleshed out in the MCU. – Britany Murphy, Discussing Film

One of the most captivating villains we’ve seen in a Marvel Studios movie… A villain with layers, and depth, and is conflicted. Much like Killmonger in Black Panther . – Jamie Broadnax, Black Girl Nerds

Huerta cannot quite measure up to Michael B. Jordan’s raw charisma, but he makes up for it by projecting an imperial mien worthy of Namor’s status as a demigod among his people. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

Do any other performances stand out?

Bassett in particular arguably puts her career-best performance in the role, with incredibly raw emotion packed into her delivery of each line of the script. – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

Bassett gives one of the best performances in the Marvel universe so far. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Bassett also has to be on the shortlist for Best Supporting Actress nominees. The script sets her up for some powerful moments that Bassett crushes with the kind of emotion to put lumps in throats. – Jeffrey Lyles, Lyles’ Movie Files

Wright gives a standout performance in having to convey a wide myriad of emotions of someone who is the heir to the throne but has inner and exterior conflicts about her leadership while living in the shadow of T’Challa and his legacy. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

One of the shining rays of exuberance in this movie is Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams, a.k.a. Ironheart. – Aaron Perine, ComicBook.com

(Photo by Annette Brown/©Marvel)

How is the script?

The storyline is fluid, engaging, and constantly moving – one of the best scripts from Marvel. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

On a plot and scene-by-scene basis, the film struggles to find one singular thread to connect everything. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

At times, Coogler and Cole’s script seems to strain from the effort it takes to pull all these threads together. – Rachel LaBonte, Screen Rant

How does it look?

The film is shot beautifully with its gorgeous cinematography and color palette being far more noticeable than most other Marvel projects. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has better visual effects than Black Panther . The cinematography is also an improvement. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

The regality of the Wakanda regime, from landscapes to the CGI technology to the costuming, the visuals are even better in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever than the original 2018 film. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

Once again, Carter does her thing… and it already feels like a foregone conclusion that she will claim another Best Costume Design Oscar for work on this franchise. – Jeffrey Lyles, Lyles’ Movie Files

Are there meaningful action scenes?

They’re at their best when they focus on the human side of it rather than the explosiveness of it all. – Rachel LaBonte, Screen Rant

[As] the scope of the battles get larger and larger, yet the stakes become more and more personal. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

The action is top-notch… Coogler is much more focused on telling a story about the emotions that drive violence, not the violence itself. – Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

Even though the movie’s action sequences are a marked upgrade over the first film’s, they ultimately end up playing second string to Wakanda Forever’ s focus on the Wakandan royal family’s emotions. – Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

Only the first action scene… has the panache that the previous film displayed at numerous turns. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

Is it more than just another superhero movie?

The movie has the muscle and heft of a comic-book blockbuster, but it also reflects profoundly on the human resonance of ancestry, remembering and moving on. – Neil Pond, Neil’s Entertainment Picks

More than just a standard superhero story about good and bad guys… it pushes its audience to think about the ripples history creates in the present . – Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

Beyond super heroes, action-packed scenes and explosions, the power of grief – the physical, mental, and emotional anguish – is the bloodline of this film. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

Wakanda Forever manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

Wakanda Forever is probably the best female-led superhero movie we have to date. – Princess Weekes, The Mary Sue

Is it a lot of movie? Will we feel the length?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has a ton of story to tell and it needs every single minute. – Travis Hopson, Punch Drunk Critics

It’s big and bulky and sometimes beautiful, almost enough for two full movies packed into one. – Neil Pond, Neil’s Entertainment Picks

I was surprised how fast the time flew during this film. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

Wakanda Forever is paced in such a way that its action sequences move at a brisk clip, while its more serious moments never overstay a beat. – Toussaint Egan, Polygon

It’s easily 20 minutes too long. Yet Wakanda Forever has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

While its length and emotional density can feel like a marathon, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a cinematic triumph. – Eric Francisco, Inverse

Does it signal good things ahead for the MCU?

For people dealing with Marvel fatigue, this is the film that will give you some hope. – Princess Weekes, The Mary Sue

I cannot applaud Marvel enough for this movie – the most important Marvel film in the MCU repertoire to date. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whaisians

It paves an exciting way forward for the Marvel franchise while cementing itself as a cultural force to be reckoned with. – Rachel LaBonte, Screen Rant

Phase 5 has some big shoes to fill after this one, and hopefully, the storytelling can create the same kind of authenticity and greatness this movie has. – Jamie Broadnax, Black Girl Nerds

Wakanda Forever suggests that the kingdom, and the franchise, are in good hands. – Neil Pond, Neil’s Entertainment Picks

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens everywhere on November 11, 2022.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'wakanda forever'.

Bob Mondello

Marvel's "Black Panther" sequel, "Wakanda Forever," brings together almost all the original cast members for a story that is both an elegy for Chadwick Boseman and a way forward for the story.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

When actor Chadwick Boseman, who brought warmth and intelligence to "Black Panther," died of cancer two years ago. Marvel Studios faced a decision. The first film had made more than a billion dollars, so there would definitely be another one. But how - start the story over, just recast the role and move on? Well, critic Bob Mondello says that, unlike other superhero epics, in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," the death of the film's title character is acknowledged from the very start.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: The images come fast and painful, Shuri reading the anguish in the Queen Mother's eyes before she can even speak the words, your brother is with the ancestors, a funeral procession, frenetic, mournful, all in blazing white, even the Marvel logo, usually teeming with superheroes, this time filled exclusively with images of Chadwick Boseman's King T'Challa. The grief is inescapable, Wakanda brought low but hardly bowed. An attack on an outreach facility, tactical weapons - no match for Wakanda's tactics.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER")

DANAI GURIRA: (As Okoye) Where is your spear?

MICHAELA COEL: (As Aneka) Shuri gave me these to try.

MONDELLO: Glowing daggers.

COEL: (As Aneka) You know, I like them better.

GURIRA: (As Okoye) Our foremothers gave us a spear because it is precise, elegant and deadly.

MONDELLO: General Okoye of the Dora Milaje.

GURIRA: (As Okoye) It will not change under my watch.

MONDELLO: Other things that will not change, at least on writer-director Ryan Coogler's watch - "Black Panther's" futuristic take on real-world history in which a proud African nation resists industrial powers that want to strip it of natural resources. This particular attack was an attempt to steal vibranium, the meteor-borne substance that gives Wakanda its power. When the queen addresses the U.N., it's to warn the world's colonialists to back off.

ANGELA BASSETT: (As Ramonda) Further attempts on our resources will be considered an act of aggression and met with a much steeper response.

MONDELLO: Coogler amplifies the argument by bringing another long-hidden civilization into the mix this time, an underwater kingdom called Taloqan, descended from the ancient Mayans, and led by a ruler who surprises Angela Bassett's grieving queen and Letitia Wright's despondent Shuri by approaching them on a Wakandan riverside.

BASSETT: (As Ramonda) Who are you? And how did you get in here?

MONDELLO: From the water.

TENOCH HUERTA: (As Namor) This place is amazing. My mother told stories about a place like this - a protected land with people that never had to change who they were.

BASSETT: (As Ramonda) I am not a woman who enjoys repeating herself. Who are you?

HUERTA: (As Namor) I have many names. My people call me Kukulkan. But my enemies call me Namor.

MONDELLO: Played by Tenoch Huerta, this guy has wings on his ankles and a chip on his shoulder, one that goes back centuries. He's come because he's looking for partners in a plan the world powers aren't going to like much.

HUERTA: (As Namor) I need to know if Wakanda is an ally or an enemy.

MONDELLO: I'll leave you to find that out. But his presence means that when this film starts globe hopping James Bond style, it skips the usual world capitals for spots like Haiti and the Yucatan Peninsula. Also, that the undersea camerawork is stellar, even if the Wakandans are slow to take this new guy seriously.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) We should find the fish man and kill him.

MONDELLO: Never mind. With superhuman strength and those wings on his ankles to let him zip around with little regard for physics, he's certainly diverting. As you'll have gathered, "Wakanda Forever" isn't just an exercise in mourning. In two hours and 40 minutes, it finds plenty of time for whale riding and fierce battles with all manner of spear handling. It is still, in other words, a Marvel movie, though a somber and at times a quite resonant one. I'm Bob Mondello.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Review

11 Nov 2022

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

For all of its blockbuster bombast and globe-trotting conflict,  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever  is, in a sense, framed around just one person: Chadwick Boseman . The loss of the  Black Panther  star, who tragically died in 2020, isn’t just taken as a logistical problem for the franchise to fix. There’s real pain behind this film. In addressing Boseman's passing, returning director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole movingly and tastefully blur the lines between the real and the fictional.

That loss — of Boseman in real life, and T’Challa within the film — becomes ambient, ever-present. The stages of grief form the trajectory of the film: T'Challa's sister Shuri ( Letitia Wright ), angry and vengeful, takes refuge in technology, while their mother Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ), devastated but clear-minded, finds it in spirituality — as though the dual elements of its Afrofuturist setting have been split in two. All of them struggle to continue with their lives. Death, as the characters reminds us, is not the end.

Namor is a highlight, an imaginative adaptation of the veteran comics character, one who here speaks truth with convincing venom.

The tragic circumstances lead to an increased focus on this formerly supporting cast, but the shift feels natural., and there are strong, absorbing performances across the board. In particular, Letitia Wright — stepping up into a leading role — finds compelling volatility for Shuri to take the spotlight. Elsewhere, Winston Duke ’s bluster is still a joy to watch; Angela Bassett is commanding and heartbreaking; newcomers like Michaela Coel (as Dora Milaje warrior Aneka) fit in as though they were always there.

Namor, meanwhile (played by  Tenoch Huerta , a magnetic presence), makes for a unique antagonist. He's a highlight, an imaginative adaptation of the veteran comics character, one who here speaks truth with convincing venom. Coogler ties him to Mesoamerican history and Spanish colonialism, and there’s a sense — like Wakanda — of a tangible, real-world history. In both Wakanda and Talokan, there is beautiful costuming and production design from Hannah Beachler and Ruth Carter, respectively; and lush photography from cinematographer Autumn Durald, who maintains precision and clarity in the action.

Namor's heritage brings with it some exciting quirks, too: from the wings on his ankles; to more tactile-seeming water effects in place of the usual fireballs; to the use of a hypnotic siren song; to the orcas and whales deployed as battle-mounts. For the most part,  Wakanda Forever  is imaginative and feels grounded, which makes the tilt to the usual CG-dominated spectacle a little jarring.

In the same sense, the film can feel overly busy. Coogler’s script sometimes strains at having to stuff it all in, from the fallout of T’Challa’s death, to the geopolitical turmoil between Wakanda and Talokan, to the usual extended-universe baggage. It all sprawls into a messy last act that can feel at odds with the rest of the film.

But  Wakanda Forever  ultimately lands on a poignant note. In bookends, it deals head-on with the passing of both T’Challa and Boseman, moments that pull the film into a moving, surprisingly personal whole. Even in his absence, Boseman holds  Black Panther  together.

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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Review: Ryan Coogler Builds a Furious Slow-Burn Sequel Around Chadwick Boseman’s Loss

As the women of Wakanda, led by Letitia Wright's Shuri, struggle to fill the void T'Challa has left, Coogler stages less a typical Marvel movie than an intricately doom-laden geopolitical thriller.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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When Ryan Coogler , the director and co-writer of “Black Panther,” agreed to go ahead in making the sequel after Boseman’s death (for a while he says he considered stepping away), he knew that the already daunting challenge of creating a movie that could live up to the first film had multiplied exponentially. His decision not to replace Boseman with a different actor was wise. You don’t try to replace someone who’s irreplaceable.

Yet what Coogler has done instead in “ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ” carries its own high-wire audacity. Teaming up again with co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, the filmmaker has woven the demise of his leading man into the very firmament of his story. As the characters, led by Letitia Wright ’s Shuri, the princess of Wakanda who is T’Challa’s younger sister, proceed to mourn T’Challa’s death, they tap deeply into our collective feelings about Boseman. That sounds like a standard thing for a movie in this predicament to do, except that where Coogler goes further is in building his entire drama — the drive, power and passion of it — around the wounding hole in Wakanda left by T’Challa’s death.

Wakanda, the most powerful nation on earth, faces a world that covets its reserves of vibranium, the indigenous purple-glowing metal that’s the source of its power. Early on, mercenaries break into the country’s technological nerve center, trying to take vibranium by force. But they’re subdued and captured, and there’s a terrific scene set at the United Nations where T’Challa’s mother, Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ), the queen of Wakanda who is now its leader, parades the bound prisoners as she dresses down the world for daring to raid her nation. This is the first (though not the last) scene Bassett will play with a blazing fury worthy of Shakespeare, and she’s mesmerizing. The source of Ramonda’s rage, which she’s too proud to say out loud, is that the attitude of many of the world’s nations towards Wakanda is charged with racism. That’s why they think they can plunder it.

The story turns on the possibility that vibranium may exist outside Wakanda — which is why the U.S. has sent an exploratory vessel into the ocean, only to see its operatives killed by the otherworldly power of Talokan, an ancient civilization of underwater dwellers with winged ankles. They’re led by Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta Mejía as a deceptively gentle-spirited, ultimately imperious king who is something like Aquaman, except that the character predated Aquaman in the comics (in 1939) by two years. Talokan, like Wakanda, is an outlier among nations, which is why Namor wants to team up with the Wakandans. But he offers Shuri a Faustian bargain: His dream is to burn the whole surface world, which makes him a spiritual cousin to Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, who in “Black Panther” exhorted a similar chip-on-the-shoulder nihilism.

Watching “Wakanda Forever,” it’s almost unavoidable that we feel the absence of Boseman’s heroic dramatic center of gravity. The movie doesn’t have the classic comic-book pow of “Black Panther,” and it’s easily 20 minutes too long (we could probably have lived without the Talokan backstory). Yet “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Oct. 27, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 161 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Marvel Studios production. Producers: Kevin Feige, Nate Moore. Executive producers: Victoria Alonso, Louis D’Esposito, Barry H. Waldman.
• Crew: Director: Ryan Coogler. Screenplay: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole. Camera: Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Editors: Kelley Dixon, Jennifer Lame, Michael P. Shawver. Music: Ludwig Göransson.
• With: Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Michaela Coel, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Dominique Thorne, Martin Freeman.  

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Here's what critics are saying about Marvel's 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever'

• Ryan Coogler's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," is over 80% "fresh" on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
• Critics said the film has an "overly busy" plot, but is a poignant tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed T'Challa.
• The Marvel Studios film opens Friday and is expected to have a huge opening weekend.

It's impossible to replace the irreplaceable, but that was Ryan Coogler's task as the director and co-writer of Disney's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever."

The sequel to 2018's blockbuster hit "Black Panther" takes place after the real-world death of actor Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed the titular hero in several Marvel films before dying from cancer in 2020. He was 43.

"Wakanda Forever" had the unenviable charge of not only being a memorial to the late Boseman, but also move the multibillion-dollar MCU franchise forward into its next chapter. It is expected to post a huge opening weekend .

Coogler, alongside Marvel Studio's executives, decided not to recast the character of T'Challa. Instead, the film opens with the off-screen death of the character. The story that follows centers on how the secondary characters in the world of Wakanda deal with that loss as well as the encroachment of the rest of the world, which has become aware of the country's rare and powerful resource — vibranium.

Several critics called the plot overstuffed, as Coogler seeks to pay tribute to Boseman and establish the necessary markers for future MCU projects. The film introduces Tenoch Huerta as Namor, the ruler of Talokan, a fictional kingdom based on Atlantis, as well as Riri Williams, known in the comics as Ironheart, who will star in her own Disney+ series.

Despite its length and heftiness, "Wakanda Forever" has generated an over 80% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes from about 300 reviews.

Here's what some critics thought of "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" ahead of its Friday debut:

Kristy Puchko, Mashable

Puchko says the film, while action-packed, is at its core about how people handle loss differently. This is particularly evident in how T'Challa's mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) quarrel over the future of Wakanda.

"Through their mother-daughter battles — born of love and broken hearts — Coogler poses questions that hit hard," Puchko wrote. "What to we owe to those we've lost? Is their legacy our responsibility? Or are we responsible for our own legacies? Might their memory bolster us or blind us to what our futures could be without them?"

Wright, who spent much of the first "Black Panther" as comic relief, now takes on a more serious lead role, one that many critics praised.

"[Wright] handles this shift well, bringing a maturity to the pesky little sister without entirely losing her bear-poking edge," Puchko said.

Read the full review from Mashable.

Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

"Boseman's T'Challa is a spirit that lovingly haunts the film," Macdonald writes.

"It's part of the great strength of 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' that it doesn't shy away from that sadness; this is, after all, a superhero movie, and Coogler might have been forgiven for wanting to quickly cut to the chase, so to speak," she wrote.

Instead, the filmmaker allows the characters and the audience to absorb the loss before flashing forward.

"There's so much that 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' does right that it's frustrating to blame it for the one flaw it can't help," she wrote. "But you watch it wondering about the movie that never got made, the story that never got finished, the life cut short too soon."

Read the full review from Seattle Times.

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

Much like the first "Black Panther," Coogler is being praised for filling the "Wakanda Forever" production with talented female actors and creators. Hannah Beachler and Ruth Carter, who won Oscars for production design and costuming for their work on the first film, are back and earning more raves.

"Their shared vision of Afro-futurism feels lush and joyful and beautifully specific set against the usual white noise of Marvel fanfare, even (or almost especially) in darker moments, like the pristine rituals of a funeral scene," Greenblatt writes. "'Wakanda' is still clearly a Marvel property, with all the for-the-fans story beats and secondary characters its ever-expanding universe requires, but it also feels apart from any one that's come before."

Greenblatt also touches on how, without King T'Challa, Wakanda has become a matriarchy.

"Without their king, Wakanda has become a queendom from the top down, overseen by Bassett's regal, ageless Ramonda, the gorgeously daunting Gurira, and Wright, who rises to fill her dramatically expanded role with feline grace and vulnerability," she wrote.

She notes that while this sequel is likely nothing like what Coogler and Marvel had intended to create prior to Boseman's untimely death, "the movie they've made feels like something unusually elegant and profound at the multiplex; a little bit of forever carved out for the star who left too soon."

Read the full review from Entertainment Weekly.

Kambole Campbell, Empire

Critics also praised the performance of Huerta as Namor, also known as the Sub-Mariner in comics, and Coogler's interpretation of the character. Campbell calls Namor "a unique antagonist."

"He's a highlight, an imaginative adaptation of the veteran comics character, one who here speaks truth with convincing venom. Coogler ties him to Mesoamerican history and Spanish colonialism, and there's a sense — like Wakanda — of a tangible, real-world history."

Campbell also noted that "Wakanda Forever" "can feel overly busy," since Coogler had a lot of elements to weave into the film.

"It all sprawls into a messy last act that can feel at odds with the rest of the film," he wrote. "But 'Wakanda Forever' ultimately lands on a poignant note. In bookends, it deals head-on with the passing of both T'Challa and Boseman, moments that pull the film into a moving, surprisingly personal whole. Even in his absence, Boseman holds 'Black Panther' together."

Read the full review from Empire.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal owns Rotten Tomatoes.

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The triumphant success of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” comes against all odds.

First, the sequel had to follow the hit 2018 film that became a worldwide cross-cultural phenomenon and a Best Picture Oscar nominee. And, more somberly, Marvel needed to craft the usual entertaining movie its fans have come to expect even after the incredibly sad death of the original’s star, Chadwick Boseman. 

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

Running time: 161 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sequences of strong violence, action and some language). In theaters Nov. 11.

Another major follow-up with two such mountainous hurdles doesn’t come to mind. 

And yet, the superb “Wakanda Forever” solidifies “Black Panther” as Marvel’s richest and most high-quality franchise. There are no noticeable symptoms of sequelitis in director and co-writer Ryan Coogler’s film. Every aspect — acting, writing, special effects, score — is a notch above its superhero peers. In the best possible sense, you forget you’re watching just another Marvel movie.

At the emotional start, T’Challa (the late Boseman, who we appropriately do not see outside of sparse flashbacks), dies of an unknown illness, leaving his mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) bereft and the Kingdom of Wakanda rudderless. 

One year later, Ramonda stingingly accuses member states of the United Nations of attempting to steal Wakanda’s vibranium — the rare, all-powerful element only found in the African country. Or so they think.

Using a special probe, America discovers the blue rock present in the Atlantic Ocean, inciting the wrath of a new foe — the secret underwater people of Talokan, who also rely on vibranium and are led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta), essentially an aquatic Black Panther. The US blames Wakanda for the attack on their ship, but Namor threatens Queen Ramonda that if she reveals Talokan’s existence, Wakanda will be destroyed.

In the absence of the title character, Ramonda and Shuri, who was previously a gadgets-and-gizmos sidekick, ascend to leading roles. And, especially on the part of Bassett, we witness the best dramatic acting in an MCU movie so far. One of Bassett’s speeches is so forceful and stirring for the usually milquetoast MCU, it’s like being served foie gras at Burger King.

Wright also goes admirably deep as Shuri, while her character wrestles with her royal role and adulthood now that T’Challa is gone. Rarely do other Marvel actors so capably play both comedy and suffering as well as Wright.

Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Aneka (Michaela Coel) all have distinct, thoughtful arcs. And a very funny helper is introduced in Riri (Dominique Thorne), a genius Harvard student who unwittingly goes along for the ride.

“Wakanda Forever” is the opposite of DC Comics’ horrible “Black Adam ,” in which somehow no character mattered or was remotely memorable. There are no loose threads here, and everybody is involving.

Huerta’s Namor makes a solid, complex villain — although not quite the showstopper of Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger — but the star is really all the Talokanil. Inspired by indigenous Yucatan peoples, Coogler and his team have built a different, submerged world as painstakingly detailed as Wakanda. Talokan is strikingly gorgeous, like Pandora of “Avatar,” and we develop an affection for it based on looks alone. That becomes important later on.

Coogler’s film, at 2 hours 40 minutes, is a long one, but there is no dead air; the locales are stunning, and the creativity on display is explosive. Checking the time at the end, I was pleasantly surprised by how late it was. That’s a credit to the director, who has a mastery of grand, portentous, earth-shaking moments that pull us toward the screen.

But it also speaks to the quality of the acting, which is an element the ballooning superhero genre has largely conditioned audiences to not care about. With an ensemble as committed and gutsy as this one — even donning full-body panther suits and wielding high-tech spears — you can’t look away.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Doesn’t Have the Answers

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever carries a series of burdens no one film could ever bear. Its director, Ryan Coogler, must grapple with the challenges and expectations born and influenced by the tragic death of star Chadwick Boseman. Coogler must craft an entertaining sequel to a billion-dollar blockbuster while working within the constricting Marvel Cinematic Universe. He must carefully balance the expectations of Black folks who have elevated the film to a celestial status — a pinnacle of Afrofuturism-tinged desires for a specific kind of Black power and representation onscreen. The film is called to respectfully introduce a new Black Panther and push the MCU forward with the introduction of Namor (Tenoch Huerta), an Indigenous Mesoamerican king-god figure of the undersea, isolationist kingdom Talokan — which has its own cache of vibranium and superhuman strength that makes Wakanda buckle. Perhaps most crucially, the film’s cast must act out grief while being mired in the experience themselves, which is especially true for Letitia Wright’s Shuri, who is tasked with shouldering the film’s most dramatic moments.

To say the film is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid — less a failure of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative constraints.

I have complicated feelings around the original Black Panther, which was released to great acclaim in 2018. I’ve never gravitated to the mythos, primarily because T’Challa is a character of such noble stature that he can come across as uncomplicated, too perfect, and lacking the human foibles that make a character root themself in your memory. (In a surprising moment of self-awareness for the franchise, a cameo in Wakanda Forever says as much.) But Boseman rounded out T’Challa with a sweetness he aimed toward the character’s loved ones, which makes the actor’s absence in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever even more profound. Without him, the sequel struggles to hit the graceful emotional frequencies of its predecessor. The Marvel framework tends to falter when it comes to portraying genuine, complicated feelings, and what is more complicated than grief? It lacks a linear quality. It isn’t something you can overcome with a magic spell or godlike abilities. It breaks against the form and function of a Marvel property.

Wakanda Forever begins with the funeral of T’Challa — a sight tinged with joy and sorrow. Here, the film is at its most vivid and visually intriguing. T’Challa’s coffin is carried through the capital of Wakanda by the tearful Dora Milaje led by Okoye (Danai Gurira). The cortège and people of Wakanda are dressed in all white — a striking touch from costuming legend Ruth E. Carter. While the faces of T’Challa’s closest loved ones are solemn, the people of Wakanda move their bodies in an ecstatic dance slowed down to the speed of molasses. But the scene is all too brief. The editing, which gives the film a rushed quality here and a lethargic one elsewhere, works against what the sequence accomplishes. We’re soon jettisoned into the thrust of the story (although thrust is perhaps too forceful a word to describe such an anemic film).

In the wake of T’Challa’s death from an unnamed illness, his mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), must help her empire navigate assaults from within and without. The true might of Wakanda is now widely known, and the film tries to spell out the geopolitical consequences of this new reality. In doing so, it turns to its lone white folks — Everett K. Ross (an annoyingly nondescript Martin Freeman functioning as living exposition) and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (a hard-edge but not altogether engaging Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — and screeches into the land of boredom and obligation. They soon learn that an even greater threat than Wakanda is Talokan — led by Namor, who is eager to fight against the surface world in order to protect his kingdom. (How many isolationist societies of magical, powerful people of color can one cinematic universe have?) Namor isn’t so much a villain as a misshapen antagonist forced into violence by a script that requires it to push the plot along, yet he cares deeply for the barely sketched supporting figures of his kingdom.

The beating heart of the film is meant to be Shuri, who is pulled in as many directions as the story itself: between grief-fueled vengeance and growth, between chaos and peace. The sharp-mouthed, highly intelligent younger-sister archetype that Shuri filled never quite worked for me, but graduating her to a character saddled with so much devastation doesn’t either. Wright can’t find the intensity required, and she lacks the physicality to stand out in frames filled with more forceful actors. Lupita Nyong’o fares much better. I’ve missed the sight of her onscreen. Her brightness as Nakia infuses a few beautiful moments in the film. Other characters feel mostly surface-level in comparison: never fully rounded out with their own moments of bereavement or a fully rooted personality. Consider the spunky college student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who is weighted down by the clunkiest jokes of the film. Gurira and Bassett, however, when given the space to do so, capably provide the complex characterization that is otherwise sparse — as a stunning moment in the kingdom’s throne room, shot through with anger and deep longing, demonstrates.

There’s a lot of wasted talent onscreen. Michaela Coel’s character, Aneka, is missing the tricksy magnetism the writer-actor displays everywhere else. The look of Namor is beguiling — as are the ideas behind his Talokan lineage (he was born in the 16th century and witnessed, as a young child-king, the morally repugnant, heartbreaking violence of Spanish conquistadors). But despite the film’s nearly three hours, there is seemingly not enough time to flesh out his people and culture. It constructs a rushed origin story never focused enough on building out Talokan. Who are its people beyond their isolationism? What do they worship and delight in? What powers their beliefs in a world where a godlike being like Namor exists? Within this part of the film’s tapestry, no character possesses a hint of interiority. Rather than a sincere exploration of this Indigenous world, Namor’s character plays like a cunning decision to broaden Disney and Marvel’s target audience under the banner of representation (despite Huerta’s clear commitment and pleasure in the role). When Huerta is called to deliver lines with the word mutant , they land with a thud.

The action scenes provide little of the decadent thrills that can power even the emptiest of superhero narratives. In the first Black Panther, the action aims for a muscular kineticism that mostly succeeds when characters like Killmonger are unmasked or the camera is trained on Okoye and the Dora Milaje. The fight choreography of the original has clean, strong lines of action and emotional beats that bring with them a scintillating force that Wakanda Forever fails to achieve. Here, the muscular kineticism has been replaced with an ostentatious grandiosity. The final fight scene, in particular, is impressive in terms of the scope and amount of actors involved onscreen, but it lacks the precision and focus that would lead to standout moments. Scenes involving members of the Dora Milaje are blocked in ways that render their physical presence much less graceful, stifling any glimmer of characterization the movement of the first film provided. The choreography of the Talokan fighters isn’t distinct enough either — save for in fits and spurts like during a fight with Okoye on a city bridge. Namor is powerful, to be sure, but his introductions in scenes lack the regality that could make an undersea king feel fantastically unreal. The new Black Panther is meant to flex their muscles in the back half, but by then, an overstuffed quality has set in. The dexterous bliss that comes with the sudden explosion of superheroic energy is crowded out. Ultimately, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw lose sight of the rich color and minute detail that make this comic world alluring and, instead, allow their picture to feel as busy as the gold-and-black costume of the new Black Panther.

Wakanda Forever is too drab to work as a capable sequel, too unfocused to feel wholly consequential among the spoiling bombast of the larger MCU, too surface-level in its characterization and thematic entanglements to function as a worthy memorial to a star gone far too soon. It is neither developed enough narratively nor complex enough politically. It is a film not about Blackness or Indigenous identity, though it hides behind the sheen of both. Coogler is a strong director still relatively early in his career, but his voice isn’t evolving as much as it’s rattling inside the morass of the ever-growing MCU. Who does Coogler want to be as an artist? What does he have to say about humanity? Black Panther: Wakanda Forever doesn’t have the answers.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Review: A Powerfully Emotional Sequel Transforms the Franchise

Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) protect Wakanda from the fierce underwater King Namor (Tenoch Huerta).

Ryan Coogler achieves remarkable feats with a powerfully emotional sequel that reshapes a blockbuster franchise. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever stands as the most mature and thoughtful film in the MCU . Coogler had to address the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman's King T'Challa, its devastating impact on the ensemble characters, and forging a new path with significant challenges . Wakanda faces existential threats for its Vibranium resources. As hostile countries clamor for the valuable ore, an undersea source is discovered with a fierce protector. Who would burn the above ground to ashes and never capitulate.

Wakanda reels from the unexpected death of King T'Challa. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) assumes leadership with a broken heart. She gives the world a stark notice. The Black Panther is gone, but Wakanda remains undaunted. She will retaliate against any efforts by foreigners to steal Vibranium. Ramonda tries to make peace and accept the loss of her son. Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) doesn't share her mother's ability to cope with grief. Anger fuels her genius mind. She's haunted by her inability to recreate the Heart-Shaped Herb. Her beloved brother died because she wasn't strong or smart enough to save him.

Meanwhile, in the Atlantic Ocean, a specialized CIA device finds Vibranium on the sea floor. It unleashes a ferocious response from a long-hidden race of Mayan descendants. K'uk'ulkan (Tenoch Huerta), the king of Talokan, has seen the horrors of colonizing invaders. "The feathered serpent god", cursed as Namor by the terrified Spanish, won't allow his people's secret home to be known. He confronts Ramonda and Shuri with a deadly request. Wakanda and Talokan have the same enemies. Find and kill the Vibranium detector's creator (Dominique Thorne). Wakanda will suffer the same wrath as the outsiders if they disobey him.

Wakanda in the Absence of T'Challa

Wakanda's thrust into a geopolitical storm by the absence of T'Challa. They have what everyone else wants. Namor brands T'Challa as a betrayer of Wakanda and Talokan. He ignored established doctrine by revealing Vibranium and its capabilities. Ironically, Ramonda shares Namor's views about hiding technology but the proverbial cat's out of the bag. She takes orders from no one. The problem is that Namor and his lethal Talokan army outmatches Wakanda in every sense.

Wright becomes a star in this film. Shuri is a complex protagonist in deep turmoil. Spiritual guidance from ancestors on an astral plain means nothing to her. She embraces science and difficult truths. Wakanda is in danger. Her father and brother are gone. Ramonda wants her daughter to be the country's salvation and future. But Shuri must come to terms with her bitterness. Loyal protectors, Okoye (Danai Gurira), M'Baku (Winston Duke), and Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), sadly watch as Shuri's resolve hardens into rage and fury. Her climactic showdown with Namor kicks so much butt it breaks a foot.

Related: Enola Holmes 2 Review: A Smashing Sequel Surpasses the Original Film

Wakanda Forever puts Avatar 2 on creative notice. The underwater scenes and Talokan production design are spectacular. Coogler brilliantly uses Mayan and Aztec tribal imagery to create incredible environments. The Talokans appear blue and wear water masks on land. They ride whales as attacking transport vessels. Their armor, tattoos, and piercings reflect a Mesoamerican identity. Huerta's Namor isn't chugging booze and cracking jokes like Aquaman. He's heart attack serious with zero compunction about killing for the cause. Flashback scenes tell Namor's origin story and how his people became ocean dwellers.

Strong Women Bolster Wakanda

Wakanda Forever extols African culture with female characters dominating the narrative. Ramonda needs the support of strong women to bolster Wakanda. But she doesn't accept failure or disobedience. A brutal condemnation is stunning. Her "mother" figure provides strength and moral compass. Shuri struggles mightily to fulfill Ramonda's expectations. This is the crux of the film. Audiences are going to be shocked where Shuri's arc leads.

There will be tears but no gushing rivers. Wakanda Forever tackles loss with deliberative structure. Boseman's presence is felt from the opening frames. Coogler pays tribute without succumbing to melancholy. He honors a departed friend by preserving and continuing Boseman's majestic legacy. The Black Panther's mantle is carried with courage and honor. Stick around during the credits for a major reveal.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a production of Marvel Studios. It will be released theatrically on November 11th from Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures .

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Review

Black panther: wakanda forever is a strong sequel that challenges its characters hard, with enough levity and blockbuster action to gain new fans while delivering a worthy tribute to the fallen panthers of the past..

In his four appearances throughout the MCU, Black Panther/T’Challa has become a staple of the franchise, largely due to Chadwick Boseman’s performance. His home nation Wakanda served as a refuge for the Avengers, with its army holding its own against Thanos in the epic fallout from Avengers: Endgame . His stand-alone film spoke to a previously untapped audience, instantly showing the world that a blockbuster film starring largely a cast of colour is a force to be reckoned with. To think that another Black Panther film without Boseman could even attempt to reach the same heights is crazy, but it looks like director Ryan Coogler and team have achieved the impossible.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a story of grief in times of war. Following the sudden passing of T’Challa, taking heavily from Boseman’s sudden death in real life, the film focuses on T’Challa’s closest allies and family holding a nation together as new enemies oppose it. As such, by the very nature of the subject matter, Wakanda Forever is one of the MCU’s most serious tales, but not one without moments of levity where needed. Similar to the first film, the sequel has an even stronger focus on the geopolitical conflict with the introduction of the wholly new, secret underwater nation of Talokan, and its ruler Namor.

Note: Certain sections of this review contain a ‘ Second viewing note’ , as it sounds, and are comments on things that I noticed with more care in my second screening, being in a more immersive 3D IMAX.

After a powerful opening leading into a funeral, Wakanda Forever gives every member of the cast time to mourn the passing of the former Black Panther. Given that we’ve seen this cast work so well together before, the reaction is natural. At the end of the first film, T’Challa promised the world that Wakanda will share its knowledge and resources to improve lives everywhere, but with his passing comes new tensions from every nation in the world. Wakanda’s natural resource, Vibranium, is sought by all, with secret operations worldwide trying to get their hands on the metal. Of course, Vibranium isn’t only found in Wakanda, with ample deposits across the oceans lying dormant. This attracts the attention of Talokan, which now has the excuse to wage war on the surface world for their transgressions.

While the film is very much about a war between two secret nations, at the heart of it is the difference in ideologies between Shuri and Namor. While her previous appearances painted her as “simply” a smart sidekick, Wakanda Forever dives deep into exploring Shuri’s worldview. Mad at the world for taking away her brother and dismayed at her country’s seemingly archaic traditions, Shuri is driven to improve and build upon her technology to keep protecting Wakanda. Namor, on the other hand, is more appreciative of the old ways, so much so that waging war on the entire planet seems like a natural step forward if it means protecting the sanctity of his kingdom. Letitia Wright and Tenoch Huerta play to their strengths where expected, but with enough vulnerability to keep the audience engaged in their non-violent arguments. While Huerta is undoubtedly the standout element of the film, Wright’s big step up into a leading woman is a spectacle to behold. No longer just a side character, Shuri becomes a force to be reckoned with in her own right, instantly differentiating herself from both T’Challa, T’Chaka, and Killmonger.

Tenoch Huerta’s Namor is badass. A very stubborn badass and kind of a jerk, which is keeping in line with the comics! He’s easily one of the MCU’s best antagonists, and similar to Killmonger has a point of view that’s more understandable than most moustache-twirling villains in the MCU. Is he an anti-hero? Well, not yet. But do I see him aiding the new Avengers when the Kang Dynasty comes knocking? Sure, I think he’ll do that, so long as it’s a strategic alliance for the wellbeing of Talokan residents. He’s also officially one of the MCU’s first mutants! While at this point, it hardly makes much difference to point out how mutants are different from regular enhanced humans, it’s nice to see the universe slowly starting to build toward X-Men with him and Ms Marvel. Namor’s abilities include the usual super strength and agility, but the little wings on his ankles make his power set distinct. Whether under the water or in the air, Namor is a formidable foe for anyone to challenge and certainly makes for some great spectacle on the big screen once he unleashes his fury on Wakanda.

Ready for #WakandaForever . pic.twitter.com/FX8mboQorS — Rahul Majumdar (@darthrahul) November 10, 2022

While the war between Wakanda and Talokan is fun to watch, I wish we saw more of these kingdoms from ground level. Even after two stand-alone movies, I still don’t know how Wakanda functions as a society for the common man. We see a few shots of different locales in both kingdoms, but that’s about it. What’s the economy of these kingdoms like? What about the legal system? It’s these questions that fascinate me more so than watching commanding generals on either side prepping their armies for the umpteenth war. It’s not as big a deal, but it would help to know the citizens of Wakanda and Talokan more before watching their armies go to war with each other. With a run time of 2 hours and 40 minutes, there are plenty of scenes that could be swapped to show this instead, but the film, if only sometimes, repeats talking points about grief and loss that do drag it down quite a bit.

Second viewing note: While my minor complaints about not seeing enough of both nations still stand, I did appreciate the hauntingly beautiful introduction to the capital city of Talokan in the second round. Paired perfectly with Con La Brisa , the sequence is among Marvel’s most breathtaking.

On the topic of things that didn’t work for me: derivative characters. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man is a lost treasure for the MCU, and it’s no wonder that without him or Captain America, the universe has lost a bit of soul. So, what’s the genius idea at play here to replicate some of that nostalgia? I know: give everyone Iron Man armour . Wow! Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams makes her debut in Wakanda Forever who, for all intents and purposes, is an amalgamation of Peter Parker and Tony Stark. There’s not much here to distinguish herself from either of those characters beyond being of different ethnicity. Still, I guess character work doesn’t matter as long as fans see another Iron Man armour flying around shooting lasers, just like the good old days. Her entire existence, at least in this film, reminds me that it is, after all, a studio film where the need for generating revenue through spinoffs is more important. See you next year with Ironheart , streaming exclusively on Disney Plus! Wait, why does have an Iron Man armour? Did she know Tony Stark? What’s her relationship to Stark Industries? Uh oh, we don’t know. Guess I’ll have to tune into her show to find out what that’s all about! Oh, and that’s not all, as there are more Iron Man suits flying around covered in Vibranium for your viewing pleasure. It’s kind of like getting a new Thor with Mjolnir , even though it has nothing to do with the character that had a unique thing going for them.

Second viewing note: Yeah, not much changed in my feelings towards Riri Williams this time, but I noticed a spark in Thorne’s performance that gives me hope for her spinoff series. With some strong background character work, Riri could easily be a leading face of the MCU, as long as she isn’t derivative of other characters before her.

All of this makes it sound like I hated this movie, or at least was disgusted by these elements when, in fact, the truth is I quite liked the film. But liking a movie doesn’t mean it gets a get-out-of-cinematic-jail-free-card from its narrative problems. I wish the film weren’t as sloppy as it is in these areas because I want to get invested in these characters. But that’s hard to do when certain decisions keep reminding me that I’m watching a studio film that’s more interested in spinoffs and IP and farming nostalgia over telling a story that matters more thoughtfully.

On the bright side, seeing returning characters like Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross, Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda, Winston Duke’s M’Baku, and Danai Gurira’s Okoye brought a big smile to my face. Okoye and Ramonda get a much meatier role this time, and the tensions between them make for some great entertainment. People will rightfully be cheering for Bassett’s powerful portrayal here, but I think Gurira deserves special praise. We learn more about Okoye not through exposition but through her actions. Having failed to protect King T’Challa, the burden of responsibility to keep princess Shuri safe is heavy, and how Okoye navigates through its trials and tribulations is a delight to watch. I wish M’Baku had a bigger role, but what he’s given here is enough as far as the story is concerned.

Everett Ross, Wakanda’s favourite colonizer, has a smaller but important role here, as he’s seemingly the only one outside Wakanda who sympathizes with the grieving nation. It’s a shame, though, that his entire sub-plot adds virtually very less to the actual story, existing as a tease for Marvel’s next projects (hello Thunderbolts ). Slight spoiler : Watching his back and forth with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Contessa Valentina is cool and all, but it doesn’t add anything to the film besides bringing up a couple of interesting questions, nothing that couldn’t be achieved with fewer scenes.

One of the complaints of the previous Black Panther movie was its lacklustre visuals, especially in the finale. Thankfully, Wakanda Forever excels in that department…for the most part. Since Marvel is now doing multiple projects in any given year, it’s clear as crystal to me that expecting the same level of polish is stupid, which it is. The big action sequences look good, but it’s the smaller moments where VFX-heavy shots falter. It suffers from what I call the “blank frame syndrome” when you see a group of characters standing in front of an obvious green screen with the background somewhat hastily rotoscoped in. Coupled with the generally shallow depth of field in the shot composition, many moments in the film reminded me that yes, this is a movie . Beyond those, though, the film generally looks better than the last one! Autumn Durald Arkapaw returns behind the camera, fresh off her work with Marvel in Loki, crafting beautiful images that don’t need to rely on CGI. If only I could actually see what was going on in the underwater and night-time scenes, this might’ve joined the upper ranks of Marvel’s cinematography.

Second viewing note : On my IMAX rewatch, the colours and brightness popped out more, helping the visibility considerably more in the scenes I mentioned above. I still wish those night-time and underwater shots had more vibrancy, but it works as setting up Talokan to be the visual opposite of Wakanda.

The film’s closing moments will stay with me as some of the best in Marvel history, thanks largely in part due to the unison of the camera work, lighting, and of course, Ludwig Göransson’s beautiful, sad but uplifting score.

Of course, like most Marvel movies, some surprises are bound to move the MCU forward. Overall, though, the film is much more focused on telling its own story while giving tribute to the late Boseman, which is done with grace and care.

Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is out now in cinemas.

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BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

"pagan identity politics and revisionist history".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Kidnapping.

More Detail:

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER continues its Anti-Christian, pagan Afro-centrism with a story wherein the Princess of a fictional, African superpower must find a way to stop the angry, super-powerful king of an ancient undersea Mayan kingdom from fomenting a world war with the superpowers on the surface, including the United States. BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER is well-produced and promotes mercy and rejects revenge at the end, but the heroes and villains are not that interesting, and it has an Afro-centric, that makes jabs at Christianity, and in a few places, and glorifies feminism because all the main heroes are “enlightened” females, and the two male heroes take a back seat.

The movie opens with Princess Shuri of Wakanda in her laboratory trying to find a cure for her dying brother, King T’Challa, aka the Black Panther. Of course, after the first BLACK PANTHER movie, the actor playing the Black Panther, Chad Boseman, suddenly and tragically died of a fatal illness. Before the movie cuts to Shuri working in her large laboratory, viewers can hear her praying to the Egyptian goddess, Bast, to help her save brother. Wrong god, lady!

Wakanda holds a funeral for the King. However, it decides not to create a new Black Panther. In fact, Princess Shuri herself no longer seems to believe in the idea of Wakanda having such a super-powerful pagan protector. She’s lost faith in her country’s god and ancestors and is a thoroughly committed “scientist.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, The United States of America has built a large exploration vessel. Using a new machine, it has detected a new source of vibranium, the meteor ore that gives Wakanda its power source and the curative properties of its advanced healthcare system. Apparently, another vibranium meteor struck Earth in the Atlantic. However, under the cover of darkness, an army of blue Mayan soldiers with superpowers, kills all the people on the ship.

Cut to some foreign speaking nationals attacking a Wakandan outreach facility. They’re trying to steal some vibranium tools, but a group of Wakandan female soldiers, led by General Okoye, stops the attack.

Cut again to Geneva, where Ramonda, the Queen of Wakanda and mother to Princess Shuri, appears before an international body of nations. She complains about the United States and other superpowers trying to steal Wakanda’s vibranium resources and its vibranium technology. She threatens to fight any nation or anyone who tries to do this.

Back in Wakanda, Queen Ramonda tries to get Princess Shuri to overcome her mourning for her brother and mystically get in touch with their ancestors. Shuri is reluctant, however. Despite her prayer to the goddess, her scientific mind doesn’t believe her family’s religious, spiritual beliefs and rituals can overcome he grief.

While they’re sitting by a small lake, the leader of the Mayan warriors, King Namor, rises out of the water and seeks to consult with Queen Ramonda. He tells her about the Americans’ use of the detector to find the vibranium deposit under the ocean. Namor tells her the vibranium deposit belongs to his people, who have been made strong and even given superpowers by the vibranium and its effect on ocean plant life. The same thing happens to Wakanda’s choice of a Black Panther protector like Ramonda’s dead son. Namor threatens to attack Wakanda with a vast army if Wakanda doesn’t find the young scientist who invented the vibranium detector and turn him over to the Mayans.

Ramonda asks General Okoye to travel to America, find the scientist and take him to Wakanda. Reluctantly, Ramonda lets her daughter, Shuri, go with Okoye to help her navigate the social and scientific challenges in the mission.

The two women discover that the scientist is Riri Williams, a young black female graduate student at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Miss Williams takes them to her warehouse laboratory where she created the detector. She’s also created her own Iron Man suit. She also has a red muscle car that she worked on with her father.

However, the FBI has zeroed in on their location. So, Riri gets into the Iron Man suit while Okoye and Shuri take the red sports car. A big chase ensues that includes some police cars. Then, when the chase ends on a large bridge, King Namor suddenly appears out of the water with some warriors. A fight begins, with Riri coming to the rescue in her Iron Man suit. Namor and his warriors try to kill Riri, but Shuri and Okoye protect her. Foiled by their defense, he decides to kidnap Shuri and Riri.

Namor takes the two women to his underwater kingdom. He tells them that, when the Spanish came to conquer Mexico and Central America, the Mayan’s god told them about a special plant that had been affected by vibranium enriched soil in part of their land. His mother was pregnant at the time with him. She and others ate the plant, turned blue, were blessed with strength, and were able to breathe underwater. So, they fled from the Spaniards and established a home under the sea. Then, when Namor was born, he was blessed by their god and the magical plant with superpowers and immortality. Now, 700 years later, the Mayans have used the vibranium under the ocean to power a magnificent undersea kingdom, Talocan.

However, Namor also tells Shuri that he wants Wakanda to join Talocan and wage war against the “surface nations.” He reasons that none of the other nations on Earth will rest until they’ve stolen all the vibranium from Wakanda and Talocan. If Wakanda refuses, he and Talocan will destroy Wakanda.

A female spy from Queen Ramonda rescues Shuri and the female scientist and brings them to Wakanda. Neither Shuri nor the Queen are interested in waging war on the other superpowers. They also don’t like to be threatened. So, it looks like Wakanda and King Namor’s kingdom are on a collision course headed toward disaster.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER has all the production values that Big Hollywood money can buy. It also promotes mercy and rejects revenge at the end. However, except for Queen Ramonda, played by Angela Bassett, the heroes and villains are not that interesting. The movie clearly suffers from the absence of Chadwick Boseman. Also, the script seems a little bit bloated.

Even worse, however, is that the movie has a strong pagan worldview stressing false religion. For example, by opening right away with a prayer to the pagan Egyptian god, Bast, the movie loses sympathy with a good portion of the movie audience in Christian America, not to mention Christian moviegoers in the rest of the world, and millions of Muslims and Jews, the other two monotheistic religions. In addition, the Queen of Wakanda still has a mystical veneration for her royal ancestors, which is another example of false religion in the movie. The only saving grace, perhaps, is that the Egyptian god fails the Princess. This point could have been made stronger if the Princess later on prayed specifically to Jesus or God in general and received a positive answer or found comfort in a biblical verse.

Also, WAKANDA FOREVER has an Afro-centric ideology that whitewashes African and Mayan civilizations and demonizes Christians and Non-African “colonizers,” including the United States. Of course, the sinfulness of human beings is ubiquitous, so it’s a never-ending struggle to promote liberty, justice and prosperity for all. However, paganism offers no solution to this problem, while the Gospel of Jesus Christ does.

WAKANDA FOREVER also has some feminist politics. All the main heroes are females, and the two male heroes take a back seat. The movie also has an overtly Anti-Christian scene that a Spanish priest seems ignorant and foolish when he calls a levitating Mayan superman with pointy ears and small wings on his feet a demon and satanic. There’s also some foul language in the movie.

All in all, therefore, the paganism, identity politics and revisionist history in BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER are abhorrent.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.

You can make a difference with as little as $7. It takes only a moment. If you can, consider supporting our ministry with a monthly gift. Thank you.

Movieguide® is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible.

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'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' - Cast Interview

Posted: March 26, 2024 | Last updated: March 26, 2024

The cast of Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” including Danai Gurira (Okoye), Alex Livinalli (Attuma) Mabel Cadena (Namora), Producer Nate Moore, and the famed director himself are here to discuss making the epic Marvel sequel. Watch as they discuss filming the emotional and powerful scenes with stars Angela Bassett and Tenoch Huerta, where this film sits in the MCU’s timeline, and what’s next for the characters and Coogler himself.

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Prince Jukebox Movie Musical in the Works From ‘Black Panther’ Director

By Daniel Kreps

Daniel Kreps

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler is set to produce an upcoming jukebox movie musical revolving around the music of Prince .

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that the long-in-the-works project — the film was initially announced back in 2018 — has taken a step forward with Coogler on board, with his Proximity Media and Universal Pictures partnering on the film. 

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Earlier this year, it was announced that Prince’s Purple Rain film would be adapted into a stage musical , with Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient Branden Jacobs-Jenkins writing the musical’s book and Lileana Blain-Cruz serving as director. 

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Black Panther Director's Vampire Movie With Michael B. Jordan Sets Release Date

An upcoming movie by Black Panther franchise helmer Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan gets a release update.

A secret movie planned by Black Panther franchise star Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan Coogler, which reportedly features vampires, sinks its teeth into an official release date.

Per The Hollywood Reporter , the untitled film by Jordan and Coogler will premiere in cinemas on Mar. 7, 2025 . Additionally, the secret feature-length project, which Warner Bros. recently picked up amid an intense bidding war, will be released in IMAX and begins production in New Orleans next month . For Jordan and Coogler, this will be their fifth film together after collaborating on acclaimed titles such as Fruitvale Station , the Black Panther movie franchise and Creed .

Michael B. Jordan's Directing Style Is Great News for Live-Action Anime Adaptations

The film is reportedly a vampire movie set in the past.

There is no official plot or synopsis for the untitled genre film by Jordan and Coogler. However, it's been widely reported the movie will be a period-piece vampire flick set in the Jim Crow-era South . Additionally, the movie is expected to have anime influences . Jordan is a known anime fan, having used the art form as inspiration for previous work, including Creed III , which he directed and starred in, and plans to expand the Creed- verse with an anime series .

Warner Bros. reportedly sees franchise potential in Jordan and Coogler's mystery film given the pair's critical and commercial success together. Both Black Panther movies that the pair worked on, the original film in 2018 and Wakanda Forever in 2022, were big hits for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the blockbusters generating over $2 billion at the global box office and becoming Academy Award-winning efforts. Meanwhile, Creed became a successful extension of the Rocky franchise, tallying $173.6 million against a $40 million budget and receiving positive reviews. Coogler later served as a producer on Creed II .

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Last November, Creed franchise producer Irwin Winkler confirmed Creed 4 is in the works , with Jordan set to sit in the director's chair again. Creed III proved a franchise-best success for the Creed film series at the box office, making over $275 million in global ticket sales despite being the first movie under the Rocky umbrella not to feature Sylvester Stallone.

Meanwhile, Coogler has been working on a reboot of The X-Files . Chris Carter, the creator of the original The X-Files , recently revealed that Coogler approached him to get his blessing for the upcoming reboot, insisting he "appreciated" the gesture.

Jordan and Coogler's mystery film opens in theaters on Mar. 7, 2025.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

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T'Challa, heir to the hidden but advanced kingdom of Wakanda, must step forward to lead his people into a new future and must confront a challenger from his country's past.

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Ryan coogler to produce prince jukebox musical for universal.

The filmmaker, known for helming the 'Black Panther' movies, also has a Warner Bros. feature set to hit theaters next year.

By Ryan Gajewski

Ryan Gajewski

Senior Entertainment Reporter

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Ryan Coogler is in a purple state of mind, as the filmmaker is working on a Prince -focused feature musical.

Coogler is attached to produce an untitled jukebox musical of Prince songs for Universal Pictures , The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The project, which has been in development since 2018, hails from Proximity Media and has a script by Bryan Edward Hill.

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Universal's 'wolf man' delays release to early 2025, ryan coogler's next movie set for march 2025.

More recently, Coogler directed the 2022 Marvel sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever . He is credited with working on the lyrics to Rihanna’s song “Lift Me Up” from the film’s soundtrack, with the track earning him Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy nominations.

Prince is a music icon known for an array of hits, including “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss” and “Batdance,” which all peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. His film credits include starring in Albert Magnoli’s 1984 rock musical Purple Rain , with the Warner Bros. cult classic — which picked up the Oscar for best original song score — hitting its 40th anniversary this July.

Coogler’s involvement in the Prince project was first reported by newsletter The InSneider .

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