With a runtime close to three hours and plenty of jaw-dropping twists,
it's easy to miss some crucial details in "Black Panther:
Wakanda Forever." From the "colonizer's" family to a genius student's backstory, and oh yeah,
an eternal war between two nations, these are the moments worth taking a closer look at.
When it was announced that "Wakanda Forever"
would not be recasting the role of King T'Challa, fans began to speculate about how the sequel would
deal with actor Chadwick Boseman's tragic death. Trailers have made it clear that T'Challa died
in the world of the MCU, but don't reveal how. It turns out that T'Challa died in much the same way
Boseman himself passed: from an illness he kept from the public and shared only with his closest
loved ones. There's a mural in the film's funeral scene with Wakandan letters that translate to,
Disney also honored Boseman with a mural. This similarity is entirely too somber to
call an Easter egg, but it's still significant and worth discussing.
That T'Challa's death mirrors Boseman's makes the first part of "Wakanda Forever" even more
impactful. It also allows director Ryan Coogler, the cast, and crew to avoid trivializing Boseman's
fatal illness by substituting his real tragedy for a possibly cheap fictionalized one. Boseman's
family and creative partners, including his widow Simone, were consultants on the film,
so the story of T'Challa's death was handled with their seal of approval.
"I cried when he called me to, you know,
ask me my thoughts and say is this-- you know, 'How do you feel about this?'"
That the filmmakers chose not to shoehorn in an overly complicated end to T'Challa's
story helped "Wakanda Forever" to clear what was, without a doubt, its highest hurdle.
One of the many recurring themes that run
throughout "Wakanda Forever" is the conflict between technology and tradition. Shuri is
squarely on team science and technology, and she wears them quite literally on her hand. Viewers
don't have to look that closely to catch the Princess's new tattoo; it's prominently displayed
several times throughout the movie. The design resembles rearranging particles. Perhaps it's a
visual representation of the chemical makeup of Vibranium or some other scientific breakthrough.
Shuri rejects the idea of the supernatural throughout "Wakanda Forever," even after she
experiences it via the ancestral plane for herself. She tells her mother that
T'Challa didn't touch her shoulder. That was just a figment of her imagination. She gives
up on the heart-shaped herb in favor of better weapons and suits. Shuri and
M'Baku even reference his accusation in the first "Black Panther."
"We have watched with disgust as
your technological advancements have been overseen by a child!"
Many other characters' body modifications harken back to their heritage. That Shuri
puts her faith so totally in science and her own genius is a huge part of her identity,
and her tattoo is a shorthand representation of that. It's telling that her own Black Panther
ceremony uses the synthetic heart-shaped herb and takes place without pomp or circumstance,
or incense, on an examination table in a cold laboratory.
Though Shuri is mostly concerned with
technology, much of the rest of "Wakanda Forever" is focused on the historical and the spiritual,
especially when it comes to Namor and his undersea home. Gods are everywhere. Bast, the MCU's Panther
god loosely based on the Egyptian Bastet, is the primary deity in Wakanda and is mentioned
multiple times. The Wakandans wear face paint that looks vaguely panther-like at T'Challa's funeral.
M'Baku and the Jabari, however, worship Hanuman, a gorilla spirit loosely based on a Hindu god of the
same name. That's why M'Baku wears a gorilla mask when he challenges T'Challa in "Black Panther" and
its why his hand print face paint looks different from the Wakandans at T'Challa's funeral. There
are also enormous gorilla statues throughout Jabariland, including one in M'Baku's throne room.
Mesoamerican iconography is even more prominent throughout "Wakanda Forever." The room in which
Namor first speaks with Shuri is covered in murals of Aztec and Mayan gods, including K'uk'ulkan,
which is both one of Namor's aliases and a mythical creature that the Yucatec Mayan
people really worshiped. M'Baku points out that Namor's people might consider him a god,
based on his nickname. Namor's costume is also adorned with mesoamerican pictograms.
It's not entirely a surprise
that Everett Ross is in "Wakanda Forever." After all, he had a fairly large role in the original,
in which Shuri used Wakandan technology to save his life after he was shot. With Shuri promoted to
the series protagonist, we were likely to see him again. How he's used here, though, is thoroughly
unexpected. "Wakanda Forever" sets the table for the upcoming "Thunderbolts" movie, thanks to a
subplot involving his former marriage to Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
But for now, the MCU is more concerned with his relationship with Shuri,
to whom he owes an enormous debt. Upon their first meeting, Shuri says,
"Don't scare me like that, colonizer!"
…as both a bit of cultural criticism and a cheeky term of endearment. When she sees Ross again,
she greets him with the same pet name and decides to exchange his debt with
her for information about Riri Williams, who designed the Vibranium detector.
In "Black Panther," Everett becomes fascinated by the remote Kimoyo beads
that the Wakandans use to stabilize injuries, including his own, and to communicate. Here,
he finds a bracelet of them at the crash site, which Valentina bugs. When he isn't willing to
help stage an offensive against Wakanda, he's presumably taken into custody. Later,
Okoye and Shuri track Everett down and free him. Okoye quips now that she's seen a
colonizer in chains, she's seen everything. Western oppression of indigenous people is
a running theme in "Wakanda Forever," so this callback works on two levels.
Not only does "Wakanda
Forever" tee up "Thunderbolts," as well as introduce a new Black Panther and a
new anti-hero in Namor, the sequel also features the MCU debut of Riri Williams,
also known as Ironheart. The character is getting her own Disney+ series soon,
and fans knew from the trailers that she'd be a part of "Wakanda Forever," though the film doesn't
use her superhero name yet. Riri's introduction is refreshingly light on backstory. Most of
what we know about her comes via visual clues and cryptic dialogue as opposed to an exposition dump.
In the comics, Riri Williams is a teenage super genius who hails from Chicago. Some
fans thought "Wakanda Forever" might venture to the windy city for Riri,
but she's already a student at MIT when Okoye and Shuri go looking for her. She does,
at least, have a Chicago Bulls pillow on her bed. Riri also mentions that both
her father and her stepdad have died; this is the case in the comics as well.
The comics version of Riri constructs her first suit mostly from stolen parts. We likewise see
her bartering with another student for parts in the film, and when Shuri deconstructs Riri's
Vibranium detector, she deduces that it's assembled from scrap. If you look closely,
her stud earrings are tiny iron hearts. Plus, her in-helmet shots call back to
Tony Stark, as does her mission to fly dangerously high to stop the drone.
In Marvel comics, Namor rules
over Atlantis. But Marvel probably wanted to avoid using the undersea kingdom since DC got
to the legendary lost and submerged civilization first with "Aquaman." Their solution is an elegant
and thematically charged improvement on the existing canon. Filmmakers took Namor McKenzie,
a half-human half-Atlantian weirdo whose name is "Roman" spelled backwards and,
via a well-researched infusion of mesoamerican mythology, turned him
into 14th-century god. In doing so, they've effectively transformed the story of Namor
into commentary on Spanish conquistadors' pillaging of Central and South America.
Atlantis becomes Talokan, a simplified version of the name of an Aztec dream world. In mythology,
it's the realm of Tlālōc the rain god. He gets a shout-out in the film. It's this entity that
Namor's people pray to when they concoct their own version of the heart-shaped herb potion with their
own Vibranium-laced plants. In Wakanda, only the monarch ingests the magic elixir. In the Yucatan,
everyone does. Namor's mother is hesitant since she's pregnant, and the mystical
substance gives her son strange mutations like winged feet, pointed ears, long life,
and the ability to take in oxygen from air or water. Everyone else turns blue and must
resort to life in the ocean. Namor's mutations earn him the status of the god K'uk'ulkan,
which means feathered serpent god since he can inhabit the air, land, and sea.
"Namor loves his people. He's going to protect them,
because to be a ruler, you have to serve the people."
It's notable that in the film, a second Vibranium meteorite hits the Yucatan. The meteor that's
theorized to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs struck there about 65 million years ago.
There's a running joke
throughout "Wakanda Forever" that Okoye isn't too impressed with the latest enhanced outfit
that Shuri's been designing for her. The new armor is much bluer and covers much more of
the body than what Okoye and the Dora Milaje are used to wearing. But Shuri insists that
the outfit comes with added benefits that will make it worth her while. Okoye and Aneka don the
armor only after Queen Ramonda forces Okoye to resign. Okoye has to give up her weapon,
and Shuri promises her the new armor comes with a brand new spear.
These odd-looking uniforms with their buggy eyes and tentacle-like appendages are actually comic
book accurate, both in their appearance and their symbolic use. In Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Black Panther"
run, there's an arc in which Aneka, the Dora Milaje's combat trainer, kills a chieftain who
was mistreating women when it wasn't officially her place to do so. Though Ayo speaks up on her
behalf, Queen Ramonda follows the letter of the law and sentences her to death. Several members
of the all-female fighting force rescue her and leave the ranks to start their own rebel group,
the Midnight Angels. This is the name Shuri gives to the armor in "Wakanda Forever," too.
Speaking of the Dora Milaje,
another storyline from the comics pops up, however briefly, in "Wakanda Forever." But
to fully understand its implications, we have to go back to an unused scene from "Black
Panther." The unfinished scene featured a moment of romantic flirtation between Okoye and Ayo. But
Okoye married Daniel Kaluuya's W'Kabi. In "Wakanda Forever," we get another reference to the events
of "Black Panther" when Queen Ramonda removes Okoye from her position and implies that she can
still visit W'Kabi in jail, where he is presumably being held for aligning himself with Killmonger.
But near the end of the movie, there's an acknowledgment of a romantic relationship between
Ayo — the new head of the Dora Milaje — and Aneka. In the Midnight Angels arc in the comics,
Aneka is the superior member of the Dora Milaje. It's she who recruits Ayo, but is eventually
bested by her in training. The two butt heads, but the sexual tension between them is impossible for
either to ignore. It's Ayo who breaks Aneka out of prison. The two warrior women dedicate themselves
to each other and to the cause of helping all those in Wakanda whom the powers that be ignored.
Ryan Coogler was
adamant that Namor the Sub-Mariner would be the antagonist of "Wakanda Forever."
The character is a frequent on-and-off ally and adversary of Black Panther in the comics,
and with the change from Atlantis to Talokan, their secret societies have even more in common.
Namor confirms in the film that he is, indeed, a mutant. In 2012's "Avengers vs. X-Men," Namor
sides with the mutants and floods Wakanda. T'Challa vows a blood oath to kill Namor,
which basically locks these two Kings and these two Kingdoms in an everlasting war.
Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa is no longer with us, so he can't be Namor's foil anymore. Shuri
takes up that mantle, too. She gets pretty friendly pretty quickly with the Feathered
Serpent God and tries to find a diplomatic end to their disagreement. He gifts her his mother's
bracelet in return... the very thing that will help her complete the synthetic heart-shaped
herb. But Nakia infiltrates Talokan after Shuri had convinced Namor she was an ally,
and she fears the mistake has started an eternal war. Tensions escalate when
Namor attacks Wakanda and kills Queen Ramonda. Characters, including M'Baku,
check her aggression, but Shuri argues that her mother's death is worth the never-ending
conflict. "Wakanda Forever" resolves when the new Black Panther has a chance to get revenge
and chooses forgiveness and cooperation instead. Basically, the "Black Panther" sequel trades
T'Challa for Shuri and runs through the comics' eternal war in about two hours and 40 minutes.