Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Wakanda Forever is a moving tribute to Chadwick Boseman and Marvel's strongest film since Endgame.
In August of 2020, Chadwick Boseman died at 43 years old. The shock of it was not only personal, in the way that the loss of any artist working at the height of their abilities is personal, but structural. Boseman had spent the better part of a decade building one of the most significant figures in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and doing it while privately managing an illness that the public knew nothing about. Black Panther was not simply a successful superhero film. It was a cultural moment of a specific and unrepeatable kind, and the person at the center of it was gone before anyone outside his immediate circle understood how ill he had been. The question facing Ryan Coogler and Marvel Studios in the aftermath was not just a production problem, though it was certainly that too. It was a question about how a franchise built on continuity and forward momentum reckons honestly with absence. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is their answer, and it is the most genuinely moving thing Marvel Studios has produced since Avengers: Endgame.
The decision not to recast T'Challa was the right one, and the film commits to it completely. Wakanda Forever opens on T'Challa's death and spends its entire runtime in the grief that follows, which is an unusual structural choice for a franchise entry and a creatively courageous one. The MCU's post-Endgame output has been uneven in ways that have been well-documented and that the studio itself has acknowledged, and what most of those entries have lacked is exactly the kind of emotional grounding that this film has in abundance. Grief is not backdrop here. It is the engine.
Shuri (Letitia Wright) is the film's protagonist, and the story follows her through the stages of mourning her brother while Wakanda navigates a new geopolitical threat. Namor (Tenoch Huerta), the leader of Talocan, an underwater civilization with its own Vibranium supply and its own history of protecting itself from the surface world, emerges to demand Wakanda's alliance against the nations racing to exploit the world's Vibranium reserves. His proposition puts Wakanda in an impossible position: join Talocan or face them as an enemy. Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, and Martin Freeman as Everett Ross also star. Ludwig Göransson, returning from the original film, delivers one of the year's finest scores, building a completely distinct sonic identity for Talocan while maintaining thematic continuity with Black Panther.
The one development worth addressing directly, for those who have already seen the film, is the recurring presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Her appearances here are almost entirely disconnected from the film's central narrative, operating in a parallel subplot about American efforts to acquire Vibranium that never meaningfully intersects with the Talocan conflict either thematically or dramatically. The time devoted to her would have been better spent on Riri Williams, whose role in the film is closer to a plot mechanism than a character. She builds a suit of armor that drives two significant action sequences, but the film never adequately explains why she is building it, and an offhand reference to Stark technology goes unanswered. The Ironheart setup is clearly laying groundwork for future projects, and the groundwork is thinner than it needs to be. These are real criticisms, and the film would be stronger without either problem.
That said, neither issue is enough to derail what the film accomplishes around them, largely because Coogler and his cast are working at a level that carries the weaker material. Huerta's Namor is one of the MCU's most fully realized antagonists, a character whose motivations are rooted in a specific and comprehensible reality rather than in abstract malevolence. The dynamic between Wakanda and Talocan works because both sides have a legitimate point, a structural similarity to the relationship between T'Challa and Killmonger in the original film that Coogler clearly understands is the franchise's most durable dramatic engine. You can follow both sides of the argument without being asked to pick one, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.
The production design and costume work are extraordinary. Talocan is rendered with the same level of cultural specificity and visual care that distinguished Wakanda in the original film, drawing deeply from Mesoamerican traditions in a way that gives the civilization a weight and history that most MCU locations lack. The underwater sequences have a visual texture unlike anything else in the franchise, and the action set pieces are staged with the confidence of a filmmaker who has earned his budget and knows how to spend it.
Wakanda Forever runs over two hours and forty minutes and does not feel it, which is the clearest possible indicator that the pacing is working. It is a film that earns its length because it is doing genuine emotional work throughout rather than filling time with plot mechanics. By the time it arrives at its closing sequence, a tribute to Boseman that lands with quiet and unmistakable force, the film has built enough emotional credit to make it matter in the way it needs to.
Marvel Studios needed this film to be good, and it is better than that. It is essential, not because the franchise required it, but because it says something true about loss and continuity and what it means to carry something forward when the person who built it is gone. See it in theaters while you can.
