Title: Wakanda Forever
Year: 2022
Director: Ryan Coogler
Country: US
Language: English
After Chadwick Boseman's death, Marvel could have decided not to make a sequel to Black Panther (2018) and nobody would have blamed them for it. This film directly addresses' his death in the opening credits and the story is thematically about the nature of grief. Each character deals with their grief in a variety of ways which drives an ever-growing conflict about Wakanda's resources.
Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), and the rest of the Wakandans fight to protect the kingdom of Wakanda from intervening world powers in the wake of King T'Challa's death.
With Black Panther (2018) I enjoyed the socio-political conflict at the heart of the movie; "Should Wakanda use their resources to help the World?" I particularly liked that the villain, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan)., was not entirely in the wrong & that our hero had to learn a lesson. This grey area of socio-politics also translates to Wakanda Forever. The central issue has no easy solution and the Wakandan Kingdom has some deep seated issues to fix.
Despite my praise for the grief driven story, I felt there were a lot of obvious technical issues with Wakanda Forever. The lighting is terrible; too many dark scenes that had me squinting, wondering what I was supposed to see. The cinematography lacked a sense of space; the lack of depth was very apparent. Event shots of supposed "expansive" kingdoms felt small and claustrophobic.
I didn't particularly like all the shouting matches that were going on in Wakanda Forever. How did any of these people become leaders when they're so obviously mentally unstable? The film does tell an intriguing story & has important themes, but it's presented like a picture with 1/10th of its budget.
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