Water, Water Everywhere

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – 2022 – PG13

As a kid growing up in the 1960s, comic books were a huge part of my summer reading pleasure, but I was a total DC fan, Superman my hero, Aquaman runner-up. Marvel did not figure in the mix which explains why I missed the genesis of Wakanda in July 1966’s Fantastic Four. Black Panther was a complete unknown to me until the film was released in 2018 and lit up the Academy Awards, nominated for seven, winning three, and the first superhero movie ever to receive Best Picture nomination. So when the sequel, Wakanda Forever was released, it was a must-see on my list. 

What worked: The opening tribute to Chadwick Boseman was creative and touching. Boseman won international accolades for playing the Black Panther, tragically dying in 2020 after battling colon cancer since 2016, unbeknownst to the Marvel universe.  A film featuring the strength and courage of women is a timely balance to the concurrently released Harvey Weinstein exposé She Said and the narcissistic #MeToo saga TÁR. Angela Bassett (Queen Ramonda), Letitia Wright (Princess Shuri), Lupita Nyong’o (T’Challa’s lover and spy Nakia),  Danai Gurira (General Okoye) and Dominique Thorne (MIT student Riri Williams) create a formidable female team as they take on a new undersea enemy. And therein lies what didn’t work.

This new enemy is the Vibranium rich underwater kingdom of Talokan led by King Namor, a feathered serpent god. Vibranium, formed from a meteorite collision with Earth, is the strongest metal in the world, rare and extremely expensive, an asset Wakanda, thinking it only theirs, hid for years. King Namor talks Princess Shuri into a tour of Talokan and meeting the blue-skinned water-breathing superhumans which he has protected from discovery for centuries. Carrying a grudge towards  “the surface world” for enslaving the Maya, Namor proposes an alliance with Wakanda to torch this surface world but  threatens to first annihilate Wakanda if they refuse. Call me pollyanna but harboring bitterness for five centuries seems excessive. Why not wreck havoc and revenge after maybe 100 years rather than 500? Why wait? And Namor threatening to destroy Wakanda, a civilization with which Talokan shares similar roots, treasures and challenges, feels arbitrary and contrived. Two powerful, intelligent nations with common interests, common identities and no historic or contemporary conflicts between each other, now wage an absurd war that consumes the (very, very long) movie. So much water. So much mayhem.

Queen Ramonda faces some United Nations type interrogation about hoarding vibranium.  And then the CIA and Navy Seals use a vibranium-detecting machine to locate a deposit in the Atlantic. And then Namor intercepts and wipes them out. And then Namor  demands that Shuri, who kidnaps Riri for her own protection, to return Riri, who made the machine for a school project, to Talokan for execution. Whew! Oh, and then there is the heart-shaped herb pressed into magical action. Oh, and so is the Midnight Angel armor. And then, and then, and then…..too long, too convoluted, too nonsensical. Film editing apparently is out. Snooze. Sigh. Oh, and then my final comment: don’t leave before the credits roll or you will miss the groundwork for Wakanda the sequel. Sigh.