Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Our Review

The elegy. Ryan Coogler’s sequel was rewritten around the death of Chadwick Boseman, and the film carries that weight openly: it opens with Shuri racing to synthesize a cure that arrives too late, then spends its first act in mourning alongside a nation. The studio let a blockbuster grieve, and the funeral procession through Birnin Zana, drummers and dancers and riders in white, is among the most moving sequences Marvel has ever funded.

Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda gets the throne and the film’s spine, a mother ruling a vulnerable nation while refusing to stop being a parent. Tenoch Huerta’s Namor, the feathered serpent god of an underwater kingdom, is the strong adversary the film needs, a mutant ruler with a legitimate grievance against surface nations who keeps a genuine moral ambiguity alive until the finale forces fists. Letitia Wright’s Shuri inherits the mantle through rage rather than serenity, and the arc lands because the film keeps testing what her brother would have done.

The midsection meanders through an MIT subplot and a CIA caper, and the final battle, blue skinned armies clashing on a flooded ship deck, returns to CG mud the first film rose above. The last scene, the reveal of the child who carries the name, restores the warmth.

Our score: 7/10, imperfect and honorable.