162 min | PG-13 | November 11, 2022 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Wakanda buries its king and the world senses weakness. From beneath the ocean, Namor and his hidden nation rise to test a nation in mourning. The film is a funeral that a franchise keeps interrupting.
Wakanda buries King T’Challa. The world’s powers smell weakness and move to seize vibranium for themselves. A second hidden civilization surfaces from the ocean floor. Namor rules Talokan and offers Wakanda an alliance or a war. The film is not really about any of that. It is about grief, and about a mother and daughter learning to carry a loss the movie itself cannot fully resolve.
Angela Bassett plays Ramonda as a queen who refuses to let grief read as weakness. She stands before a room of foreign diplomats and turns mourning into a weapon. Letitia Wright carries Shuri from comic-relief inventor into reluctant lead. Wright plays a genius who trusts machines and distrusts feeling, and the movie forces her to feel anyway. Tenoch Huerta Mejía plays Namor with calm menace and real grievance, a man convinced he is protecting his people. Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, and Lupita Nyong’o fill out the court as Okoye, M’Baku, and Nakia, though the crowded story gives them less to do than the first film did.
Ryan Coogler directs from a script he wrote with Joe Robert Cole. The two build Talokan as a bioluminescent counterpart to Wakanda, a Mesoamerican civilization reimagined under the sea rather than a generic Atlantis. Ruth E. Carter’s costumes do real worldbuilding, separating Talokan’s feathered and jade-toned regalia from Wakanda’s Afrofuturist silhouettes. The action is the weakest craft on display, staged with murky underwater fights and a climax that leans on water effects the cameras struggle to make legible. The film runs long and feels it, with a middle stretch that stalls between plot engine and elegy. Coogler is more interested in the elegy, and the movie is best when it stops moving.
This is a film built around an absence. That gives Wakanda Forever a sincerity most superhero sequels cannot manufacture. It also leaves the movie divided against itself. The franchise needs a new hero, a new threat, and a runway for the next installment, and that machinery crowds out the mourning the film does best. Coogler delivers the eulogy with feeling and the spectacle out of obligation. When it grieves it moves you. When it remembers it is a Marvel movie it sags.