‘Black Panther 2’: I know it’s flawed, but I love it

“Love, let's talk about love / Is it anything and everything you hoped for? / Or do the feeling haunt you? / I know the feeling haunt you”

Love. It’s as big as the universe – and bigger, still. It simultaneously can and can’t be quantified. Its value is as much symbolic as it is embodied. It’s both abstraction and tangible actuality. And it absolutely haunts the entirety of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Just before the curtain drops on the first Black Panther film, four IRL years prior, King T’Challa (the late, great Chadwick Boseman) and Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) are in the projects of Oakland, California, where T’Challa has just revealed to Shuri that he has bought out some real estate there and will build the first Wakandan International Outreach Centre, wherein Shuri will lead the scientific exchange programme. Activating his kimoyo beads, he then uncloaks a Wakandan spaceship, which attracts the attention of some Black children playing basketball. All but one child runs towards it, mesmerised. The lone straggler, instead, focusses his attention on T’Challa, and asks him two questions: “This yours? (gesturing towards the ship) and “Who are you?”

T’Challa responds with a smile, the credits roll, and Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “All the Stars” beams into the stratosphere. As a moment, it’s magnificent. As an ending, it’s gorgeously, tragically prophetic. As a means by which to understand how the filmic Black Panther universe operates, it’s clear in its undeniable truth: Love.

The celebration and safeguarding of love.

A love so thoroughly pure and fundamental, everything about the film’s realisation – from its script upwards – is forged in blood. The blood of history and heritage; the blood of transcendence; the blood of family; the blood of Boseman – the blood of love itself. The very existence of Wakanda Forever is a rallying and radical act of love, since the script for what was initially meant to be the sequel to Black Panther was completed before Boseman lost his long and quiet battle with colon cancer in 2020. So, Ryan Coogler’s Wakanda is both synonymous with love and, as Kendrick and SZA averred in their bookend of the prequel, absolutely haunted by it. 

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is about a lot of things. But its essence, the blood beneath all its moving parts pulses with one central dynamic: The legacy you inherit and the legacy you leave behind.

As much as it’s the finale of the fourth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as much as it’s a panoramic visual realisation that packs some show-stopping performances from some of its cast members that will endure as blazing paradigms, as much as it has a lot to live up to since its predecessor is the the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time, Wakanda Forever unfurls as more of a foremostly emotional experience than it does a popcorn-fuelled blockbuster action smash. It’s absolutely freighted with emotion, with love, and all that gushes from it – grief, pain, fear, rage –  and one aspect of its best, most potent veneer is how it depicts the characters mourning the loss of Boseman on screen, and how the film serves as a tribute to him, inarguably an IRL Black Panther.

That’s why the film’s climactic moments are all the more visceral, like the funeral Wakanda holds for him, and, later, for his mother Queen Ramonda, played by the utterly superior Angela Bassett. Her performance here is superlative. The monument to her character – the commanding power of her radiant aura – cannot be long, tall, or vast enough.

When she’s in the frame, you feel it. Queen and protector of Wakanda, widow of a dead king, grieving mother of a dead king, and frustrated mother to a disbelieving daughter battling her own demons, she is all of them, with an astoundingly time-stopping level of grace, power and pathos. There’s a moment where she stands firm in the midst of a United Nations-type entity and holds them accountable for attacking Wakanda in their quest for vibranium. Her steely resolve in the face of intense scrutiny is inspiring on levels that continue to transfix long after the moment passes.

“Let our gracious response to the attack be an olive branch”, she says, simmering and snarling in equal measure to drawn-out perfection.

Queen Ramonda is also an embodiment of one of the film’s truths: Women take the lead here. The film’s best moments are furnished by women who pledge themselves to a cause greater than themselves. Like Wakanda. Like Love. The Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s elite women-only special forces team, led by General Okoye (played fantastically and movingly by Danai Gurira) and bolstered by Nakia (the always-resplendent Lupita Nyong’o), are also viscerally compelling ambassadors of this truth. Every time Okoye drives the base of her spear into the ground, I get spirit-clutching chills.

Then, there’s Shuri. By necessity, she’s now thrust into the heart of all the action, and some of the film’s most bruising and tender moments are of how she negotiates the momentum of the action that connects her brother dying to her becoming the next Black Panther. She’s there at both funerals. For her, the emotional toll of the action increases with the film’s runtime. “The Black Panther is a relic”, she scoffs at one point, all logic, science and rationality.

But there’s a storm brewing inside her and it takes being driven to the nth-extreme of rage and despair – “I just buried the last person who truly knew me. My heart is buried with her” – for her to find in herself the will to rise to the occasion.

Ironically, it’s with this Shuri phase as the Black Panther that frustrates the suspension of my disbelief. I love this film, enough to rank it as amongst the best in the Marvel canon, and in the overall corral of ‘superhero’ fare, but the lack of fanfare around her ascension to the Black Panther mantle is absolutely frustrating and puzzling. With T’Challa, it was a climactic event within a film-length climax. Here, it’s a pushed-to-the-brink exigency, punctuated only by what Deadpool calls a “superhero landing”, a hastily written entrance before the demands of the plot begin getting addressed.

At this point, my omission of anything related to the antagonist Namor and his world is glaring. But I came into this too entrenched in my bias towards Wakanda and how its fate is unraveled via its people to be anything but superficially invested in Talokan. Coogler did a little more than the bare minimum in drawing the parallels between Wakanda and it, and in fleshing out Namor’s origin story to the point where his motives are credibly influenced by it. 

But how believable they are is something that stands in the way of how much better this film could be. But, both oddly and obviously, that doesn’t bother me. I’m not going out of my way to pick apart something that I (a) came in wanting to like (b) was proven right about for much of the experience. For me, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is about Black Panther and Wakanda. And underpinning both is the animating force of all the action and drama: What we take on and what we leave behind.

Just before the curtain drops, Shuri, who by this point is the surrogate of all of Wakanda, burns her funeral garb, accepting the finality of T’Challa’s passing. It’s a serene, beautiful scene. As always, it's hard to tell if the tears coming out of her eyes belong to her or Letitia Wright. Because, for all that happened earlier, this film is a poem of mourning – but also of rebirth. As Nakia, approaches her, so does a little boy, her son with T’Challa. He tells her his name is Toussaint – but his Wakandan name is T’Challa.

After that, the credits roll.

I’m sold. No one can tell me otherwise.