Wakanda Forever
3:29 PM - Here’s what I remember from the first Black Panther movie: Super hot people, high-concept, well-executed and specific aesthetic, good performances that weren’t too over the top, cool powers that weren’t so powerful it felt stupid, and a story that didn’t try to outdo itself, just stuck by some classic themes without reinventing the wheel and let the movie be good on its own terms.
That, to me, is a perfect Marvel movie. They’re never going to make “the Godfather” in the Marvel Universe, but the first one of these was as close as it’ll get. So expectations are high for Wakanda Forever, which I’m only now watching because I have a six-month-old and there was no theater-going happening when it came out. Let’s watch this thing!
(As I’ve found so often when live-blogging movies, alternate poster art tends to rule.)
3:34 - It opens into action, which I like, and this sister/superscientist character is fun and I really like this actress, but her “powers” (which amount to ‘do science discoveries in real time’) are the closest to groan-worthy in the whole story.
3:36 - But then she *doesn’t* save the day and instead King T’Challa dies, because obviously they have to address the fact that Chadwick Boseman actually did tragically die young. Loving this opening.
(One of the all-time great talents, taken far too soon.)
3:38 - The AESTHETICS, man. Just, like, the vibes. It’s very classically African, but done very subtly and with amazing reverence. They’re doing actual Afrofuturism in the biggest movie franchise of all time without playing it even slightly for laughs and it just makes me proud to be alive and watching in the year 2023.
(Aesthetics.)
3:41 - Angela Bassett not only doesn’t age physically, she doesn’t seem to get older in her affect. One of those rare humans who just seems to get more formidable with time. She can come on and do all the exposition in some courtroom scene and I can’t look away.
(Based on this picture I would have said 40, knowing her career timeline I guessed 57, then I look it up and she’s 64. Jaw-dropping. I know, makeup and lighting, but still!)
3:44 - This is starting fast, I love it. Sequels are so often sort of plodding and this sure isn’t. Wakanda isn’t sharing its Vibranium (which is such a better name than ‘Unobtanium’, which was the name of the substance in the original Avatar and which they mercifully excised in the recent sequel), they aren’t messing about, and if other countries keep trying to steal it, they’re going to start killing a bunch of people. Conflict!
3:48 - Now there’s Vibranium in the ocean! Some government discovers some, they’re about to mine it, and now their equipment is going off and something terrible is about to happen. This is what I mean by a story that just lets the movie be good. Establish an idea: “This is going to be a movie about conflict over Vibranium” and then go to more scenes of that in other contexts instead of bringing in some other thing. Low-key great screenwriting in its simplicity and discipline.
(Good writing is about brevity and necessity. If you start adding unnecessary things like subplots and random gifs from the internet, you’re lazy and probably not to be trusted.)
3:52 - It’s some new sea-people we haven’t seen before attacking the mining rig! Are they Wakandans? Who are they? Ryan Cooler (the director) seems to have watched a lot of John Carpenter movies, he writes really good, simple turns that work well.
3:56 - Just realizing that I’ve been so out of touch with the new baby that I literally don’t even know if Michael B. Jordan is in this movie or not. Did he die in the last movie? Not that that’s really a barrier in Marvel movies, but I wonder if they got him back. I love watching movies without finding anything out about them! (Also reading a really cool live-blog before or while watching is great, of course.)
(I keep feeling like his head is moving really weirdly in this gif, like it’s sliding sideways, and then I just tell myself I’m not sleeping enough.)
3:59 - This is cool, they’re doing a sort of faith-vs-science theme here with Angela Basset and Letitia Wright (playing her daughter). She’s trying to show her daughter a funeral ritual and her super-sciencey daughter isn’t having it. This is a bullseye theme for these characters, and even if it’s done a little heavy-handedly (it has to be since there can’t be more than like ten minutes between action set pieces) it works, and it addresses the weakest part of the world head on. Great writing.
4:03 - Okay so the mer-people are gonna be a big part of this movie and I’m into it, this is fun and I had no idea it was coming. Neat.
4:04 - Well, the kid woke up from his nap, so it’s time for an extended break.
(Live footage of me parenting.)
7:06 PM - Okay, about to re-start this movie at about the first act break. Did I mention I had a six-month old? This is how I watch movies now because this is how I do everything now—thirty minutes at a time punctuated by a couple hours of getting fussed at by an oversized infant (he’s 99th percentile in size thanks to my giant genetics), who is strapped to my chest while I try to do chores or make dinner or whatever, and resist the temptation to just put on Ms. Rachel and let him zone out and probably ruin his future brain function. Anyway! I think there’s actually a profound point there, because this is how most people are watching stuff now, at least some lesser version of it where they’re doing something else while they’re watching, pressing pause, etc. The days of the family gathering around the TV set to watch Ed Sullivan together after dinner have gone the way of radio, and creatives must plan accordingly. And *especially* for a Marvel movie that ~everyone is going to watch. If you’re making like “Tar” or whatever high-brow thing, maybe you can justify enough pretension to insist that people see it in theaters, but if you’re Ryan Coogler, people had better be able to follow this movie while doing dishes from across the room and not being able to hear it because a baby is screaming so they’re reading like half the subtitles and missing the other half. Changes what you can do!
Okay, pressing play!
7:08 - Martin Freeman is the token white guy in these movies, and he’s just so good at it, really knows his role and stays in the background. It’s fun because he’s such a dork and basically emotionless except for frustration at the main characters antics and all the black people in the movie are so cool and dramatic and deep. Great casting.
7:13 - So now they go and recruit another like 19-year-old science genius, and it’s a funny scene but I’m not sure I really get it, like they already have one of those but now they need another one, for basically unspecified reasons? I was hoping they’d sort of cut against this part of the world but they’re leaning into it, throwing around “encryption” and “A.I.” as if those are answers to questions.
(“You’re telling me I’m a teenage genius and I’m not even the first one in this story? What do I have to do to get some attention?! Oh God, I’m gonna get kidnapped, aren’t I?")
7:15 - And now this OTHER nineteen-year-old genius is like super mad they’re there instead of stoked, which also I don’t really get, but hey now the cops are outside and they’re in danger again and we can all forget about that and just move onto the next scene. Filmmaking!
7:18 - Chase scene! All is forgiven. This is what Marvel does so well. One is in a muscle car that can talk, one is on a motorcycle, and one is in a flying suit that a 19-year-old somehow got the money to build, there’s cops everywhere, and the music is pumping. Physics? Where we’re going, we don’t need physics!
7:25 - First fight against the mer-people. Florence Kasumba is a badass. That is all.
(No joke here, she is an amazingly fluid fighter on screen and has clearly worked her butt off on her craft.)
7:27 - Julia Louis-Dreyfuss sighting! You know she’s special because she has a dyed streak in her hair. I guess since it’s a sequel they needed one more white person, and hey, you could hardly do better.
7:30 - It’s really cool how they just let this movie be about the women in the story. It doesn’t feel forced or anything, it’s just like, T’Challa is gone, so the ones that are left are mostly the women, so just make a movie about them. There have been some stupid ‘girl power’ moments in some Marvel films (especially the Avengers movies, woof), but this is how it can be done right. Also, is this the highest-budget movie ever made that centers black women? I can’t think of a bigger one.
7:37 - This new scientist character might be the only miss in this movie for me so far. She’s not the greatest actress and her part just isn’t that well-written, which makes sense because it’s not even clear why she needs to be in the story. It’s shocking how hard it is to keep superfluous characters out of scripts, and I say that as someone who’s written many of them. I think the problem stems from the fact that one of the main differences between movies and life in the first place is that the average person knows WAY more people than the average character can know. Like you know dozens of people at least pretty well, and there’s absolutely never time in even a long movie to develop that many characters, or even half that many. So you populate a script with just a couple characters that you mean to develop thoroughly, but as a writer the script just seems so *empty*, like it seems unrealistic that your main character would only interact meaningfully with like 2-3 other people. Add that to the fact that you can solve basically any story problem by adding a character, and it’s just very tempting to end up with characters who just don’t have much to do. (Story problem = “how/why is the character going to do what I need them to do for the story to go forward.)
(The whole thing could be this if I’m not careful, I have a lot of detailed opinions about screenwriting.)
7:43 - They’re really going deep on this mer-person thing, and it’s getting pretty interesting, but I just keep thinking about the scene from Zoolander where he’s coal mining with his father (Jon Voight) for one day and then they see his commercial for Zoolander’s like face moisturizer or whatever and Jon Voight is like “My son is a goddamn mermaid.” And it’s too bad my brain is stupid because the dude who plays the leader of the mer-people is actually a damn good actor (Tenoch Huerta) and I haven’t seen him in much before so it would be cool to be able to take his scenes more seriously, but that’s my curse—once you’ve seen Zoolander, it lives inside you forever.
(I will never not laugh.)
7:48 - Wow they’re going deep with this mer-people thing! This movie shouldn’t be called “Wakanda Forever”, it should be called “Wakanda Half-the-Time”.
(They’re trying to do a South American nation and the multi-cultural thing is cool, and this guy is a good actor, but also he looks like he sings in a 90s Indie band that sounds too much like Good Charlotte to make it big and he’s filled with resentment about it.)
7:53 - Just checked and we’re only halfway through. Oi. I can pretty much guarantee at this point this movie is too long at almost three hours, and I say that as someone who’s enjoying it! Some of us have to get up with infants in the morning!
8:00 - Cool turn here with some believable miscommunication to start a war between Wakanda and the mer-people, who I guess are supposed to be Mayan based on the name and backstory. Ryan Coogler can definitely write.
8:01 - There’s lots of stuff about these mer-people that are just confusing though. They’re Mayan but also a dude who was there at the very beginning when they got turned into mer-people is still alive and leading them, even though they do get old because there are old/dead people among them. Also, some of them are blue and some aren’t, but it’s not really explained. Some of them demonstrated superpowers where they got killed and regenerated, but then one of them died permanently to start the war irrevocably. Not sure exactly what to make of it. Some typical Marvel-fuzziness here that you really see in stuff like Dr. Strange where the rules just aren’t even clear, which makes those movies hard for me to watch despite Benedict Cumberbatch’s undeniable charm. (I consider myself an official Cumber-Bitch, which is what his fan club calls ourselves, but I like him more as Sherlock Holmes.)
(Googling “train derailment gifs” on a Saturday night is enough to get me on some sort of watch list, isn’t it? But you can see what I was going for. The life of a writer.)
8:05 - So I guess there’s going to be a war now, but the Wakandans don’t seem that worried about it. They’re sitting around having deep emotional conversations and not preparing for war really. Doesn’t seem advisable.
8:06 - Also, it feels like if Michael B. Jordan is going to be in this movie, it’s got to be in the next fight scene or two. They’ve been making a whole thing about how there’s no Black Panther anymore because he (Killmonger, a hilariously on-the-nose name for Michael B. Jordan’s character) destroyed the magic ingredients that allowed them to pick a new one. But what if… he comes back to save them?! (I can just hear the pitch now)
(Alternate posters don’t miss!)
8:12 - Okay the fight scene between the mer-people and Wakanda is freaking rad. Just high-velocity spectacle and cool set piece ideas crammed together in a satisfying lump, then kneaded until smooth. I’ll bet this was rocking in a theater.
8:20 - So the mer-person King says he wants Wakanda’s help in destroying the other nations of the earth, but also says his kingdom is unstoppable and Wakanda can’t possibly resist. So why does he need their help so bad? Couldn’t he just kill the other nations on his own? Also, is destroying them really the best plan? And shouldn’t we address the question of nuclear weapons? Like is he going to take out all the nuclear silos first? Does he know where they are? I know, I’m probably over-thinking this.
(If a life could be summed up in one gif…)
8:23 - Hoo boy, the two super-genius teenaged scientists go into the lab to do some science-magic in real time and figure out how they’re going to beat the mer-people, and it’s pretty eye-roll-inducing! This is the dark underbelly of Marvel—a some point in almost all the movies, it just completely stops making sense, and yet the characters have to pretend it does for the story to move forward. Not great!
(Let’s just go back to Aesthetics, all this explanation is killing the vibe.)
8:27 - *Still* doing real-time science-magic. When I say this movie should definitely be shorter, this is basically what I’m talking about. This scene is stupid, so there’s no reason to drag it out to 15 minutes, just do what you gotta do and get back to the cool part of the story. I dunno, I guess people love this, it must test well, but personally I’d prefer a black screen with a title card that just says “then they discovered a secret way to make a new Black Panther” and then cut to the next scene.
8:29 - Theeeeeeere he is, Michael B. Jordan! Wearing all white cotton with no shirt and an open-robe, cause he knows what the people come to see. I’ll bet that robe comes off at some point and we get the full glorious torso if he stays in this movie for more than five minutes. I keep thinking he should just start talking about boxing, like his “Creed” movies are bleeding over into this one.
(He did not, in fact, stay in the movie for five more minutes, and pretty clearly seemed like he did one scene just so they could say he was in it.)
8:33 - Aw, snap! Super-scientist Letitia Wright is the new Black Panther! You knew it was coming but it is cool to see. What a role to play! She’s got like no flaws. Even the whole “I’m a scientist who doesn’t believe in the old rituals” thing she pretty much dropped without conversation. Honestly it’s kinda silly they couldn’t fit a little more pathos for her journey into this movie that lasts almost three full hours, like give her a scene where she doesn’t want to take the herbs and go on the Black Panther journey instead of fifteen minutes of fake-discovering how it’s going to work. Still, she wears the hell out of the suit!
8:39 - At this point I am begging them to start the final fight scene. It feels like I’ve been watching this movie for nine years.
(COME ON!!!)
8:45 - Every time just before a battle starts I’m like “this movie is kinda stupid” and then it starts and I’m like “this shit is like “300” and it’s awesome”. They keep bringing me back!
8:46 - My view of this movie is also punctuated by my wife sitting beside me and completely freaking out about all the ocean scenes because she’s scared of the ocean and whales and sharks and stuff. She’s “never watching this one again” and it has nothing to do with quality, she just doesn’t like whenever they cut to a wide shot underwater in the ocean.
(This one’s for you, Babe. I love you so much, I’ll never try to make you go out on the ocean, I swear.)
8:49 - Of course, as all Marvel movies must, after all the world-wrecking stakes and huge armies and magical technology, it comes down to two really strong people punching each other and it’s all about who can do the best punching and who can take the most punching. If Marvel movies have one overall message, it’s got to be “punching really hard is the most important skill in the world and it solves all problems eventually if you just punch hard enough for long enough”.
8:56 - Endings are hard. This one wasn’t entirely satisfying. “In the end it was all a battle for her soul” might work in a novel, but in a movie you just end up asking “If they were just gonna stop fighting, why didn’t they just work it out in the first place and save like thousands of people’s lives?” It’s still a really fun movie, though. Besides “The Snap” in Infinity War and the return of Surtur in Thor: Ragnarok, I’m not sure I’ve loved a single ending to a Marvel movie, but the journey is always interesting, and this one was. Could have used more Michael B. Jordan, but I guess, as big of a star as he is now, they were lucky they could get him at all.
They pretty much have to make a Black Panther 3, it feels like, because they never really resolved most of the outstanding questions like “what happens if the US doesn’t stop trying to get some Vibranium?” Like they want it to be all about these characters stories and her going and living happily ever after in Haiti, but they’ve set up these world-shaking questions the entire time, so we’re just kind of wondering.
9:02 - I totally thought it was over, but dios mio these Marvel movies just like never end, there’s been about five moments where they could have cut to black and instead it’s still just going and she’s thinking about T’Challa again and I’m sure there’s going to be a post-credits scene and I’m never going to go to bed.
9:07 -
END
Thanks for reading along! I do recommend this movie for Marvel stans, and don’t really recommend it for people who aren’t seeing the whole canon. It’s…fine. It’s really weird to say that about a movie that cost $100,000,000+ dollars to make, because it seems like it should be spectacular or a failure, but that’s just not how it works these days, and for what this type of movie is allowed to be, I actually think this is a pretty fresh and interesting take, even if a couple of the characters are stupid and it’s 45 minutes too long. Not as good as the first Black Panther, but that was one of the best Marvel movies ever made, so…
If you enjoyed this live-blog, please like, comment, or share with anyone else you think might enjoy it. Thanks, have a great week, and I’ll be back next weekend with another original story!
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“alternate poster art tends to rule” Alternate posters are almost always cooler than the main poster! Why can’t they make the posters for movies more interesting?