![]() ![]() ![]() His absence was deeply felt throughout Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. He was the heart and soul of that extraordinary outlier in superheroic cinema, his charisma permeating every frame even when he wasn’t on screen. ![]() There’s no doubt that Coogler faced an uphill battle to get this film made after Black Panther star Chadwick Bozeman’s surprising and sudden death from colon cancer in August 2020. The sight of two communities of color fighting each other and, in one case, even destroying part of Wakanda while the powers that be are deliberately kept on the sidelines by the script, was both disheartening and infuriating. Never have battles between two factions in a superhero-comic book franchise depressed me more than the ones in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. While Ryan Coogler’s sequel may be primarily about sorrow and loss and how we cope when confronted by the death of a loved one, those very honorable and meaningful themes are drowned not only by the commercial demands of that sausage-making machine known as franchise filmmaking, but by its own wrong-headed and, given the tribal times we live in, where white supremacism is once again rearing its ugly head, misguided politics. That film was the pure essence of Afrofuturism. While civilizations have battled each other over resources since the beginning of time, there is something frankly disturbing about watching a technologically advanced African culture battle against an equally advanced and powerful underwater Mesoamerican one over philosophical differences in the protection of a common resource sought after by Westerners-well, let’s not beat around the bush, the white powers that be-for militaristic purposes.Īnd, folks, that’s my BIG problem with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the much-anticipated sequel to Black Panther, a film that joyfully celebrated the resilience and vibrancy of a proud continental culture and people while delivering some exciting action scenes and a lesson in geopolitics. ![]()
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