The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

I feel like such a chump.

I honestly thought Marvel was going to try for once.  I have no idea what this unfounded optimism was based on.  

Most of the praise for this film was written by shills before it hit the theaters.  You can tell. 

Although, I have seen legitimate good reviews for this movie, and they were entirely from fat Gamma Males.  If you are a Fat Gamma Male or are simply a Gamma male who is fat in spirit, this is absolutely the film for you. You will cry like the bitches you were born to be throughout the whole thing.  

If you are a Delta and above, you will curse the goddess of whatever fate that pronounced the doom upon your head that forced you into a theater to endure this impenetrable wall of tedium.  

Fortunately, the movie theater I went to serves drastically overpriced beer.  Bless you, oh Founder’s Dirty Bastard Scottish ale ABV 8.5%, I couldn’t have made it without you.

I strongly suspect this script was mostly finished before Chadwick Boseman died because he was mad as hell with Disney about something before he clocked out.  It feels like it was extensively reworked.  Some things just don’t fit like they should.  It is possible that this script was originally supposed to take place during The Snap after T’Challa got zilched out for five years.  That would make more sense than the complete lack of political adjustments being made when T’Challa was…let’s face facts…dead after Thanos’ little visit.  

When T’Challa Blipped back in, he should have seen Gorilla Dude sitting on his throne being unhappy to see him.  Although Gorilla Dude was undoubtedly less happy to be in this movie given that he was portrayed as being stupider than a gorilla.

Regardless, a story about his family adjusting to King T’Challa being gone would only make sense if they hadn’t already just gone through it.  They are acting like they are mourning him for the first time and we all know he just spent five years being dead.

I would have to assume that you were hopelessly incompetent as a scriptwriter to have deliberately designed a story like this.  This is not an assumption that I can casually dismiss with Marvel in the 2020s. 

The oppressed minorities in this movie are constantly snarling about “colonizers.”  WHY? Neither Wakanda nor the Sea-Mayans were ever colonized.  And if the Wakandans were so morally outraged about the slave trade… Why. Didn’t. They. Do. Anything. About. It?

If Wakanda is three hundred years ahead of everyone else then I am pretty sure, my 18th-century ancestors would not have been willing to pursue the slave trade in face of 20th-century weaponry.  Also, the Wakandans could have blown up the Woman King.  For that matter why aren’t they ending the slave trade now?

Stop pretending they gave a fuck about anyone else in Africa because clearly, they didn’t.

As for it being representational, I went with my friend Joe Madrigal and laughingly asked him about the representation.  “Do you feel seen now, dude?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t, asshole, I’m brown, not BLUE! How did you talk me into seeing this shitty thing?!”

***SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT***

Although, I can’t imagine any of the Darklings going to see this monstrosity.

Not voluntarily.

T’Challa dies from space cancer and the magic Black Panther flowers are all dead, so there will be no Black Panther to protect Wakanda. 

Big Sad, and it’s time for a prolonged grieving sequence, which probably does work for a lot of people who aren’t remembering that this is a Disney production and they are exploiting Chadwick Boseman’s death. A man they had written out of the franchise BEFORE Disney knew he was dying of real cancer.  They don’t care about people who cared about the character, or more especially the family of Chadwick Boseman, they just want to extract money in the most cynical and hypocritical way possible.  

By exploiting his real-life death while turning this sequel into a movie that is the complete opposite of Black Panther.

The original film made $1.3 billion.  Marvel films were routinely cracking a billion in those days, so the first billion was no real surprise.  But that extra $300 million and the extraordinary merchandise sales were all due to one thing, a movie that portrayed Black Fatherhood in a very positive light.  Black Panther was honestly, mediocre Marvel, and the effects were amateurish but there was a heart to that movie and it was all about the relationship between fathers and sons. Black men who were trying to be role models to the boys in their life repeatedly took them to see this movie.  They were the ones who emptied the toy shelves. No drugs, no exaltation of criminals, no whippings, no handouts from guilty whites.  It was likely an accident, but Marvel made a film for black men.

This ain’t that.  This was not about fathers and sons.  It wasn’t even about women having to survive when they lose their men.  It was yet another movie about the Feminist Heroine’s Journey. Somewhere along the line, straight black men became the white men of black men.

This was about the filthiest bait and switch Woke Marvel could manage.

And it is indeed a product of Woke Marvel, with lots of preaching in the markets that will tolerate it.  There is a lesbian guard that is in this just enough to make her presence felt but is easily snipped out for Muslim countries. 

Which she was.

Okay, getting back to the movie.  There was an attack by mercenaries on the Wakanda Outreach station in Mali.  I know enough about Mali to roll my eyes in disgust at the virtue signaling.  

The attack failed and the mercs were captured.  They wanted Vibranium. T’Challa’s mother drags them to the UN so she can tell them to do better.  The mercs are all white men and they all literally kneel to Slay Queen. She informs the UN that she is canceling all Virbranium shipments.

Gearshift! There is a ship that is using a Vibranium Detector and they just found the motherload.  Then the Sea-Mayans kill them.  This will be the scene that shows up the most on YouTube.  You could actually say it was good. The Sea-Mayans are blue because… I really don’t know why. Sure, the Atlantians were blue in the comic books, but these ain’t them. I don’t know why they did it other than to mock the actual Marvel fans in a fit of vicious cruelty. “Look what you won’t be getting, assholes!”

The Queen returns to Wakanda and why do they still have the silly disguise field running?  The entire world now knows what and where Wakanda is.  Are they waiting for an update patch?

Stuff happens.

Shuri and her mother walk and talk for a bit until they run into Na-Morrrrrrrr. He says that’s what his enemies call him, but Woke Marvel forgot to provide him with any.  

Truth be said, what Na-morrrr wants isn’t unreasonable.  Up until very recently, Vibranium was thought by everyone to be the rarest substance on Earth.  Nobody went looking for it because there was no point.  It was kind of a scientific blind spot.   But then T’Challa revealed that Wakanda had a fuck-ton of the stuff.  If there was that much in one spot, maybe there was that much in another. Suddenly Vibranium was worth looking for again.

And the surface-dwellers found it at Mayan Atlantis.  Namor wants an alliance with Wakanda because, duh, they are the ones who gave him this headache in the first place.  

Not going into details but the way it was presented, Namor’s proposal is reasonable and mutually beneficial. Wakanda probably should accept the deal.  The Queen refuses so the movie can happen.  Let me stress that she has no reason to turn him down.

I strongly suspect there was another version of this scene in the original script, and that Victoria Alonso couldn’t look at it without screaming in Woke Feminist hysteria.  

The Queen’s refusal only makes sense if Namor was demanding Shuri’s hand in marriage to seal the deal. 

So far as feminists are concerned that would just take too much agency away from Shuri to even have that plot point on the table.

Anyway, the long-ass movie has begun.

Plan A was an alliance and that is now off the table.  Okay, on to plan B.  Mayan Atlantis will declare war on Wakanda if they don’t immediately take care of the inventor of Vibranium.  

And the inventor is Shuri!

Oh, wait. No, it isn’t.  It’s Riri Williams.  How could I confuse the two of them?  Possibly because their only defining characteristics are being young black super geniuses.  Seriously, there is no real difference between the two characters.  

Riri is an empowered young black woman in a horrible kind of way. When we meet her, she is doing the homework for rich kids and charging them extra if they are a day late or white men. The character is so obnoxious that the bald Wakandan woman has to tell the audience, “I like her” despite the fact that she has done nothing to make herself likable. 

Riri Williams is the new Ironman.  She was introduced in Marvel Comics seven years ago as a deliberate subversion of Tony Stark.  She was roundly rejected by comics fans but the purpose of her comic book was to introduce her so she could fail upward.  Mission accomplished.

Riri is the world’s smartest genius unless that’s Shuri.  

She can invent anything, although that isn’t really how genius works.  Full-grown products of decades-long research and development don’t pop out of anyone’s head after a one-minute montage.  I know this is a comic book movie, so I have to let that slide but it’s still bullshit.

Skipping ahead, the Sea-Mayans kidnap the girls and take them to Mayan Atlantis, so Namor can begin his unbelievably long exposition dump.  We get an origin story that begins when his mother is pregnant and I’m not joking.  We find out that the Sea-Mayans used to be regular Mayans until smallpox came to town.  They took some kind of flower drug like the Black Panthers take and turned into the blue Sea Mayans.  Since Namor’s mom was knocked up he became a half-child mutant or something so that he would always have a foot in both worlds but belong to neither, almost (but not really), like the real Namor.  Was she the only pregnant woman in town? I don’t know.  I was getting more beer at that point.

This incredibly boring biography had one purpose, for Namor to give Shuri his Mom’s necklace that has magic seed MacGuffins that will let Shuri 3d print Black Panther Flowers.

Again, going back to what I think was in the original script.  This would have been the point when he was romancing Shuri.  Sadly, Shuri is now a feminist heroine and will never have children or a man.  She might have a lesbian relationship with Riri but they didn’t make it clear if that was happening yet.  

My money says, yes.  It’s irresistible to Woke Marvel.  

I’ve sacrificed my daily word count on this unholy alter so I’m going to wrap this up fast.

The Wakandan women’s army, (you know the one with no men in it because they all walked out for a 40 and never came back) //cut joke buechler used it// launches a rescue mission and prevents Shuri from saving a Sea-Mayan whose name I can’t remember.  Namor is Big Mad over this and attacks Wakanda.  The Wakandans fight them off but the Queen is killed.

Shuri is now the woman king but without the gross slavery baggage.  She uses the MacGuffin necklace to make herself Black Panther.  After two and a half hours in this Black Panther movie, there is finally a scene with Black Panther. The Wakandans attack the Sea-Mayans, so Shuri can have her big fight scene with her Ex.  It was ludicrous. At one point Shuri literally gets a spear driven all the way through her abdomen, shrugs it off, and then she does a backflip to show how tough women are.  The strong brown man literally gets his wings clipped. The fight ends, peace is made and the movie is over.

In the mid-credits, it turns out that T’Challa has a son. 

Who will never be raised by his father.  

Yeah, I left out a lot. I don’t care anymore.

The misandry in this film is breathtaking.  ALL of the men in this movie are strawmen. Wakanda Forever is drenched in Marvel Morality. What do I mean by Marvel Morality?  It appears to be that radical off shoot of Bakuninism that dictates, “that which aids the Revolution is moral and that which hinders it is immoral.”  Although Marvel Morality goes, “those who are protected by the Woke are always moral, those who are white men are always immoral.” Seriously, these people have a moral compass that points to pre-schooler magnets. We got our first big dose of Marvel Morality in WandaVision when it became clear that no matter what Wanda did, she wasn’t in the wrong.

No matter what the Wakandans do, they were never in the wrong. Even if they were.

My rule for Does Not Recommend has always been, “there is no reason to see this movie.”  That is not quite the case here.  Angela Basset delivered big time, she earned her paycheck but it just isn’t enough. There are little spots of light in this deep pit of darkness but due to the ungodly run time, they are buried. Especially as this unjustifiable length is all filler to pad the runtime of the movie.  The only reason to do this is to try and get the Academy to look at this thing as something serious.  Kevin Feige is on an Oscar hunt.  

I can’t say he won’t get it, but I will say the Academy will feel dirty giving it to him.

What I can’t give it, is any kind of credit for trying because they didn’t.  It was a perfect example of paint numbers Woke garbage.  

The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend