In addition to superhero blockbuster, Wakanda Forever is also a melancholic grief drama

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever starts, how could it be otherwise, in a heavy minor. “Your brother is with the ancestors,” Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) is told, out of the blue.

Her brother – who was in that first Black Panther (2018) performed by Chadwick Boseman. The then brand new star actor died in the summer of 2020 from the effects of colon cancer.

The strongest finding of director-screenwriter Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole is their choice to make Boseman’s death an essential part of this sequel. Deceased, but not disappeared, that’s what it’s called in Wakanda Forever. In recent years, Boseman’s panther man had simply become too big and meaningful to just replace. After all, with his thoughtful portrayal, he wrote film history as the face of the first American superhero blockbuster with an almost entirely black cast.

During the bombastic funeral ritual in that first act of Wakanda Forever we see him one more time, as a gigantic mural, filmed in graceful slow motion: T’Challa, aka Black Panther, leader of the fictional, wealthy and technologically extremely advanced African kingdom of Wakanda. When the logo then appears on the screen, with which the films of superhero empire Marvel usually start energetically and loudly, the soundtrack is only filled with softly rushing wind.

A year later, Wakanda is at the center of a geopolitical crisis. Because how strong is a country without its impeccable leader? Queen Ramonda (beautiful role by Angela Bassett), T’Challa’s grieving mother, reports to the United Nations in Geneva to reassure world leaders: Wakanda’s very expensive raw material vibranium, necessary for the invulnerable black panther suit but also an ingredient for weapons of mass destruction, is despite everything is really in safe hands.

That is disappointing. Singing a hypnotic song, sailing on whales Avatar-ish blue underwater folk invade Wakanda, led by a merman with tiny wings at his feet. A rather silly appearance in the melancholic grief drama and the geopolitical spectacle film that Wakanda Forever also is, but you get used to it quickly.

Googler gives the antagonist played by Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta – Kukulkan for his followers, Namor for his enemies – a similarly deepening backstory to Michael B. Jordan’s palpable villain Killmonger in the first part. Once again with fantastic results: the distinction between good and evil, often so sharply defined in Marvel blockbusters, dissolves before your eyes.

Meanwhile, Princess Shuri gets her own history of becoming – gradually transforming herself into who she actually was in that sad opening scene.