Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review

Marvels highly anticipated phase four continues with the sequel to 2018 Black Panther movie which starred the late and very great Chadwick Boseman.

Following on from the loss of Chadwick the team behind the sequel has really done a great job of respecting the late actor and adding to the legacy of Black Panther which he did such a great job of starting.

The movie starts with Shuri franticly looking for a cure to save her brother but not managing to do it in time. This sets the tone of the movie as she’s broken and a bit lost and the time she’s needed by her family and people. I think Marvel made the right choice of not recasting Boseman, they could have or even added him in with CGI for a few scenes but I think out of respect and rightly they chose to include him in flashbacks and photos from the first movie.

The movie mostly follows Shuri who’s played by ?Letitia Wright who I think is just such a great actor. In everything I’ve seen her in she’s just totally absorbed her character and has made this one of the strongest entries into Marvel’s cinematic universe. In this. movie she copes with family loss, and relationships and on top of that takes up the Black Panther mantle and does a totally amazing job of all of it.

I’m. not sure how the RnD and concept art teams at Marvel manage to bring comic book characters to life so well every time but they have outdone themselves with Namor. He’s a supervillain from the depths of the ocean with tiny wings on his feet. I think with any other production company they would struggle to make it look good or believable but they did an amazing job of bringing the character to life.  Tenoch Huerta who plays Namor also did a great job of bringing the character to life as he has so many different sides in this movie. You see him as a menacing villain but also have some empathy for him too which is hard to deliver a lot of the time.

One thing that I enjoyed but didn’t think was well delivered was the introduction of Riri Williams aka Ironheart the college student that makes her own armor based on Iron Man. I loved seeing her in the movie but thought the movie tried to do too much by including her. She really needs a bigger introduction and more screen time. Maybe if Marvel managed to make an Ironheart TV series before Black Panther it would have worked better. Again I loved seeing Riri in the movie but it just felt like they tried to fit too much into the movie, the way they let her just hammer the armor together in a few scenes by hand just didn’t fit with the MCU.

Overall it was a great movie and an amazing tribute to Chadwick Boseman. The whole cast really owned their roles and carried the story so well. You got to see the same events from different points of view and its one of those movies that I just wish was longer. I’m sure there was a director cut out there on a server somewhere that’s six hours long and I’d love to see it.

For the future of the franchise, I’d love to see more of Letitia Wright’s Shuri as the Black Panther for years to come.

Posted by Adi Mursec on November 24, 2022