Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Like many Marvel sequels before it - Iron Man 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron spring immediately to mind - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a second instalment that takes the runtime minutes used in the previous episode to introduce or provide nuance for the characters and cultures important to this specific property, then trades them for a more cynical kind of scaffolding. Presumably these knots that Wakanda Forever ties itself into will be untangled either by spin-off streaming events or subsequent film phases. When writer-director Ryan Coogler does afford himself the space to explore the more personal pains generated by the death of King T'Challa, both within this film series and the real-life passing of actor Chadwick Boseman, Wakanda Forever distinguishes itself; allowing an emotional wavelength, distinct from the flippancy of the unending Marvel production line, to bleed in. 

Angela Bassett, resplendent in funeral whites and Tyrian purples thanks to costume designer Ruth E Carter, holds court in every scene she occupies. She sits at the centre of the frame, her brow furrowed with weary. When roused, the bereaved Queen hammers the shrinking curs who share her screen with a pounding rhetoric steeped in grief. The actress, more than once, delivering a righteous storm of justified and sustained slander. Bassett's performance, not to mention the very real trepidation rolling off Letitia Wright's Shuri as she is slowly elevated from a talkative sidekick to the driving force of the franchise, would seem to demand a narrower focus in this sequel. Sadly the film sprawls constantly, inviting in new players and the computer generated robot suits they disappear into. This is a recurring disconnection in Wakanda Forever: characters that the audience are presumed to have become attached to are all transformed into anonymous digital marionettes. 

As the stakes begin to rise in Wakanda Forever, the human element shrinks. The genuine jeopardy experienced by an audience fretting over their favs evaporates into loosely arranged strafing runs or a mobbed violence that we only glimpse from the detached viewpoint of a bird. The fraying emotions of the film's heroes experience a similar, unceremonious, dismissal too. Shuri, having clawed her way out of a nightmare vision after having chugged her own artificial approximation of the heart-shaped herb (the plant that allows prospective Black Panthers to connect to a churning dream realm), instantly has her pain brushed off with an axis grinding gag so we can transition into the next expositional report. Although the wider demands of the Marvel slate threaten to make paste of Wakanda Forever, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw do extend a determined sense of sympathy when photographing the trepidatious Wright. The physical smallness of the actress - especially when compared to Tenoch Huerta Mejía's muscled Namor - is accentuated rather than obscured. In this way Shuri, even when positioned as looming and triumphant, always has an aching sense of vulnerability about her.