Life Finds a Way: BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

I don’t envy the cast and crew of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's task in creating a sequel after its star unexpectedly passed away. Imagine being obligated to make a blockbuster feature film for the most popular ongoing franchise for the biggest studio, but it has to be about the sudden death of your friend and co-worker. That writer-director Ryan Coogler and his collaborators manage to make a movie that’s simultaneously enormous spectacle and gently grief-stricken is some kind of miracle. It has such incredible liftoff that it manages to avoid the downward drag of Marvel formula for more of its runtime than you’d expect. Wakanda Forever is a superhero movie. Technically. But it’s not really interested in building huge CG slugfests, and, indeed, is at its worst when it has to fill half of its climactic confrontation with hectic effects shots of big armies blandly hurtling at each other. What does work is its mournful qualities, which extend not only to its characters mourning the death of Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, but to its exploration of the legacies left by tragedies—familial, royal, colonial. It opens with a funeral, and throughout finds tenderness in scenes with Queen Angela Bassett and Princess Letitia Wright. Starting with such somber celebration—a franchise sendoff that would be crass if it didn’t stay just on the right side of an honest salute—it keeps a fragility throughout.

This sequel finds the fictional African nation tossed into uncertainty as Western nations seek to exploit its resources. Meanwhile, Wakandans are also confronted with another secret nation—an underwater kingdom populated by mutant descendants of a lost Mayan tribe. And so the encroaching conflict is about indigenous survival in the face of genocidal oppression, and the ways in which the pressures of potential colonization turn tribes against each other. Coogler takes the time to build the antagonistic king of the underwater people, Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), into a richer character than we usually see in the more formulaic of these pictures. With evocative backstory filled in quickly, in generously evocative historical flashbacks during a sensitive monologue, we see the pain of Namor’s past sits close to the surface. And the angling between Namor and the Wakandans takes on some complicated real-world edge as characters on all sides consider taking violent steps to protect their own, even at the cost of others. Pity that their conflict has to run through some scenes with Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus back in the States, especially since they tease a promising geopolitical wrinkle that’s summarily dropped. Besides, it’s underwater and in Africa that the movie is most alive.

We get a sense of history in the ways the characters speak to each other, in their gestures and intentions, and as the frames push out into small, suggestive, murky glimpses of a fantastical setting. Coogler keeps his camera close to the characters, but pulls back just enough to give a sampling of worlds populated by unique peoples and cultures their rulers want to protect. The plot globe-hops in a way that feels expansive, and the stakes feel genuinely large. Turns out when you build conflict rooted in character and expressed through their emotional deliberations and deep lineages, you can suggest world-changing suspense without shooting a blue laser into the sky or summoning swarms of aliens or robots to punch for an hour at a time. The result is a comic book plot—complete with side-quests and living MacGuffins—that’s often warmly characterized. Wright, in contrast to the eager comic relief she played last time, is sunken with grief, and sees opportunity for connection with new characters before growing tempted by sorrowful vengeance. Bassett is strong regal suffering—a speech culminating in “Have I not given EVERYTHING!?” is a powerful expression of emotional pains. Returning supporting characters (Lupita N’yongo, Winston Duke, Danai Gurira) have slightly less to do, and I wish there was more attention paid to their moral dilemmas, but their presence is a warm reminder of what the first film did so well: building a community of characters whose words and deeds have consequences, and who relate to each other in ways that have actual weight.

Coogler, unlike most directors working for Marvel, has ideas and knows how to communicate them. His work—a day-in-the-life of a man murdered by police, Fruitvale Station; a celebration of an old franchise by reframing its perspective, Creed; and the original Black Panther—has consistently considered questions of what one can build for oneself while alive, and what one leaves behind for others once gone. He’s suited to make a film about an absence, about characters struggling to live up to a good example that’s been taking from them too soon. But this is also a movie that complicates this easy sadness. It’s earnestly committed to questioning violence and lamenting cycles of retribution. It comes by this honestly, engaged with issues of vengeance and victimhood, expectation and exploitation. Namor is never entirely in the wrong; Wakandans are never entirely right. This makes for good drama, with our heroes wrestling with a sense of morality, weighing what’s satisfying in the moment against what might be better long term. In the movie’s most exciting moments, the spectacle—a fun car chase with an instantly-compelling new character, a concussive water-bombing of Wakanda—runs hand-in-hand with a thrilling sense of wondering how these peoples can find a way to deescalate.

By the end, though, the movie has lost some track of these ideas, burying them in so much zapping and stabbing and chaos that’s atypically, for Coogler, and typically, for Marvel, unreflected upon. I found myself puzzling back through the chain of events and lamenting the shortcuts and sanding-down that had to happen to force a more typically Marvel climactic collision. Here’s a movie that pretty persuasively makes its own case against the formulaic stuff that’s weighing it down. It’s difficult to care about armies colliding, let alone the teases for future conflict, when the movie itself has made it clear it is about, and builds towards more characters realizing, that war does not make one great. Coogler has made an open-hearted franchise picture that’s often genuinely funereal and always interested in rebuilding its heroes’ broken hearts by helping them find new purpose. For the first couple hours, it’s alive and engaged and animated by interesting ideas beneath the fast vehicles, big explosions, and sparingly deployed quips. And in its final moments, it returns to a soft, quiet, tender spirit. That’s the stuff that will linger long after the noisy, simple, limp action of the finale fades.

They've Gotta Have It: DA 5 BLOODS

Landmines planted years ago are still harvesting death all these years later. So explains a woman (Mélanie Thierry), a descendant of a Frenchman who got rich as a colonizer in Vietnam, when she meets a group of Black American veterans who’ve returned to the country. She’s telling them what she’s doing out in the jungles, though they aren’t about to tell her they’re after gold they buried on one of their tours of duty over forty years prior. They’re all excavating past sins, she looking to clear her ancestor’s exploitation from her conscience, while the vets are hoping to take back some riches owed for theirs. The gold was American payment to collaborating villagers who were later napalmed casualties of the war. These soldiers found it and hid it for later—for our people, their afroed leader (Chadwick Boseman) assured them. Reparations. The woman’s statement, though, is also a signpost signaling an important theme running through Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a film about all sorts of landmines, long buried, blasting like new for characters who’ve gone to war but never really came back. Lee, at the full command of his powers as a master filmmaker, has made a film freely mixing present and past, genre and drama, violence and serenity, revenge and recompense. It’s as ambitious a film as he’s ever made. It knows all the right pressure plates to press to build suspense and ignite surprise, sharply, and with studied complexity. A pair of Vietcong vets buy Da Bloods drinks in an opening scene—signaling a film in which history has ways of hiding and revealing the unexpected, even in plain sight.

Here’s a film with full, textured characters who expand and deepen as the film goes on, capable of surprising us with new layers. It’s enough to remind you how simple most films are, how surface level they remain as characters are too thin to change, or grow along predictable lines. No, Lee’s screenplay (co-written with his BlacKkKlansman collaborator Kevin Willmott from a draft by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo) knows too much about world history, and about film history, to stay on the surface. We begin with a reunion of the four surviving Bloods, whose bonds were forged in the heat of Saigon and the jungles beyond. It’s Ho Chi Minh City now, and the men have changed, too. There’s Otis (Clarke Peters) who walks with a limp, pops pain pills, and hopes to reconnect with a Vietnamese woman he left behind (Lê Y Lan). Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) is softer, and Eddie (Norm Lewis) is richer—he offers to pay for them all, at least— than when last they saw this place. And Paul (Delroy Lindo), still wracked with PTSD which flares up around the sights and sounds of this place, smugly dons his MAGA hat, to the shock of his compatriots and his estranged son (Jonathan Majors). And yet none of them stay in the first impression we have of them—they are capable of more, rising to difficult occasions or succumbing to dreadful outcomes as the plot rises up to meet them. They all have grown weary and troubled with age, driven at this late stage to find the gold that they think will begin to restore what was taken from them by a pointless war that started their adult lives on a note of such violence and emotional toll. The film is bookended with archival footage of Black dissent—opening with Muhammed Ali explaining why he would not serve in Vietnam, and closing with Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking before a crowd about liberty. Lee gives the movie this mournful edge of righteous agitation, setting a key flashback scene during the war against a radio report of MLK’s assassination, Black soldiers left to wonder if their lives matter.

In true Spike Lee fashion, the film is no mere political sloganeering, nor does it reach for easy answers. Indeed, it proceeds first as a gripping entertainment and draws confidently its ambiguities before dropping rhetorical flourishes. The film is rich in allusion — a Heart of Darkness boat up the river to their buried Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a journey begun from an Apocalypse Now-themed bar. Old war buddies hang out, banter, reminisce, drink, and dance, and then the search drags on and the metaphorical storm clouds gather on the horizon. (The ensemble is terrifically convincing every step of the way, with Lindo’s escalating, sweaty, paranoia a clear standout as it builds to a startling paranoid monologue of Greek tragedy proportions, cut with a lens flare of astonishing grace.) Lee also confidently mixes film stock and aspect ratios — grainy square combat flashbacks and gruesome real war photography, digital scope present-tense, and taller frames swelling with terse suspense. It’s loose in its telling at first, freely cutting between tones and tensions, allowing us to know the characters and feel out their relationships to each other and to their lives. And then it tightens its grip as the action narrows in focus and the stakes get higher.

After all, this treasure hunt is a journey to confront the darkest moment of their past. It kicks up all sorts of memories, jealousies, regrets, and fears. And the film does, too. Memories of Vietnam war films, men-on-a-mission movies, elegiacally sweeping American epics and melancholic revisionist Westerns. They’re stirringly recombined in Lee’s trademark style, probing and provocative—here made contemplative and cynical, blisteringly violent at times and unmistakably, understandably aggrieved. Here’s a movie that knows all too well our American propensity for spotting potential landmines in our culture, then burying them, hoping against hope they won’t explode on us in the future. These vets, returning to extract a dream long deferred, fall into or respond against American traditions of greed, violence, exploitation, racism, and nativism. Their fallen comrade, whose remains now surely mark the spot, represents both trauma and treasure. And the soil in which their personal history took root might yet have death to harvest.

All Superheroes Go To Heaven: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films so far, the latest, Avengers: Infinity War, is certainly the very loudest. I suppose it has a right to be. Billed as the Series Finale when anyone with a working brain knows it’s merely the biggest Season Finale yet, it’s the culmination of ten years of these things. Ever since Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury stepped out in the post-credits scene of 2008’s relatively compact, swift, and charming Iron Man, promising to introduce that hero to a few others, it’s been an endless string of formulaic origins and meetups. At least the formula – 90 minutes of exposition, banter, and fun with character actors, followed by a 30-minute CGI shooting gallery – remains sturdy enough, and the performances roped in charismatic enough – that it rarely feels too much. They vary in quality. I prefer the looser hangouts where the action has a zing of screwball B-movie appeal (Iron Man 2, Avengers 2, Thor 2, Spider-Man Homecoming) or earnestness (Captain America 1, Black Panther) to the ponderous self-important ones (Captain Americas 2 and 3) with the ones in between tolerable, too. But generally they are completely disposable diversions. I enjoy them, and then they evaporate, leaving only vague impressions and the sense they should bring back Sam Rockwell someday. Infinity War is what all 18 films have built towards, the culmination of many Infinity Gem MacGuffins and Thanos references, as the purple titan himself (voiced with a growl by Josh Brolin, whose likeness stares back at us from soulful computerized eyes) comes crashing down to Earth looking for ultimate power, and two dozen heroes assemble to beat him back. 

This results in apocalyptic sequences as the characters are genuinely frightened for once in the franchise. Their quips pale in comparison to a man wielding an enormous gold gauntlet slowly studded with the glowing powers needed to wipe out half of existence in the snap of his fingers. When a ginormous whirring oval spaceship hovers over New York City, there are ominous stakes as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) mix worry into their determination. They all want to defeat Thanos – once they’re caught up on his plan, that is – but aren’t sure how to go about doing it. He’s already one of the galaxy’s most powerful beings, with an evil plot nigh incomprehensible in its universe-wide genocidal scope. What are a bunch of plucky knockabout do-gooders going to do in the face of that? Still, this is a Marvel movie, and the jokes fly fast and frequent, and, as directed by the Russo brothers and scripted by series’ regular writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, ably balances the tones. It also shuffles a massive cast in interesting ways, letting characters hitherto separated by time and space collide in fun exchanges and tenuous team-ups in bright, clear, IMAX cinematography.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it leans on its best features – letting Spider-Man (Tom Holland) earnestly tag along behind Stark and Strange, and ceding all of the film’s galactic plotting to the winning combination of the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, et al) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). (They are the funniest and, funnily enough, the most emotionally engaged, too.) It’s something of a screenwriting and editing marvel (oh, pun not intended, believe me, but now I’m sticking with it anyway) to keep something like 30 major speaking roles – all major players in their respective realms – and a couple different tonal modes balanced to such a successful extent. Part of it is the streamlined plot, subplots carried over mostly shunted to the side due to the enormity of the main dilemma, allowing the characters to focus on one goal. Part of it is giving different pieces of the goal to different smaller team-ups: a cosmic crew, an Earthbound squad (led by Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and a stay with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in Wakanda), and one travelling between. It’s perfectly engineered to bounce between these groupings of heroes, giving each and every one a crowd-pleasing entrance and perfectly timed laugh line or action pose throughout.

These performers have a certain iconoclasm to their positioning in the roles by now, and it’s great fun watching them spar and quip and fight side by side. The action is largely satisfying, too. Not quite as deadening as usual, it has heft and design, some cleverness, and some big, booming consequences (that will inevitably be almost or entirely reversed next summer, but are still satisfying shock in the moment). Best of all are the applause-break splash panel moments – my favorite goes to a thrilling late-breaking electric return in the battle royale finale. It may be a big, dumb, violent cartoon, but improbably Marvel Cinematic Universe productions have accumulated affection and accrued pleasures that outweigh any individual film’s successes and flaws. It’s a high-budget, high-spirit corporate product. It’s blockbuster serialized filmmaking, a massive sporadic television production on the big screen. The only gamble is that we’ll want to see our favorite charming superhero buddies pummeled and bloodied and beaten down to their lowest point yet, and still clamor to see them bounce back again, and again, and again. As long as the movies are this passably satisfying, agreeably diverting, and leave the audience just curious enough to see what happens next, they will. Infinity War, indeed.

Superb Hero: BLACK PANTHER

Black Panther is easily one of the best entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at this point a sprawling, occasionally mind-numbing constant in modern multiplexes. This one succeeds for the same reasons the other good ones do. It’s loaded with a ridiculously charismatic and overqualified cast delivering good-enough quips, and built out of splashy comic book action that barely overstays its welcome. But the movie leaves a slightly bigger than average impression because it is allowed a bit more personality. Offering control over to Ryan Coogler, the promising young writer-director of Fruitvale Station and Creed, the story of the princely superhero ruler of fictional pan-African paradise Wakanda is given a genuine charge of retro-Afro-futurism. Here is a gleaming modern city hidden away behind a force-field in the heart of Africa, the capitol of Wakanda, a country both a towering symbol of sci-fi technical might – the most advanced in the world – and rich in tribal tradition. Untouched by colonialism and slavery, Wakanda is strong and isolated. This becomes both its greatest asset and a potential weakness, as characters debate the long-held seclusion of their people. What do they owe the greater world? Heavy is the head that wears the Black Panther crown. There’s slightly more charge – in politics, character dynamics, and world-building – than is the norm in this type of thing.

Played with paradoxically shy bravado, a soft-spoken Chadwick Boseman is T’Challa, ruler and protector of Wakanda, and the hero of the title. We last saw him introduced in the worst MCU film, the interminably boring Captain America: Civil War, where his father was killed in a terrorist bombing. Now, his people look to him to lead. His mother (Angela Bassett), tech-genius sister (Letitia Wright), advisors (Forest Whitaker, Daniel Kaluuya), spy (Lupita Nyong’o), rival (Winston Duke), and military leader (Danai Gurira) have competing and overlapping interests. Some wish them to be more proactive, sharing their technology – flying cars, miracle medicine, hover trains – with the world’s underprivileged. Others wish to protect their secrecy at all costs. Enter the villains – a scene-chewing thief (Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaue, last seen getting his arm chopped by Ultron in Avengers 2) and a rabble-rousing zealot (Michael B. Jordan) – who are hellbent on breaking into Wakanda and zooming out with high-powered weapons to send hither and yon to the oppressed everywhere. A new world order is what they’re after, and though deep down they ideologically align with the Wakandan ideals of freedom, their process is suspect. Yes, Wakanda may be prepared to fight off baddies with violence – they have an army and battle-rhinos, after all – but at least they aren’t indiscriminately murdering their way through a plot for world domination. There is real political heat to this conflict, and it is rooted inextricably in character. Jordan, especially, brings great simmering rage and expressive, pointed attack that’s more vivid and personal than the typical superhero villain.

So Coogler does more than the usual MCU picture gets up to, while managing to draw several immediately lovable new characters and relationships. It’s an entire cast of scene-stealers, fun on the surface. But, beyond the pleasure of charming performances, that it’s an all-black cast makes it powerful representation – a swaggering thrill of diversity in an otherwise very white franchise. It’s not even explicitly addressed in the film itself; best is how it takes this state as natural and right and moves on to business as usual. Here the cast goes zipping through light banter and fun action. There’s a car chase through Korea that’d be the best action sequence in any other MCU film, and its almost a letdown following a fantastic brawl in an underground casino – sets up a space that looks like a Bond lair and sings with a Kendrick Lamar song before sliding through a digitally-composited long take that slides up and down a multi-level set. It has exquisite design, clothing its characters in colorful patterns and an assortment of accessories drawing equally from African fashion through the ages and vintage Marvel looks from the groovy to the modern. That it has all this vibrancy of personality and ideas makes it all the more depressing that it must culminate in one of those endless CGI slugfests that – though still slightly more fun than the deadening conclusions to, say, the otherwise semi-charming Guardians of the Galaxy – will clearly call out for a fast-forward button in any at-home rewatch. Still, it effortlessly and entertainingly opens up a fascinating new corner in a franchise that risked falling into dull repetition. It may fall into the same routine eventually, but at least it gives us something relatively fresh to admire on the way there.