Quo Vadis, MCU? (Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)

 SPOILER WARNING!

In the inevitable mid-credits stinger for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Letitia Wright's Shuri, who has assumed the mantle of the Black Panther but has handed the opportunity to serve as Ruler of Wakanda to the tribes to sort out among themselves, pays Lupita N'yongo's Nakia a visit in her adopted home of Haiti, only to find that Nakia and her late brother have had a son whom she has also named T'Challa.

And so the question of how to keep T'Challa's story going without recasting the role has been answered. Personally, I didn't care for this approach, but I guess it beats having a multiversal variant of T'Challa hop into universe 616 through an errant Doctor Strange portal. 

Crucially, though, even though there was an obligatory "Black Panther will return" text in the final credits crawl, the generally somber mood of the film and the absence of an end-credits teaser kind of had me wondering...exactly when will that be, and who will be wearing the mantle then?

Yes, I know the film ended with Shuri taking her synthetic heart-shaped herb and donning the Black Panther suit, but her doing so felt less like a passing of the torch and more like designating her as a placeholder until the new T'Challa is old enough to assume the identity, something which, barring an Avengers: Endgame style time-jump, won't happen for a very long time.  Shuri didn't hold the Black Panther mantle for very long in the comics either, after all. Maybe after telling this very cathartic story about grief, Marvel really does need to lay the character to rest, at least for a while. 

That actually got me wondering; how does Marvel plan to "retire" the second batch of Avengers, i.e. those introduced mostly in Phase 3? The likes of Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Sam Wilson as Captain America, by the next Avengers movie, will have been around for nearly ten years. James Gunn has openly said that the current incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy will end with the third movie.  Avengers: Endgame was the perfect way to retire at least three of the O.G. Avengers, while the Hawkeye series may have provided a convenient road to retirement for Jeremy Renner's Clint Barton as well as a low-key passing of the torch to Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop. As much as I despised Thor: Love and Thunder, it does make sense that Thor, being a god, is still around, as is the case with the ultra-powerful Hulk. One does wonder, however, how much longer Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo will agree to appear in these roles, especially given Hemsworth's recent discovery that he is genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease and Ruffalo's, well, age.  Will these characters be allowed to retire, or will they get barbecued by an Infinity-Stone-like McGuffin? It's not particularly pleasant to contemplate but considering how Black Widow and Iron Man met their ends in Avengers: Endgame I can't help but think about it. 

Another issue I have with characters being retired, whether through death or otherwise, is that I can't help but wonder: what happens if audiences don't embrace the replacements that Marvel is lining up for them, much in the same way that Star Wars fans have, by and large, rejected the poor copies of Luke Skywalker and his crew that were trotted out in the Disney-era sequels?

In the last few years, it has been made clear that nearly all of the "OG" Avengers have replacements lined up, with Anthony Mackie's Falcon having taken up the Captain America mantle, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova clearly being set up as the new Black Widow, and Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk rather blatantly being set up as the replacement for the Hulk.  Ironheart, or Riri Williams was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to set up her upcoming Disney+ show and it's pretty obvious that she's basically the next Iron Man.  It would seem that all of the MCU characters are fair game for this treatment, with the exception, of course, of Sony-held Spider-Man, who will likely live forever.   The thing is, how will audiences feel about it? I can't help but wonder. 

What I find sad about this development is that, apart from the characters who have made it to the big screen, Marvel has literally thousands more at their disposal, especially with the return of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Marvel's stable.  They went the right route by introducing characters like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, neither of whom has any connection to what came before.  This was what made most of the characters introduced from Phase I through Phase III endearing: they all felt  fresh and new.  Shang-Chi and Moon Knight both have that feeling, and if people had responded well to the Eternals, well, they would have benefited from that too. 

By trotting out "replacement Avengers," however, Marvel could be setting themselves up for a serious fall in the not-too-distant future.

That's just me speculating, of course; in the end the market will determine what stays and what goes, just like it's done with the comic books for decades. 

 

Not The Disaster I Was Expecting: A Review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

 directed by Ryan Coogler

written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan

I'll be honest; I was firmly in the camp of the "recast Chadwick Boseman" viewers. I had my choice of actors who could have filled in his shoes, and quite frankly didn't see the point of indulging the sentimentality that had attended his death. For one thing, recasting roles vacated by actors' deaths is nothing new; Warner Brothers didn't kill the Joker after Heath Ledger's death and that worked out pretty well for them eleven years later. Also, T'Challa felt like far too important a character to bury so soon after his introduction.  All that said, I understood the imperative that pushed Marvel Studios and Ryan Coogler to forge ahead with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever without T'Challa.  Even so, I was basically expecting an absolute train wreck of a film. I ultimately watched it because I wanted to see where they would take the story, but my expectations were as low as they could possibly be.

I was, as a result, pleasantly surprised by what I eventually saw.

The film starts with King T'Challa (Boseman, depicted later exclusively in old footage) dying offscreen, with his sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) trying and failing to save him from a disease that is never named.  Shuri, together with her mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and the entire nation of Wakanda mourn the passing of their king. 

A year later, Wakanda,  now under the rule of Ramonda, is fending off attempts by the "developed" world to steal its precious metal, Vibranium, which they are constantly searching for in Wakanda's outreach centers. 

What not even Wakanda knows, however is that the United States has built a Vibranium detector and has started poking around under the Atlantic Ocean in search of the precious metal, where its machine found some. The Americans are then attacked by an all-new threat: blue-skinned, superhuman adversaries, led by a mysterious, extremely powerful flying assailant.

As Shuri grapples with her grief, Ramonda takes her to the riverbanks in an attempt to help her process it, when both of them are visited by the Namor (Tenoch Huerta-Mejia) king of the sea people who attacked the Americans. Namor blames Wakanda's act of opening itself to the world for the Americans' rapacious hunt for Vibranium which was brought them to the depths near his kingdom. He therefore commands Ramonda and Shuri to bring him the American scientist responsible for creating the machine, threatening to bring war upon Wakanda if they do not comply.

Wanting to head off disaster, Shuri and General Okoye (Danai Gurira) travel to America where they visit their old friend Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and get him to tell them where to find this scientist, who turns out to be a prodigy studying at MIT named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne).  Realizing they cannot bring themselves to turn her over to Namor, with his clearly murderous intent, Shuri and Okoye attempt to bring Riri over to Wakanda, but when Namor and his forces attack, Shuri goes to his kingdom of Talocan in an attempt to talk him down, only to realize that Wakanda and Talocan are basically on a collision course, a problem made worse by the fact that Wakanda is still without its greatest protector, the Black Panther, unless she can do something about it.

 If I had watched the first Black Panther movie and this one movie back-to-back without knowing the real-life event that inspired it, I can honestly say I would have been far unkinder to this movie than I am feeling now. A lot of the changes would have felt nonsensical.  Boseman's shadow looms large over the entire film, which struggles to fill the shoes he has left behind.

The good news, though, is that they manage to tell a coherent story even despite this massive handicap.

 The bad news, however, is that even though Coogler, screenwriter Joe Robert Cole and the whole crew lean heavily into Boseman's death as a story point, they remain unable to fully overcome the challenges that  his absence from the story has created. Letitia Wright does a commendable job portraying Shuri's grief throughout the film, quite likely inspired by how broken-hearted the actress was at the death of her co-star two years ago, but though she is clearly written as the lead, she is simply not enough to carry the film by herself. She does, however, get able support from her  co-stars like Bassett, Gurira, Lupita N'yongo who returns as Nakia, and Winston Duke who returns as M'Baku, but the net result is a film that feels very much like it's missing its lead. Then, of course, there's the usual Marvel malaise of the big CGI battle at the end, punctuated by the fact that when Riri Williams finally goes into battle in her Ironheart suit that fans knew as coming, it does not look anywhere near as convincing as the original Iron Man suit that Stan Winston Studios and Industrial Light and Magic built all the way back in 2007.  Given the fantastical nature of Namor and his army, Coogler had to have known that the final battle would be CGI-heavy, but he doesn't seem to have learned his lessons from the truly awkward CGI mess that was the first film's final battle. Plus, the film was at least twenty minutes too long.

All of that said, the storytelling was genuinely affecting, especially when it focused on how the characters involved dealt with the grief of loss.  It informs their decisions, and in Shuri's case her compassion shines through as she seeks to honor her brother, even as she longs to avenge her own losses late in the film.  The acting is pretty solid all around, with Angela Bassett turning in a particularly powerful performance that elevates every moment she's in the film. 

Also, apart form the CGI, which is the usual melange thrown together by ten thousand different contractors, the production work on this film is rock solid, with most of Coogler's key collaborators like composer Ludwig Goransson, costume designer Ruth Carter and art director Hannah Beechler all having come back to lovingly render once more the world they brought to the screen for the first time four years ago. Goransson's score was, for me, a particular highlight as I was happy to note that he didn't lean into his themes and leitmotifs from the first movie but rather composed a whole new set of tunes for Coogler to work with, including a haunting siren song for the denizens of Talocan. Carter and Beechler, apart from bringing back the color and power of Wakanda, also bring a whole new world with the Kingdom of Talocan and its underwater denizens. While I doubt this movie will walk away with the brace of Oscars that the first one did, some of its technical work is bound to get some kind of recognition.

Also, I was glad to see how Marvel had addressed the problem of Namor appearing to be an Aquaman clone, despite his comic-book counterpart actually being older than the DC Comics character (for a change). I wasn't particularly bowled over by Tenoch Huerta-Mejia's performance, but I thought it was all right, and I look forward to seeing what Marvel can do with the character. 

Do I think Marvel could have made a better movie if they had simply recast T'Challa? Honestly? I still think so, but it is what it is.

7.5/10