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I want to talk about some of the failures of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
First, let me say that I thought they handled the death of their main actor about as respectfully and deftly as any blockbuster movie made by Disney could be expected to. The emotional through line of grief and dealing with the death of a loved one rang true, and I found myself tearing up a bit towards the end.
However, I feel like this movie is very messy and a lot of it comes from their unwillingness to be as daring politically or aesthetically as the original Black Panther.
My biggest complaints circle around Talokan and Namor.
Whatever else one might say about the concept of Wakanda, the idea of asking what Africa would look like without colonization, and the imagination behind its Afro-futurism is interesting and compelling. On top of that, the political questions at the core of the first movie, while not Citizen Cane, are fundamentally interesting: What responsibility do the powerful have to those weaker than them? Is a gradualist or revolutionary approach to change better? Isolation or conquest? Isolation or outreach?
It is also helped along by the fact that Killmonger managed to be a villain with a point - as a descendant of royalty and African slaves, a Wakandan who has seen the plight of African Americans and come away with a more revolutionary Black nationalist mindset as a result. He manages to be grounded up until the point they decide to make him just enough of an asshole to justify stopping him for trying to change things the wrong way.
But all of this falls apart with Namor. He is old enough to have personally been oppressed by Spanish colonists 400 years ago, and he even attacked a Spanish hacienda while burying his mother. He says he will "never forget what he saw." And yet... he just sort of let the rest of Spanish colonization and Mesoamerican history play or more or less the way it did in our world after that? He saw the rise and fall of Fascism and Communism in the 20th century, and he didn't lift a finger, but as soon as the surface world is on the brink of discovering Talokan, it suddenly becomes imperative to preemptively conquer the surface, since the system of White European dominance that American hegemony is the latest instance of would be all too happy to use neo-colonial policies against these two new superpowers.
However, the passage of 400 years really makes Namor feel way less justified in his crusade. Killmonger personally experienced life as a poor black kid in contemporary America, and learned the broader context of his suffering and the oppression of his people. Meanwhile, Talokan has been isolationist for the last 400 years and clearly hasn't bothered to stop oppression anywhere else. (He says his enemies call him "Namor", but who are his enemies? Aside from burning one Spanish plantation to the ground 400 years ago, what did he do for the Mayan people since then?) The passage of time has also made things more complicated. Namor would be most justified if his crusade was against the Spanish - but of course they haven't been a world power for a long time, so instead the movie uses America and, strangely, France as its two examples of White European colonizers in the modern world. (I suspect they wanted to do more with the Haiti-France connection in the original script, but it got cut for being too spicy.)
But in Namor's conversations with Shuri, he talks about how "you know how they treat people like us", and I have to ask whether the movie actually manages to say anything about race relations or the history of colonialism at all, rather than lazily referencing it. Like, sure small pox and Spanish conquista was horrible for many of the natives, and it sucks that Namor's tribe had to go through that, but none of that would really justify attacking the countries today, the people alive today. The time to act would have been 400 years ago, and it seems like the Talokanian people had the power and ability to fight back against the Spanish, and they did nothing really substantive to do so. They gave up after one plantation.
As an aside, I think it is simple realpolitik that America and every other halfway competent nation would be trying to get their hands on vibranium in the MCU. I don't actually think the hints of neocolonial critique really get off the ground here. MCU America doesn't want vibranium because Wakanda is a black nation, and wouldn't want it because Talokan is a Mayan nation. They want it because there are aliens and demons and gods in the MCU, and vibranium is one of the better tools for fighting back against them. As well as being responsible for miraculous advancements in medical and other technologies.
Overall, this just seems like another instance of Marvel not doing a great job with Hispanic countries and cultures, even as I tend to be fairly impressed with how they handle the African American experience. For a good example of the former, look at the Eternals. What exactly makes Druig stop his mind control scheme to bring peace between the Indians and the Spanish at a single city? Why didn't he do that to all the Spanish? For an example of the latter, see The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
I've made jokes in the past that Black Panther was a love-letter to American supremacy. For all it was supposed to be Strong African Country, the plot is basically that a small central-african country gets couped and counter-couped by the American government twice in about a week... as an accident. First as a rogue former agent, but second by a isolated agent cut off from the state. So great is the power of the CIA that it's agents on their own overthrow the most powerful African Country in the world, twice, before really knowing it exists, and so great is the power of America that Wakandan royalty defects from their civilizational mission of isolation and starts giving aid to that most needy African population there is... American citizens.
Black Panther (the film) always had its own unfortunate implications- steotyping 'authentic' africans as shoe-less tribals with animal motiffs, much use of the noble savage trope, but at it's heart it was also a personal story of a man coming to grips between the tension of the virtues and flaws of something he loves, but knows needs to change for the better. The set dressing is set dressing, because the core story is emotional conflict of ideology and overcoming flaws, and if that's enough to get people to give a pass to the Unfortuante Implications, who am I to say nay?
I don't get that feeling from Wakanda Forever.
As a story protagonist, Shuri works as a 'working through grief' story, but she doesn't actually address or grappel with any really character flaws. Shuri's flaw is that she is grieving, and her grieving is corrupting her otherwise unimpeachable nature, but this isn't an actual character flaw, or anything but the most blameless of guilts. Shuri feels bad for not being able to cure an incurable disease... not, say, refusing to be at her brother's side as a man on his deathbed, denying him a final request. Not for getting a bunch of American police killed in the midst of a coerced kidnapping attempt. Nor for anything else she did, but only for what she couldn't- and couldn't be expected to do- achieve.
This is closer to the suffering-Sue stereotype than an actual character challenge for her to overcome, and the same extends to Wakanda as a whole. T'Challa struggles with the fact that the father he loves is a hypocrite and his people need to change, that his nation's policy is fundamentally flawed, and that Wakanda isn't as good as it tells itself it is. T'Challa loves his people and his friends, but the 'we follow the throne, not you' dynamic is explicit and a major point of divergence where T'Challa, the warrior-king, has to give way to T'Challa, the hero, to save his people from themselves.
Shuri... does not address that her mother broke treaties and promises to share technology and resources, is returning to isolationism, and that the Wakandan foreign policy is being governed again by xenophobic distrust of the outside and secrecy that is threatening to turn the world against them. They can't tell the truth that they are in danger because... Wakanda is in danger? This would be an excellent context for Shuri to break the mold- to reach out for help, and going against her mother's well-meaning strength-in-isolationism- but no. The writing doesn't tie the hero's growth the nation's improvement, because there is no real growth here. There is a reversion to the unquestioned norm, and as an extension the state of Wakanda isn't changing either.
Wakanda, as a character, isn't exactly asserting itself either. No one expresses any opinions on the state of the monarchy's foreign policy, of the direction of the nation is going until it's an actual war council. The people of Wakanda are presented as generally conformist- not even the spark of rebelliousness that faced T'Challa in the challenge for the throne. The advisors are inconsequential early on, and literally dismissed later. Decisions are made for them more than by them as a people. Peasants are going by wooden boat while the royalty flies above them in tech-future spaceships. T'Challa is grieved by the people of Wakanda, but the people of Wakanda fleet their only real city after the first raid in modern memory which takes the queen. Wakanda is no longer an unquestioned superpower, the fundamentals of their assumed superiority dashed by an open an unequivicable defeat on their own home soil and then the deaths of many in a losing battle their princess took them to... but no one has any issues of the new losses, because Princess Shuri didn't let her grief drive revenge?
There are a lot of interesting things you could do here from a writing point. Wakanda is implicitly an incredibly stratified society. It's gone through a seminal moment of it's unquestioned supremacy not only being questioned, but overturned. They lost the battles, they lost their queen, and they've just lost the royal dynasty. It's isolated, and keeping the secrets that have murdered innocent citizens of other countries. You can make interesting stories with this.
But they won't, since that wasn't the goal here, and won't be the goal when the superhero teamup needs to happen.
If one thing is disappointing for me, it's this
Wakanda is a fairytale land so I guess there could be a worry that digging in too deep would undermine it's ability to function as such for everyone but it does feel very empty after two movies now.
A lot was made of the idea of a pristine, uncolonized African country but they haven't really explored it from the ground view.
I actually don't mind a deliberately archaizing nation with schizo-tech distribution...if you explore that concept*. There's lots to draw on there: Wakanda is one of the few left nations that actually seems to believe its supernatural founding myth (with good reason apparently) and apparently has had an unbroken continuous government longer than anyone else, despite what appears to be a highly rickety system of succession. This sort of thing could lead over-valuing of the past, a bunch of people who constantly LARP their ancestors' lives and have grown so indolent that they don't worry about the costs of this.
All of this is weird and absurd and would be fun to see an attempt to condense this into something that made sense.
But it's just sort of a potemkin country instead.
Oh well, this is why god made rational fanfiction.
* This is also my problem with their military. I don't mind that it's incredibly dumb; I mind that they don't explain this dumbness as a product of them being incredibly sheltered and coddled. Even worse: people keep telling us it isn't incredibly dumb.
In the first film to feature Wakanda, the shepherds in poverty outside the invisible gates were actors as much as shepherds. It looks like the country has car-free cities and fast transit for people to get to their reed boat’s dock in the morning for work. They seem to deliberately have chosen a philosophy which eschews all the bad things about cities (anything which causes alienation) and embraces only the good: economic concentration and opportunity.
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