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Notes -
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 found it pretty hard to suspend my disbelief for the movie, which made it feel really empty to me. Particularly disbelievable:
Like you said, a 400-year-old man who, as far as we know, has been very passive and lived under-the-radar suddenly decides that he needs to preemptively conquer the world even though there doesn't seem to be a tangible threat to him or his people. I usually expect centuries-old elders in fantasy fiction to have a more cool and level-headed approach to these sorts of things, considering they have so much experience and have seen empires come and go etc.
Given the many similarities between Wakanda and Talokan it also seemed like there was significant opportunity for diplomatic cooperation between the two of them, why dive into negotiations with a heavy-handed threat of war?
Namor seemed to want to both have Talokan remain a hidden isolated nation and initiate global war for conquest and/or deterrence; these goals seem at odds with each other and made it hard to understand his motives.
The power balancing seemed off in the movie. Wakanda has always been known as a highly advanced global superpower with defence systems and technology sufficient to take on Thanos' armies. Why is it that the Talokans seemed capable of just swimming right into their capital city and waterbombing the hell out of it, even prior to Namor joining in? The projectiles they were firing at Namor didn't even seem to have any homing capabilities considering he wasn't particularly fast at dodging.
The University girl wannabe iron man. Made a vibranium detector, something that literally every global superpower is trying to do, just for fun as a school project because her professor said she couldn't, in a car workshop, with (presumably) no vibranium in her possession to test and build it on, and probably little known research on the topic available for reference? Bullshit. Huge Mary Sue vibes. Built an iron man suit arguably better than the Mark I yet apparently is busy with schoolwork and needs to rush off to her Differential Equations class? Also bullshit; I could maybe believe she's some sort of prodigy but why would she bother wasting her time with trivial math classes in university then? Her just walking into the Wakandan workshop and making something comparable to iron man Mark III in the span of seemingly days is also ridiculous.
Whatever happened to the Talokans being seemingly immortal? On the bridge Shuri's bodyguard stabs several of them in the chest and they fall over dead, then they get up and walk it off. Later on a Talokan dies after a single gunshot.
I actually have a Grand Unifying Theory of Modern Mary Sues, which comes down to two principles: 1) audiences don't want to be taken on the exact same journey twice, and 2) modern film executives are more likely to make a new entry with a female protagonist.
It is absolutely true that if you compare, say, the time it takes for Rey in Star Wars to reach certain milestones, she does better than either Luke or Anakin with far less training. However, I also think it is true that if the sequel trilogies had instead been a brand new franchise, the fast speed at which Rey learned force techniques wouldn't actually be much of an issue. So her first confirmation of the Jedi being real and not just stories happened today, and she mastered the Jedi Mind Trick in like an afternoon while chained up? That's not much of an issue if the sequels are all that exists. Maybe being a space wizard is really easy or something? And she beats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber fight with essentially no training? Well, he wanted to capture her not kill her, and he was heavily injured, yadda yadda.
I think Ironheart in this movie, as well as characters like Rey in Star Wars or Korra and Avatar, often have the real world background that audiences have already seen how high power scaling can go in the universe, and are eager to get back up there again. It happens with male protagonists as well. I believe Boruto has advanced faster in some regards than his dad Naruto, and Gohan reaches Super Saiyan as a child while his dad had to train his whole life to do it. It just happens in long-running franchises. Audiences don't want to wait 200 episodes for Boruto to naturally reach the same point as his dad.
Well he trained intensively with his dad, one of the few Super Saiyans in the universe, in the hyperbolic time chamber for the sole purpose of also reaching Super Saiyan status. He had also been alluded to have immense power deep inside when he was a child before his dad even went Super Saiyan. Goku on the other hand only really did goofy "training" with Master Roshi and Kami/Mister Popo, and only really made significant progress after training with King Kai and in the gravity chamber, which seemingly didn't take place over that much time, maybe a year, after which he transformed into a Super Saiyan with no guidance available. So I think Goku and Gohan, while they had slightly different arcs, are comparable and Gohan's transformation doesn't invalidate Goku's.
Goten and kid Trunks however are ridiculous with how quickly and effortlessly they managed it, but I think everyone agrees on that.
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