I'm trying something new. It's been exceptionally difficult to keep up on everything there is to keep up on, both as a consumer and as someone who likes to prattle on about the things he consumes. So the plan is this: Kent's Week in Film -- each week I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer thought piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week, I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. I'm still working out the whole formulae, so it might evolve from here, but let's just get started...
KENT'S WEEK IN FILM #1
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) d. Ryan Coogler - in cinemarrr
See How The Run (2022) d. Tom George - Disney+
Don't Worry Darling (2022) d. Olivia Wilde - Crave
Burdened with the achingly unfortunate passing of its franchise lead and the cultural landmark status of its predecessor, Black Panther:Wakanda Forever had much to overcome to be a worthy successor... hmm... overcome may be too strong a word... "work through"... it had much to work through to be a worthy successor. Much like Shuri had to work through her past and reconcile with her legacy in order to rise as the new Black Panther (Not a spoiler, basically revealed in the trailer)
The problem, however, is that Shuri (Letitia Wright) isn't our focal character. The film feels lost without Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa to centre it, and it is looking for a leader everywhere (just like Wakanda)...in Ramonda (an outstanding Angela Bassett), M'Baku (never enough Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira should have her own franchise), as well as Shuri. At the same time it also has to take the pains of the further world building of Wakanda, and adding more fruit to the MCU pie, by introducing another young hero in Riri Williams (super charming Dominique Thorne), a whole rival (undersea) nation, plus its leader (one of Marvel's oldest characters) Namor (an exceeds expectations Tenoch Huerta). It also needs to pick up the threads of the prior film where Wankanda stopped hiding from the world, and the global earth shake that caused, and the knickers that it twisted all up as a result.
The film, to be honest, has too much to handle adeptly in its 2.5hour+ runtine. Some aspects work very well... Namor and his people aren't overly simplified villains to crush and swat away, and Riri Williams is actually integral to the plot and built out as a character rather than the living Maguffin America Chavez was in the Doctor Strange sequel. But, as a result of these boons, Wakanda suffers from erratic pacing and story beats. I think this would have been better served as a 6-to-8 hour mini series where the intrigue of global politics, the internal strife of faith in leadership, and the emotion component of grieving and loss could breathe more.
To be clear, there's not much in the way of bad scenes here -- Coogler himself is quite the deft craftsman, and surrounded with creatives who make it all look so good -- mostly its sequences are challenged by the amount of time they can spend, and the timing of the edits that hamper their success. The opening funeral montage, for example, is beautiful and sad (that is until the cgi spaceships show up) but it also feels rushed.
I also can't help but feel the film needed to place Shuri even more as it central figure, but it was afraid to. I bet somewhere, deep in the process, it went from "let's keep the new Black Panther a mystery" to "let's be pretty obvious it has to be Shuri". For well over half the movie I did think we were supposed to wonder who would be the new Panther, since Shuri doesn't really feel like she's being set up for this until very late in the film. Almost too late. To the point of deus ex machina...it needs her to be Black Panther, but has she truly earned it based on her journey here? She's never seemed like much of a fighter, so it seems a stretch, even with a fancy suit and super powers, to put her up against a 400-year-old superstrong flying mutant warrior from the sea. Hell, I though Okoye was the right candidate until they gave her a different (but comics accurate) suit. At the same time, Shuri and Namor, were always on the cusp of something flirtatious but it never quite gets there. This really needed an infusion of sexiness (but then captor-captive relationships are probably not a good idea, so nevermind).
And then there's Everett Ross, yep the token colonizer is back. He has a small bit of purpose here, better employed than he was in the first, to be sure, but again, not and explicitly necessary ingredient in this particular pie. At least it acknowledges that a CIA agent having debts or allegiances to a foreign land (despite being the "good guy" thing to do) makes him a very bad, very compromised CIA agent.
With Boseman gone, Wakanda Forever becomes exceptionally female-centric, with the majority of the cast being women. There's a thread of "powerful black male erasure" in not recasting T'Challa, but it's a damned if you do/damned if you don't scenario. I lean more on the side of don't than do, so this feels like the right play, but it's certainly not the only play that could have been made .
The female-centricness is not something trumpeted or even really pointed out. At the same time, it also feels a like it's lacking in a strong female POV, which is maybe why a lot of the film feels like its housekeeping rather than really advancing these characters in a meaningful and empowered way (of course the women of Wakanda have never felt disempowered in any sense).
This may grow on me in a second viewing (as the original did), as I think there's a lot of thought put into it all, and I truly hope there's a Lord of the Rings-style extended cut for home viewing that lets this all breathe more (so many people complaining it's too long, I think it's not long enough).
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Maybe the conceit of a murder mystery happening on the set of The Mousetrap (1000 performances in, but still very early in it's seemingly endless London theatre run), complete with some actual real-life players (Richard Attenborough, Agatha Christie) was a bit too specific, and perhaps an analogue version (Toast of London's dusty old "The Moose Trap" mayhaps) might have suited the film better.
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The film starts to show its discordance with its 1950's perfection aesthetic in small bits to start, but ever increasing in nature as it progresses. Some of these do come with a cool sense of foreboding, while others feel a little too heavy handed. Florence Pugh and Harry Styles make for a very sexy couple in the onset, and it's a great looking film in general. Olivia Wilde really shows off what she's capable of here, everything from sex scenes to action sequences, paranoid intrigue to esoteric moments. If the story isn't sealed tight, it's not as much Wilde's fault, I think, so much as Wilde brings so much to it that it makes these logic gaps less immediate. I can't strongly recommend it, but at the same time, I wouldn't warn anyone away from it either.
(Small Spoiler)
My one observation, about halfway through, was that the overwhelming tones of Men's Right Activism, particularly in the media broadcasts, made me think this was some COBRA-like techno-militia bent on world dominance (eg. Springfield from the G.I. Joe cartoon). You take COBRA out of the cold war and put it into recent years and it's totally an organization started by the MRA set.
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