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.

How It Hurts Me Inside: SMALL AXE

Filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a collection of five feature-length films, might be his most impressive work to date. And he’s no slouch, responsible as he is for the brutal historical drama 12 Years a Slave and the exciting Chicago crime and corruption thriller Widows. This latest project is both wide-ranging and narrowly specific, encompassing a variety of moods and situations in an exploration into the lives of West Indian immigrants in London across a number of decades. It’s of a piece with his filmmaking interests in bodies in spaces — with everything from Cynthia Erivo’s tense running in Widows to Michael Fassbender’s wasting away in Hunger or swinging full frontal Shame, McQueen is a director who wants to put on screen bodies and what they can do in relation to what they reveal about character, and what it says about the spaces they’re allowed. His work is about bodies commodified, objectified, enjoyed, adrift, expressed — but above all else: alive. Here, across five separate stories with related thematic interests, we see immigrants taking up space in a land of white hegemony used to relating to these othered bodies as colonizers, and therefore still leery about seeing them as equal neighbors.

What elevates this project above McQueen’s other accomplished works is the way this interest is allowed its loosest expression, with an observational warmth and interpersonal beauty as actors’ behaviors guide a loving camera, which turns a well-worn eye on injustice without lingering in the pain. Its emphasis is on catharsis, on righteousness, on the frustrations and setbacks and wrestling with the mess of life. It’s that mess that makes of race relations the stuff of drama here, but modulated effectively, sometimes as foreground, sometimes as background, sometimes as implication. Roughly speaking, the five movies break down into: two films of a community built by rising up in opposition to or apart from a White culture (Mangrove and Lovers Rock), one about a Black man who hopes to change a racist system from the inside (Red, White and Blue), and two about Black men forged in the cauldron of racist systems (Alex Wheatle and Education). That they work together — as one expansive mural portrait of a time and a place and a people — and separately — as stand-alone works with varied topics and approaches — is part of the pleasures herein.

In Mangrove, culture creates connections, and walls off those who’d view those creating this culture with suspicion. Hence the tension. The film is about a restaurant which, due to its all-black patrons, draws the ire of Notting Hill police. It’s the 70s. A protest against law enforcement’s prejudicial treatment of this establishment ends up turning chaotic as the police apply their brutal bludgeoning tactics. Accused of provoking a riot, the owner (Shaun Parkes) and a handful of Black Panthers (including Letitia Wright—appropriate casting, that) are put on trial where they must face the unblinking and unthinking prejudice from the system that started the whole problem in the first place. An early scene of a raid at the restaurant lingers on a ladle clattering on the floor; a scene during the trial hangs behind a jail cell door as an unfairly accused man screams as he’s locked away for contempt after trying to point out the flaws in the judge’s approach. How galling what's considered equally expendable. The film’s a blood-boiling work of docudrama, so clearly arranged and carefully paced, and so attuned to the theatrical flourishes and grand opportunities for speeches and rhetoric in a captivating hot-button trial. (One wonders how anyone involved in the flat and broad and dull Trial of the Chicago 7 wouldn’t feel embarrassed by the comparison.) In these scenes, the protestors and the law are divided by the architecture and furniture of the courtroom. Their neighborhood oasis is invaded by suspicion. They’re simply fighting for the right to be left alone.

It’s this subtext that carries over into Lovers Rock, which contains a swooning immediacy and intimacy in group dynamics. Taking place entirely at an underground dance club in 1980, a tight, sweaty, and close quarters house party, the film finds its cast hiding away from the racist established party halls that wouldn’t have them. Set to a booming playlist and a jocular DJ, the movie finds a perfect encapsulation of how a shared set of cultural consumption — music, food, and slang, lovingly captured in process and effect— can knit a group closer together. When Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” starts, the crowd erupts with pleasure and delight, immediately slow-mo chopping along with goofy grins. Later, the electrifyingly falsetto “Silly Games” makes for a great slow-dance groove so intoxicating the group just keeps singing it even after the record stops spinning. The lilting attempts at the high notes and steady shuffle of feet is beautifully amateur, with a wondrously spontaneous outpouring of connection. Here’s a group safe and away from the cares of their days — although, of course, there are tremors of disjunction and disagreement spilling into the margins. But for these fleeting moments, they’re lost in the music, and in each other. McQueen, true to his interests, films bodies in close proximity to each other, capturing unspoken connections, slow grinds of seduction, and soft sweet flirtations. All the while the music thumps away until the early morning denouement. In a year that kept us apart, what a thrill to watch a movie capture this feeling of togetherness.

But if those two features are about community inside out, Red, White, and Blue takes an outsider in. Here John Boyega plays a scientist in 1983 who decides to change careers after he witnesses police attack his innocent father. Rather than fight that system from the outside — we saw how difficult that can be in the first film — he goes right into it. He signs up for the police academy with all good intentions, and we watch as he makes some progress before his hope erodes. Boyega plays a finely tuned arc that never tips its hand. He gives his character room to make believable well-intentioned decisions and strategic errors alike, never falling into overly proscribed preconceived ideas. It plays with the iconography of the policier with its matter-of-fact distance and just-the-facts crispness to the staging. But it’s enlivened by a sense of determination, and a sly humor to the outrageous absurdities of departmental racism. (It also doesn’t pass up the meta wink inherent in the scene where Boyega tells a buddy he wants to join “the Force.”) There’s a driving urgent collision between his desire to change the system while those closest to him worry the system will change him first. Set against the context of the other films in this grouping, McQueen makes it clear the degree of difficulty in approaching institutionalized bigotry of this, or any, kind, from any angle.

It’s an idea that reaches a culmination in the final two features in the project, which are the shortest, smallest, and most intently focused on the experience of one individual. In Alex Wheatle, the title character is a young man sentenced to prison for his role in a 1981 protest. There we watch the casual cruelty of incarceration as it shapes this man’s perspective. It’s among the most interior of these pictures, and McQueen brings his usual psychological immediacy to watching the situation’s toll. It’s a perspective that carries over into Education, a tightly drawn drama exploring 1970s trends in education that caused a disproportionate number of Black students to be siphoned off from mainstream schools into institutions of special education. Both these shorter features are as naturalistic as the others, but take on a shorter lens, a grainier closeness to the subjects, and watch as the sledgehammer subtlety of bureaucratic prejudice weighs heavily on those under its control. It’s responsive without being reductive. Taken together with the other works, McQueen has built up a portrait of a people and a place, a study of contrasts, collisions, consequences and contexts for which people cry out for justice. Its empathetic specificity is its individual strength, and its wide lens builds complexity into its cumulative power as a story of prejudice and perseverance.

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.