Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler, November 11, 2022) Movie • Page 25

It’s just stuff from over the years from conversations I’ve had or heard on podcasts. No real tea to spill. Just very strong opinions haha citing toy commercials from decades ago and such. All in good fun.

 

Saw this today and really enjoyed it. I thought they did the best they could to carry on from Boseman's death in a way that was respectful.

Thought everyone did a great job in their roles and Huerta's Namor especially came off as an equal measure of charismatic, smug, and hostile, just like the comic Namor. Need more M'Baku.

The only complaint I have is that I noticed waaaay too many slow-mo scenes in the fights. The one with Namor and M'Baku was effective, but some just seemed gratuitous in a way that was distracting.

 

Massive agree on the slo mo.

 

Yep. I’ll third that.

 

Some more random thoughts:

The scene with Queen Ramonda and Okoye was really hard to watch, because it was so emotional and uncomfortable at the same time. Really thought that was well done.

The other thing is that Valentina said she bugged the beads before Ross ever found them, which makes me think, did she do that knowing that Ross would find them and that he'd then be contacted by Wakanda and she'd be able to listen in?

I mean, it's a real Batman gambit, cause it relies on Ross both finding the beads and then decidedly not telling anyone that he found them. And then also that Wakanda would entrust information to Ross.

Which I guess is all plausible, that's what makes it a Batman gambit, but in the end it feels like the only thing it accomplished was giving her cause to have Ross arrested. I don't think it gave her any intel on Wakanda that she wouldn't have gained anyway. So... what was the point? Just to remove Wakanda's one U.S. government ally?

I hate asking questions like these cause now I feel myself staring into an abyss and I don't like it.

 

It basically just gave Valentina something to do in the script.

 

Probably setting up Thunderbolts or something. Everything with the US government felt like backdoor piloting for some other MCU project

 

pretty bland flick, can we get Coogler out of the MCU now

 

Nah.

 

So gonna be the same as Hulk is. Not necessarily a bad thing.

 

I don't know that I'd want to see a Namor movie anyway. I think Namor works best when he's bouncing off of other personalities, like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers.

 

Yeah I loved him in this but don't feel the need for a solo Namor film at all.

 

Blimey. Deserved IMO, but wasn’t expecting it at all.

 

Bassett acted her ASS off in this. Glad she at least got the nom

 

Coogler went into further detail about what the story would have been before Chadwick’s death. The night he came back from the Thanos snap he’d find that five years ago he had a son, but now he has missed five years of the boy’s life and on top of that Nakia is now married to another man. It would then jump ahead three years from that point to his son’s eighth birthday where T’Challa takes his son out into the bush for a ritual where he wants to teach him to live off the land and get to know him better. He’d be struggling with co-parenting and feeling out of place in the world he once knew. That’s when they’re interrupted by Namor, and T’Challa then has to take his son with him into battle. Val was also originally meant to have a larger role in the story.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/...chBuoPF3ZCYPjh2J4bf0Dlw_rqnY0&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

 

I'd hate that tbh

 

The more I think about it, the more I think this movie would've been a lot better if they stripped out all the Martin Freeman/JLD stuff as well as the Riri stuff and just focused more on the core conflict and characters.

 

Isn't the fact that those characters caused the core conflict kind of a problem? Or are you suggesting replacing them with nameless stand-ins?

 

No stand-ins. I'd rather them write another way for the conflict to start that didn't require all these outside characters. There are already so many characters the movie needs to service. Although, the idea of two civilizations similarly concerned about colonizers and world powers exploiting their resources being pitted against each other is already kind of strange.

 

I don't know if it's strange. I feel like the vibe they went for is that Namor's kingdom is isolationist and their determination to keep it that way has made them cruel and intolerant in how they deal with the outside world, to the point where they're more than happy to execute a college girl who only has tenuous ties to the problems they're facing.

Whereas Wakanda is trying to be more diplomatic about it, still trying to be open to the larger world and to the people worth being open for, while recognizing the dangers present and tactically dealing with them.

How well it handles this is up for debate, but I think there are obvious differences to go with the parallels that make it clear why they're not just working together to fight the rest of the world. Yet, anyway. I guess the ending hinted that they might be doing that in the future.

 

Fair enough points. I'd prefer the movie explore those parallels and differences more and use them to kick off a conflict naturally instead of introducing a character to get me excited for a Disney+ series and using them. I'm not pretending I'd know how to write it myself. It's just something I feel upon reflecting more on the movie.