One of my favorite parts of Opening Night for Marvel movies is the opening titles fanfare. You know that deal where some pages and panels flip by, then the camera starts zooming out while key moments from the franchise’s history play out in rapid succession over a powerful Michael Giacchino score.
Some time around 2016, this thing really started picking up a critical mass of narrative weight where the Previously . . . in the MCU run-through always packs quite the punch when montaged in half a minute. I always get a little choked up during this part because it’s a connection to the nexus of all the other times I’ve sat there on Opening Night (30 times?! Can that be possible?) still just so thrilled and unbelieving every time that one of the great passions of my childhood is being served up as the most successful franchise in cinematic history.
CHADWICK FOREVER
That’s not what we got Thursday night for BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Everyone knows that Ryan Coogler and his cast had a nearly impossible task ahead of them when lead actor and seemingly real-life superhero Chadwick Boseman died suddenly in 2020, so certain that he was going to beat cancer with his indomitable spirit that he didn’t tell anyone in the film industry that he even had it. Should King T’Challa be recast? Should the character be killed as well? Onscreen or off? Could it possibly be a good idea to assemble a final performance out of existing footage with maybe a little bit of the CGI deepfake technology that the Star Wars franchise has employed with varying degrees of success this last little bit?
In the end, they made the best choice possible. We open on Shuri, T’Challa’s brilliant little sister played with such charisma by Letitia Wright, in full-blown red-alert Crisis Mode, using all of her brilliance and futurist technology to save her brother, who’s in the next room where we never see him and fading fast. It’s a devastating set-up and Wright plays her focused urgency to perfection, just almost managing to convince us that in defiance of what we know about reality, there’s somehow still a chance that this will end well. This makes the scene’s inevitable resolution crash down on the viewer that much harder. I didn’t realize until that moment that I had only mourned the man, the actor, whose smile lit up the world after the cameras stopped rolling, but the real-world loss was so seismic, I hadn’t even begun to process the death of T’Challa, King of Wakanda. The standard Marvel opening fanfare was gone. No Giacchino score. Just shot after shot after shot after damn purple shot of Boseman in character as T’Challa. I looked to my right and the woman down at the end of the row had her face buried in her hands. The guy to my left was just shaking his head. Most folks within earshot were openly weeping. Friends, your correspondent in seat C12 was certainly no exception. A devastating and cathartic experience.
Only, then we had two and a half hours of movie to make it through.
THE PERFORMANCES
Everyone, of course, showed up and delivered top-tier work. Wright continues to carry the narrative over the course of the film. Angela Bassett has never been more majestic or grand as Queen Ramonda, just letting the U.N. Security Council have it in an early scene. It’s not wild to suggest that she could pull an Oscar nomination for her performance; she certainly deserves one. Danai Gurira continues to delight as General Okoye with some of the liveliest and most animated facial expressions I’ve seen in recent memory. Lupita Nyong’o has a smaller but crucial role to play as Nakia. There’s such a deep bench of talent here.
Winston Duke is hilarious as M’Baku of the Jabari, barking and talking noise at everybody. He finally gets a couple of action scenes, but I could absolutely devour a series of shorts of him and his crew just hanging out reacting to news of the MCU as it trickles in, what he thinks about the Eternals or Shang-Chi or Moon Knight messing around in Egypt or Jennifer Walters’s latest antics. Michaela Coel does a great deal with very little screen-time, Dominique Thorne sets up her upcoming IRONHEART series via excellent chemistry with Wright, Martin Freeman remains solid as the Tolkien White Man (I’m sorry! It still lands!), and there are a couple of surprise appearances I won’t spoil. But let’s talk about Namor.
AQUA DRIP
Tenoch Huerta Mejia has a great deal of heavy lifting to do here in his role as antagonist ranging the spectrum from sympathetic and charming to terrifying and consumed by enough rage to invade the entire surface world. Huerta carries it all off with deft chops, toggling from enchanting sincerity to brooding to murderous with apparent ease. Much has been made of the decision to fold in Mayan culture into the MCU Atlantean aesthetic; I’m usually dubious about such decisions, but it’s a good fit here. The designs look tremendous up on the big screen. Shoot, they don’t actually even call the place Atlantis! We get Namora and Attuma, but the only named undersea location is Talokan. It is a little bit funny, Black Adam and Namor look very similar to one another in the comics, but getting these movies just weeks apart, neither of the actors looks anything at all like the source material. I’ve got to say, though, Huerta has so much gravitas and magnetism, I was immediately hoping that his great love for Sue Storm makes the transition to film here as the decade rolls by. And he’s an absolute airborne terror when the fighting gets going.
All in all, Coogler and the cast succeed on every level and deliver a film that’s the most focused and soulful of Phase 4 by a pretty long shot. They pack an enormous amount of plot and character beats into 161 minutes, keeping a couple of plates spinning in the game of perpetual MCU-setup while never losing sight of making this own unique film a satisfying experience in and of itself. And they accomplish this while paying proper tribute to the enormous talent who left us way too young, honoring him in the most tasteful way possible, definitely enough to just wreck everyone all over again on the way out at the end of the film. CHAD BOSEMAN FOREVER!
5/5 Flapping Little Ankle-Wings
-Rob Bass