Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Third World War

or

"A Colonialist in Chains...Now I Have Seen Everything"

 

When last we left (and, I'm sure, regretfully) Wakanda, they were ending their fearful (if understandable) isolation and establishing an outreach program into the wider world, no longer hiding in plain sight, sharing their culture, their knowledge, but not their wonder-mineral vibranium. The world is not ready for that (although they continue to try to possess "by any means necessary").

 

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever begins with the acknowledgment that its MVP, Chadwick Boseman, who has played "The Black Panther" in all the previous Marvel movies, is dead. Much tribute is made, deservedly, but the most important thing the movie does right off the bat is to say that the actor (and the character) are irreplaceable, too irreplaceable to even try. In a movie industry where actors are replaced with the drop of a salary demand or a controversial tweet (and a genre that is still trying to come to grips with multiple actors playing a single character), this is refreshingly noble. And rare. Already, the movie re-establishes that air the original had of being a labor of love rather than a labor of commerce. 

King T'Challa, the former Black Panther, protector of Wakanda, has died of an unspecified disease. The country mourns the loss, but none more than T'Challa's sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), princess and technological whiz-kid, who only knows that for all her brilliance and skills, she could not save her beloved brother. Now the kingdom is ruled by Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) with no protector, no Black Panther, but the more-than-capable army of the Dora Milaje, led by General Okoye (Danai Gurira). She's going to need them. At a United Nations meeting, she is pressed by the U.S. (Hey, Richard Schiff's in the Marvel Universe!) and France to share Wakanda's resource of vibranium, which she steadfastly refuses.

She gives them something else, instead. A big lesson in "Don't Mess With Me." The entrance opens and Okoye and her troop bring in some French soldiers who had tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to steal some vibranium. Ramonda lays down the law. Nobody is going to get the stuff for its potential for weaponry. If anybody tries it...well, they better not. Wakanda's memory is also forever.

They're not alone in that. The U.S. is trying to get their own vibranium deposited deep in the Atlantic Ocean, with a new device that detects the stuff. But, before any extraction can be done, there's an attack on the ship where the crew inexplicably jump like lemmings into the sea, impelled by a strange sonic attack of an unknown origin, and a helicopter attempting to escape is grabbed and thrown to a catastrophic end into the sea. Was it Wakanda? How? Even Wakanda doesn't know.

The answer comes from the sea. While Ramonda and Shuri are holding a private ritual ending their mourning by burning their ceremonial white robes, they are approached by a human rising from the water with wings on his feels and fire in his eyes. He is K'uk'ulkan or Prince Namor (Tenoch Huerta) of the undersea kingdom of Talokan and he loves what they've done with the place (the water is so clean! And the air is so fresh!), but not so much in his neck of the ocean, so he warns them. His people have stopped another attempt to take vibranium—this time from the ocean floor with a device that is specifically designed to detect it. As it is Wakanda's responsibility to police the mining of the stuff, they'd better get a handle on it, especially in his territory of the sea. If they can't, he'll see to it personally and with less restraint. His first aim is to find the person who created that vibranium detector and if Wakanda doesn't hand them over to him, he's not willing to wait and he'll take action against the people responsible and Wakanda, as well.

Okoye and Shuri contact their "favorite colonialist" Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), who knows who made that vibranium detector. She is MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who apparently has the "McGyver"-like ability to make a flux capacitor out of scraps taken from your recycle bin. Not only did she make that detector, but she's working on her own "Iron Man" suit because...well, MIT must have a liberal extracurricular activity program. But lousy security. When the two Wakandans contact Riri, they must first get by a raid by the FBI and then the Talokans, who take Shuri and Riri captive.

Queen Ramonda is furious with this. She demotes Okoye of her rank and then sends for Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), former Dora Milaje and War Dog spy to infiltrate Talokan and rescue the two scientific geniuses who can't seem to rescue themselves.

Well, it just gets more complicated from there. Ultimately it turns into a war between third world countries, tribe against tribe, while both should be looking at the real threat, which is the supposedly industrialized nations (although they pale when compared to Wakanda) trying to get their empirical mitts on the resource the two warring factions share. It seems to be a case of not keeping your eye on the vibranium ball, but that's what happens when things get personal. You lose the big picture when you're the target of the attack.

But, as frustrating as that is—and aren't all wars fundamentally frustrating?—one must acknowledge the complications. Coogler displayed in the first Black Panther a penchant for world-building that went beyond decor and here, he does the same sort of thing for the Talokans (in a way that seemed to escape the DC Aquaman movie), creating a murkier version with more natural materials, and enough back-story to create the grudges necessary to sell the thing.

But, more than that, this movie is a bit of a miracle in that, even if it isn't as artistically successful as the first Black Panther movie, it is successful enough without its lynch-pin title character present (and its charismatic lead actor irretrievably absent) and, instead, depends on the superb supporting cast that enriched its predecessor. Imagine a Batman movie without Batman. Nope. Not gonna happen. But, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is engaging even without a Black Panther character for the majority of its running time (consider that a SPOILER alert). I can't imagine another film franchise that would be able to pull that off and get away with it, let alone excel in its own way. 

As these super-hero movies start to merge together and become indistinguishable from one another, that is a remarkable accomplishment.

Wakanda forever!

 

 Prince Namor ("The Sub-mariner") has been around since 1939

 

Judas and the Black Messiah

99 to 1

or

Crouching Panther, Hidden Agenda

Judas and the Black Messiah is "based on a true story", which immediately sets one's Truth Squad into overdrive to see just how far afield the fiction is from reality. Such cynicism is matched, but then surpassed, when one learns that the movie is pretty much true, and that it happened very nearly exactly how it's depicted, just as the more pessimistic among us might suspect it did. One takes no joy in this, no sense of triumph that "they did it right for once," but only the despairing attitude that the truth of it is not stranger than an audience might accept (the standard trope for altering a story), but that it is altogether what they've become accustomed to accept.

That's a tellingly depressing bar to admit. But, we're a nation that excels at complacency when it's not in our immediate backyard.

Further still, the truth is actually more stunning than what is portrayed in the movie, and we'll address that fact at the end, because it weighs on the incidents like a stone, evoking feelings of amazement, pride, and shame.

Judas...tells the story of Bill O'Neill (Lakeith Stanfield, who has the toughest but least showy role in the film), a Chicago grifter, caught one night in an unsuccessful car-jacking (the incident didn't happen exactly as portrayed, as O'Neill was probably pulled over for a DWB), with a fake FBI badge on his person. It's one to two in prison for the auto theft, but five years for impersonating a federal officer, so the local FBI guy (Jesse Plemons) makes a deal: go to prison for possibly seven years, or help out the FBI and walk out free. O'Neill can only marvel at his luck, due to his lack of knowing anything about "Faust."

The devil he owes comes in the form of J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, who, despite being encased in even more makeup than Leonardo Di Caprio had to endure, is still unconvincing), who, in what should have been his gay, twilight years as head of the FBI, is seeing his black-and-white world of gangsters, racketeers and "Reds" become a bit more nuanced in the form of generations of "Boomers" becoming disenchanted with the "System," the "bread and circuses" not seeming to be enough to distract them. It runs afoul of his agency, which is comprised of white, crew-cut (and presumably straight) men in business suits—but we see them drinking on the job in their offices (would that pass Hoover's scrutiny?).His concern, right now, is black nationalist groups, like the NAACP, the SCLC, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers—not only due to their threat to the white status quo, but also for relations to communist and socialist causes.*

Their target is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), who has become the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, after studying pre-law and serving as a Youth Council leader of the NAACP. Naturally charismatic, a powerful speaker, and a student of revolutionary technique, Hampton began by organizing political classrooms, a civilian program for supervising police activity as well as a Free Breakfast Program. But, his biggest achievement—one which surely must not have escaped the notice of the FBI—is that he has organized what he called a "Rainbow Coalition," uniting the Panthers, the disparate Chicago street gangs, the White Southern Young Patriots Organization, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. Nothing scares an established authority more than a united coalition of dissidents. 

The FBI will begin their own disinformation campaign to splinter the Coalition, but their ace is Bill O'Neill, who will infiltrate the Panthers, and winning the begrudging trust of Hampton, eventually become the Security Captain of the Chicago chapter. He will maintain his hustler's stance, only going so far as until his life is at risk, but even then, when the FBI puts the pressure on him between doing something he's loathe to do and spending time in prison, he will do as ordered. It's just that he has no idea the limits the FBI will go to, whereas he might feel unironically safer under the umbrella of Hampton and the Panthers.

The history is well-documented and the official record simultaneously white-washed and tainted—Hampton was killed in a raid on his apartment. At the time of the raid he was unconscious from a dose of secobarbitol, slipped into a drink by O'Neill on FBI orders. Despite his condition, Hampton did not survive the raid and died from two gunshot wounds delivered hitman style to the head. Court records would indicate that Hampton died of plausible deniability. It was a "hit", carried out by the FBI in the tradition of the gangsters they once hunted.

All this is laid out by King in as unobtrusive a way as possible, getting the details right, making his shots as if a documentary filmmaker with extraordinary access, with a cutting style that favors reaction shots and a gradual acceleration of tension. The cast is amazing: Stanfield has the wary look of someone being continually hunted; Kaluuya is always amazing to watch because his choices catch you by surprise—his Hampton is charismatic, but the way Pacino's early days as Michael Corleone are charismatic, walking into every room, surveying it, and then taking it over by sheer force of personality, even cunning; and Dominique Fishback is all knowing-eyes as Panther volunteer Deborah Johnson, who starts out questioning Hampton's rhetorical skills and ends up becoming his muse and lover. 

One fact haunts: at the time of his death, Fred Hampton was 21 years old. Bill O'Neil had been recruited at the age of 17; he was 20 at the time of Hampton's assassination. There is no other way to look at the story than as a tragedy, of potential, unused and misdirected. Of lives wasted and power corrupted.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a devastating indictment.

* But, it's also personal for the FBI's director: In one scene, one of the few featuring the FBI director that has any resonance, director King has Hoover sanctimoniously ask Plemons' agent "How would you fee-el...if your daughter brought home her black boyfriend?" The agent can only stammer back at him: "She's eight months OLD!"