Black Panther 2: The Blue-Blooded Grief of ‘Wakanda Forever’

When the untimely demise of a lead actor forces a film — much less a superhero franchise — to pivot in its vision, tragedy is usually written in as an intangible footnote of history. As a mark of posthumous respect, the reel does not dwell on the real; the event has happened, the character is gone, and the universe has already been pushed into the future. But that’s not how director Ryan Coogler sees the loss of Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman. This is a rare case where concealing the fictional wound could mean cloaking the legacy of the performer. 

The sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, opens with the actual moment King T’Challa dies of an unspecified disease. We don’t see the man of course, but we sense his fading. We see his sister, Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), trying desperately to revive his heart from her lab. She fails. It’s a haunting scene, replete with raw visual grammar — a jittery tracking shot, a behind-the-scenes tension — that’s different from the rest of the franchise. Viewers are invited to feel — and live through — her immediate sense of loss, which is something we couldn’t experience when Boseman’s death was announced out of the blue. We see his coffin, the native funeral, the tears and the salutes. Not everyone can accept that he’s gone. Not everyone needs to.

Beneath its MCU frills and rise-of-a-successor template, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a story about coping. It’s not about forgetting and moving on; it’s about remembering and struggling to move on. Coogler does not shy away from suggesting that art, too, grieves just like life — messily, openly, awkwardly — especially when the lines are blurred. Chadwick Boseman meant something. He transcended the movies. He became the symbol of Black strength and dreams: a bridge that connected a bruised past to a boundless future. Most of all, his humane heroism taught an entire generation that rage is, both phonetically and spiritually, a subset of courage. Not even comic-book fiction can obscure his sudden absence. The gravity of his identity bleeds into this film. And it’s what distinguishes Wakanda Forever as a sequel, in the purest sense of the term. 

The adults of Wakanda — including the late T’Challa’s mother, Queen Ramonda — are putting on a brave face. They realise that they have a duty to fulfill, and a nation to protect against the greed of Western capitalism. Everyone wants a piece of their priceless vibranium. But young Shuri is finding it difficult to transition. She spends her time making machines, and scoffing in the faces of tradition and antiquity. So she finds human trauma harder to process; her mind is too advanced, too curious, to lean on crutches like faith and religion. Shuri cannot fathom that someone as immense as her brother — as Boseman himself — can be taken away by disease. It’s unfair and, unlike her mother, she is resentful. She is hurting. She is alarmed that, despite all her genius and resources, her brother died the way her oppressed ancestors did. He was the future of their race, but he died like an African mortal from history. 

Shuri suspects that she is one step away from feeling like a victim again; she is one push away from wanting to watch the world burn. She is wary of her youthful rebellion morphing into reckless rage. Some might wonder why T’Challa’s partner Nakia, played by the inherently fierce Lupita Nyong’o, isn’t the automatic choice as successor. But the truth is that Nakia, like the Queen, is too sorted and seasoned: She wouldn’t ‘transform’ into the new Black Panther as much as summon her soul. What she is, might not be too distant from what she is supposed to become. But Shuri is broken enough to be built — and to be shaped by choice rather than destiny. Shuri is emotionally fertile, waiting to be pounded by the demands of heritage.

Wakanda Forever is designed to scale up this voice of Shuri’s inner turmoil. Her moral duality is amplified by the staging of the story. One side of her is represented by Wakanda itself — where centuries of racial oppression were channeled into the creation of an evolved and elegant country; where they forgave but never forgot the ills of White colonialism; where empathy trumps apathy, and nobility outranks revenge. With her brother gone, though, this side of her is dormant. The other side of Shuri is rooted in the bitterness of grief and retribution: like her late cousin Killmonger, but also like the pointy-eared, ankle-winged mutant ruler of the new Mayan nation introduced in this film. Namor is the King of Talocan, an underwater avatar of Wakanda with blue-skinned, water-breathing residents that James Cameron will not be pleased to see. 

While it may seem convenient to alter the DNA of the Black Panther universe — where Wakanda isn’t the only land blessed with vibranium anymore — it is not without reason. Vibranium is just a metaphor for any mineral-rich, self-sustainable foreign land that Americans have their eye on. Namor’s powers and paranoia are derived from this metaphor. He does not want history to repeat itself, he strives to protect his people from the “surface world,” and so his vigilance wears the mask of vindictive violence. Namor is the oppressed devil on Shuri’s shoulders, as opposed to T’Challa’s angel. He is the cautionary tale that she is already a sentence in. Namor wants revenge and domination for his past, and he pushes her to a point where all she can see is retribution for her past. He gives her someone tangible to blame for the loss of her family — and a reason to abandon the Wakanda way. How quickly she gears through her five stages of grief is what defines the final act of the film. 

This quest to make or break Shuri is not smooth sailing. The path taken is a roundabout one. For instance, Namor first approaches Wakanda because he wants them to capture the American scientist responsible for a vibranium-detecting machine. For someone as invincible and advanced as Namor, this is a strangely bureaucratic deal to make. This scientist, an MIT student named Riri Williams, is an outside version of Shuri: Black, gifted and thrown into the deep end of an ocean she is unqualified to swim in. Shuri’s protection of her is instinctive, but when Namor does abduct both of them, he spends most of his time giving Shuri a tour of his water kingdom instead of just killing Riri. Perhaps he wants to be understood before being feared — a rare quality for someone who regularly threatens Wakanda to adopt his terms. At one point, in the middle of subduing Wakanda through warfare, Namor abruptly stops and declares that he will be back in a week. This week, of course, is for Shuri to nurture her rage and become a dark Black Panther. 

But there’s a beautiful montage — an epiphany of sorts — in the climactic battle that bridges the chasm between two great civilisations. It zooms out from the MCU moment and speaks to the cinema of perspective. In doing so, Coogler offers Shuri a shot at closure and adulthood at once: She is a lot like her brother, and yet she is more like herself. Coogler also offers his film a chance to lament and cement the spirit of Chadwick Boseman at once. The reel dwells on the real, and Wakanda comes out better for it. Some have accepted that the Black Panther is no more. But not everyone needs to believe it. After all, what is grief but the invincibility — and sequel-driven heroism — of memory?