Wakanda Forever - It's a Terrible Mess

so here we are folks the end of phase four of the MCU and what a phase it's been if you were to ask me to list my favorite moments from the last 16 releases I'd have to say um so anyway my channel being only a year old I wasn't around for the last black panther film and so I missed that chance to be called a racist for not liking a badly written piece of garbage portraying an isolated African tribe as a bunch of spear chucking loincloth wearing monkey noise making Savages who structured their society around pre-modern ideals of governance like having Kings kick their challenges off waterfalls and whose only route toward modernity came from the fortuitous Landing in their territory of a magical meteor containing a metal so hard that their Stone Age tools couldn't possibly have put a dent in it yeah you did hear that right you are a racist for not liking a portrayal of black people as spear chucking monkey noise making loincloth wearing militaristic Savages because the fact that we finally got to see a bunch of spear chucking monkey noise making lioncloth wearing militaristic Savages leading a major Hollywood film made the original black panther a cultural moment and if you aren't on board with cultural moments you are a racist that's how the the world worked in 2018 and not much has changed since if you dared suggest that in fact patronizing a whole Rich continent of people in order to satisfy the segregationist wish fulfillment fantasies of African-American intellectuals and their white Lefty Sims might not be a good use of the medium of film you were also a racist point out that the entirety of human history shows that the most isolated peoples of the most backward regardless of what natural resources exist below their feet because they don't have the knowledge to make use of them yeah yeah that was a pretty racist thing as well my dude you should probably take a long hard look in the mirror and ask why you're so opposed to black people having their cultural moments you evil racist bastard you wakanda is a progressive Beacon because while the entire continent was suffering multiple AIDS malaria hunger and drought crises they all stood around telling themselves how pure they were while doing precisely [ __ ] all to help anyone and if you pointed out that you cannot simultaneously believe wakanda's exclusively black population should be championed while while also holding to the theory that diversity is our strength well you get the idea happily for me though we have a black panther 2 now out at the cinema and it turns out that you don't even have to make criticisms of this film to be considered a racist at least according to this fine specimen of humanity if you're white and you go and see the film that makes you a racist if you really want to prove to black people that you love us and you care about us and you are down for the cause do not go see that movie opening weekend you buy your ticket you give it to a black person or a black family who can't afford to go and then you go sit at that theater in front of the doors you make sure that every black person in that theater can enjoy that movie in peace you make sure that you use your body to block us from anybody who would be coming in that theater to do us harm that is your job you can go see it on another weekend go see it on the second or third weekend but the first weekend that's for us to do anything other than this is anti-black awkwardly white people not going to see minority-led films is also evidence of racism and so I guess you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't I'm a racist because a whole swath of society has decided that it is literally impossible not to be a racist making the term entirely meaningless this is a review of black panther 2 wakandan Boogaloo and There Will Be Blood and also spoilers if you want fewer spoilers I did a much shorter review over on my second channel the link for that is in the description I will now give you an appropriate and generous amount of time to go away so the film begins with Shiri frantically trying to do some wakanda signs to save t'challa who is dying off-screen because Chadwick Boseman is dead remember the film is almost certainly going to play on this a lot and you might be thinking well rightly so a talented young actor taken from us when he had so much to offer the world and if that were all it was you would be absolutely right to think that except that if I'm right and the film is going to turn a dead guy into marketing fertilizer you would also be correct in thinking this a little bit exploitative which given it comes from a studio that happily airbrushes black characters out of Marketing material whenever it's trying to fellate the Chinese market in turn for sweet sweet Yen and also a studio that turned that same much Miss dead guy's Twitter account into a zombie shell for its latest products well that's a theory with a bouquet of evidence to support it if you are going to base a film of the tragic real-life death of a talented actor then the only way to avoid the charge that you are monetizing cancer is to make it a very good very heartfelt very meaningful film I'm not ruling out the prospect at this juncture I'm just going to note that Thor love and thunder also had the rich tragedy of cancer in its setup and it used that to create um well for love and thunder shuri shouts science stuff at the computer that's a tongue twister try saying it quickly and the computer gives us small odds of success she appears to be attempting to synthesize some version of the magical [ __ ] goop flower that killmonger burned in the first film because this will save the charter anyway she's not having much luck and then someone from house valarian turns up to inform her that her brother is with the ancestors now and we cut to avocandon funeral is this the right moment to broach the question of recasting well [ __ ] it why not the obvious thing to do would have been to dedicate the film to Bozeman and perhaps then repurpose the usual Marvel intro to depict his life and his talents much as they did when Stan Lee died and then in that tradition comic books have and have had forever recast the role and proceed with the story it being the obvious decision doesn't make it the right one however you would lose the value of inheritance the opinions of the taking up of mantles both of which used properly are rich material in drafting character and motive I'm sympathetic to the argument that the focus shouldn't be on the man but rather on the character and the symbol and the story and so making a film so heavily reliant on his death is to miss the grander point of the continuous narrative but I'm not devoted to that position I think you can marry the two positions and use inheritance to emphasize stakes and story and actually do a better job again though the burden is on the writers to actually do a better job and well we'll come to that the funeral is what I would describe as African kitch much as with a great many of the Traditions depicted in the first film I believe some research did go into the portrayal of African rituals particularly for that first film but it doesn't quite escape the label of catch because simply borrowing the most African looking or African feeling of rituals still amounts to an attempt by the filmmakers to capture african-ness as its primarily American audience understands it and this is the audience that tried for a while to tell us that Kwanzaa was a sincere expression of African roots and that not speaking English properly was being faithful to the ancestors you know I I someone saying it's like it's like being a mosquito in a nudist colony you don't know where to start what's up I sometimes wonder whether Africans are as embarrassed by African Americans as the English are by white Americans or the Irish are whenever Americans claim to be Irish the wakandan funeral gives us the whole Smorgasbord of African myths drums dances tribal songs and makeup now you might want to sit down for this because it's going to come as a shark I am not myself African so I can't say too much about the authenticity of the get-ups except to say that just borrowing random bits of culture from various real-life tribes and cultures is not of itself authentic and I would be pleasantly surprised to learn that that is not what's going on here much of this sequence is shot in slow-mo which if they keep it up will go somewhere toward explaining why this film clocks in at two and a half hours slow-mo drums slow-mo procession slow-mo's Smiley and happy people dancing it's it's a funeral guys you might have you might have guessed that from the coffin all the dancers are cheerful and chipper all the people in the procession itself are somber and downcast is that an African tradition I I don't know we also get a long lingering shot on a poster of t'challa in case he was still wondering how much emphasis was going to be placed on Bozeman's death in this film the Black Panther helmet is being carried behind the coffin and then we get a flyby by the Camden spaceships which again forces us to ask how and why this is such a technologically materially and scientifically bifurcated Society okay well maybe not why it's quite clear these films want us to take home that pre-modern culture and tradition can survive modernity pretty well intact which is the kind of [ __ ] you can only believe in if you are yourself a poor foolish disciple of post-modernity but but we still have a film to review so we'll just brush that aside the film wants us to feel very sad about all this and it goes some way toward achieving it even if it falls flat for its self-indulgent longevity but it does rather sacrifice the effect when it has the coffin beamed up by one of the spaceships which kind of makes you wonder whether we'll get a black panther 3 The Search for Spock I mean the search with the Charlo one day one final observation on this aspect of the film because I don't recall seeing it remarked upon elsewhere this is not the first time in Universe the child has been for most intents and purposes dead he was Thanos snapped out of existence in Infinity war and until the Hulk snapped everyone back into existence those who were gone were presumed to be gone forever and they should have colored the Charter's funeral in wakanda forever we all get and understand the trauma of death of losing loved ones very few of us have ever had to lose the same loved one twice while it's forgivable that wakanda forever should devote so much time exclusively to mourning it does also need to exist as a film in its own right telling and continuing a story and to make itself a part of its grander universe that it hasn't done that is not a unique feeling we were told way back when that phase four was all about dealing with the Fallout from the blip yet with the exceptions of the Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Spider-Man phase 4 has been spectacularly disinterested in the consequences of the blip in fact we seem to have moved on as though it had never occurred wakanda forever if it were interested in a broader exploration of grief as opposed to merely tacking on a funeral to a generic Marvel movie would have taken this opportunity to ask or present interesting questions about the nature of grief to look look at the difference between suspected and known loss to examine how the experience of the blip impacted their experience after Charlie's death perhaps suggesting that the loss of an immediate friend and loved one somehow outmatches the loss of billions of nameless faces in its pain and its poignance and then dealing with the grief and perhaps even the guilt that would stem from such a conclusion but this is phase four of the MCU so nah [ __ ] it we have to make whales fight UFOs so on with the plot we do then indeed get the Chadwick devoted opening titles meaning everything I've said thus far has been critiquing a pre-credit scene better brace yourself then folks I think this might be a long one we Flash Forward a year later when the queen of wakanda raimonda mother of the Charla and shuri has been summoned to a United Nations session where some boilerplate white bureaucrat upgrades of her wakanda's failure to share resources and to cooperate with the wider world as it had promised it would do at the close of the first film gee I wonder if we're going to get lessons on Whitey hypocrisy well not immediately at least though remonda does explain that wakanda doesn't share vibranium not because of its dangerous potential but because of and I quote the dangerous potential of you how is she Queen exactly don't lines of succession typically go either downward or laterally the child had no kids that we know of so wouldn't the title of automatically gone to shuri rather than back up to his mother regardless who it went to at what point can the writer succession by combat be invoked if killmonger had waited just a few years could he have become king just by kicking either an old woman or a small girl off a waterfall does anything about wakanda makes sense well no but it's a very Advanced very civilized and in always superior place so who cares we then cut to the Outreach Center opened by t'challa at the end of the first film so I guess this one deserves props for not simply forgetting its existence though and I might be wrong here it wasn't a very memorable film but wasn't part of the point and purpose of that Center to share wakandan resources with the world did that not include vibranium if not then what precisely could wakanda have shared by by the center given how much of its technology is based around vibranium if it did include vibranium how could they possibly have controlled its usage given a little bit of it in the wrong hands made Ultron and yet how is it not already in circulation given Gollum went in and out on a whim stealing things and selling them on and then if they refused to share it and they can't sell it because their technology is derived from it what can they sell how can they help how can they afford the cost of helping the wider world and if they were selling it at what point would they have run out given any asteroid made of so harder metal insufficient quantities to provide near endless product would probably have wiped out the Earth on impact it's almost as if wakanda makes no [ __ ] sense we then flip back and forth between a military raid onset Outreach Center and queen raimonda scolding the United Nations for wanting to use the chala's death as an excuse to exploit wakanda against its will she even mentions that she knows Rumors in their military establishments which leaves you wondering if you knew you couldn't trust the various nations of the world not to invade and steal your magical [ __ ] metal why would you leave your Outreach Center open to attack in the first place ah but then you see it was all the ruse it turns out the center is protected by by the um the door Dora Mill the door of the explorers and his Queen he tells the UN now is our time to strike the Explorers Julie do their striking Michonne from The Walking Dead has a chat with discount Michonne while they go about slicing through the soldiers criticizing her for not having brought her spear with her this count Michonne tells Michonne that she prefers her laser daggers that shuri gave her because she just does whereupon Michonne Channel shot and giving a passionate argument for why sticks are better than guns and knives he got stick good on him okay Sometimes some distance later the door of the Explorers bring the evil Whitey soldiers that they didn't slice into pieces into the United Nations chamber I guess it's just been in permanent sitting for the entire duration of their trip in order that remondo can threaten the United Nations with war if they try that Shifty [ __ ] again we then jump away to the Atlantic Ocean where a ship sends some submarine scientists down to the ocean floor to inspect a drill that has um it's found some vibranium they have a vibranium detecting Machine lead scientists one pointedly says it's the only one we've got which I'm sure will be very relevant later but you might be thinking hold on a minute I thought the world's sole source of vibranium was the wakandan meteor now you're telling me there's more of it how much more of it where how to begin with if it's under the water why hasn't James Cameron found it already how did they build a machine capable of locating it who built a machine capable of locating it why is there only one such machine how given the vibranium wrecks the drill bit on their very advanced piece of Machinery did the first bookandons managed to mine it with Stone Age tools by the way if you were about to answer any of these questions with well it's in the comics no [ __ ] off and go away the MCU and the comics Universe are not the same thing the comics are far from a reliable guide anyway as we are about to see these quests questions and their consequences will have to be accounted for by the MCU preferably in this film they have significant connotations some of which we will come on to in a moment otherwise though we've just invented another source of vibranium and a random one-off contrivance machine solely as an excuse for the plot to happen and we will come back to that in a moment as well for now one of the underwater scientists gets distracted by a pretty jellyfish and so misses that her colleague has just been torn off his Lifeline by some unseen foe then she gets killed off screen above the waterline just just bear with me here and remember that this film is a sincere and heartfelt tribute to a much loved and dead actor some Aztec mermaids appear and sing the guards on the ship into committing suicide though their song courteously holds off having its full effect long enough for main scientist women and chief CIA man it's a CIA Ship by the way to put in earplugs now as usual I'm going to try and make sure to complement the film where it deserves compliments and this scene does eerie well enough it feels sinisterly enchanting largely through its sound design and its lighting it's quite well shut mermaids tricking Sailors with song is quite a long established characteristic Aztecs doing it though ah not a thing as far as I'm aware why am I calling them Aztec mermaids well because Neymar the villain of this piece to whom we are shortly to be introduced has been race swapped we need you to act like a middle eastern terrorist right away there's just one problem I don't look Middle Eastern hahaha leave that to us even the atlanteans aren't safe from the race swappers though the motive in this case would appear to be that Marvel feared an Atlantean villain would Clash too much with Aquaman this at least has been cited by shilrant I mean Screen Rant as a primary reason why the Race and History swap was a good idea though I can't help but note that if we're now in the position where Marvel is looking so fearfully over its shoulder at what DC is doing it's because the quality Chasm between these two Studios has decreased rapidly in the last few years and DC has not got very much better in that time which should tell you all you need to know about the MC's phase-long nosedive anyway the merman attacked the ship and head scientist women calls in a Strike Team she and chief CIA guy run away and get accosted by the merman whose physical design isn't quite up to the sound design of their song The shark-like headpie is one of them wears puts one in mind of the flying Dutchman's crew in Pirates of the Caribbean otherwise they're blue that's their most distinctive characteristic she shoots at one of them and by that I mean she she really does shoot at him she shoots at him a lot as in she basically empties a magazine at him or would have if her pistol didn't have unlimited ammo she Fires at any rate a good number of rounds and he doesn't die armor you might think well no no no he's not really wearing very much of that Bulletproof Skin then no no it's it's not that either because as she runs to the chopper she shoots a number of them and they do indeed at least seem to die meaning the one she was closest to the one standing still right in front of not more than a few feet away got hit seven eight or even nine times conveniently in his little piece of armor while all the rest of them were unlucky enough to get hit in the 85 Plus of their body that wasn't covered by armor meaning essentially that she was aiming for the one plays guaranteed not to kill him and he looked quite an important guy meaning her failure to kill him could end up being very important indeed she makes it to the chopper which takes off kind of Lucky the pilot had just been sitting there for hours with his headphones on otherwise he'd have got tricked into the sea by the merman she gets on the radio and informs someone that the merman Aunt were Camden's because well because they're blue seems a bit racist are you saying blue people can't be wakandans but I thought diversity is our strength incidentally this will not be the only film featuring water-based indigenous blue people to release between now and Christmas wakanda forever vines with avatar the Last Smurf Bender for an award nobody knew existed Best Supporting Smurf on screen the nominees are this guy and and and this guy I don't I don't know either of their names and I don't care the helicopter flies off but the merman used some kind of magical power that makes the helicopter crash the camera pans away and we see one of the merman flying how very mysterious back to wakanda which we know before we see it because we get an African man shouting music at us and romondo Valerian and Michonne fly through the cloaking Shield which for some reason is now controlled by a wakandan drumming a tray full of water are you serious it's it's almost as if wakanda makes no [ __ ] sense have they reactivated the cloaking device since the child had promised wakanda would reveal itself to the world like they withheld resources and cooperation after he promised to open his country up to the global society and then had a [ __ ] when people pointed out that they weren't upholding their trade agreements well I guess they must have and I suppose well you might be able to make the cloaking device make sense given they now fear attack from the outside world again Shiri is doing more science she's designing new EXO suits for the wakandan Army evidently she's finally decided that magical cloaks and Spears might not befit the army of a hyper-advanced civilization that aspires to the title of and indeed calls itself the most powerful Nation on Earth Queen Ramon that doesn't like Sherry's AI she says it might wake up and take over the world but shuri explains that AI isn't like it is in the movies except well I mean she knows it is she must know that it is because that's exactly what happened with [ __ ] Ultron and she doesn't have the excuse of ignorance because it's well established that wakanda has excellent intelligent services and has long known what goes on beyond the boundaries of its Magical Kingdom this isn't a small thing it's not a tiny technical matter it would be mildly irritating for an MCU film to discard a minor development in a previous story but we now seem to have reached the point where characters have entirely forgotten the events of the main Avengers films which suggests lazy ass writing if nothing else shuri doesn't want the mantle of black panther she explains that she thinks it's a relic that said given she was intimately involved in making and updating the suit and given she still sees the value in suits otherwise she'd not now be making them for the Army you might think that she of all people would see the utility in the mantle or at least the trappings of the mantle this by the way isn't a bad Trope by any means they would seem to be establishing her as The Reluctant superhero it's been done many times but it's been done many times for a reason it can form an important part of the hero's journey the usual difficulty is in keeping it fresh wakanda forever has gone some way toward achieving that through its setup because it's a device bound up in the death of her brother and her failure in curing him of whatever condition he had in Universe the problem here is largely a practical one shuri is as mentioned one of the people most likely to see the utility of the Black Panther and certainly of the suit it's not quite enough for her to Simply say the mantle is a relic to make it a chord with the character they've actually written their would or their will we've still got a ways to go yet maybe they'll do this but they would or will have to be a more pronounced aversion to that suit in particular as the emblem of the mantle which would be relatively easy to establish and also quite effective necessary even in order to ground her objection to something of massive technological potential in her character rather than Beyond it the film wants to tell us that she has no time for tradition it does not want to tell us that she has no time for technology in rejecting the Black Panther suit she is rejecting technology whereas if it would simply tradition she was opposed to she shouldn't have a problem taking the suit and divorcing it from the traditional mantle in order to square this circle then you would need to tie tradition and Technology together in her own mind we don't get that approach in this scene alas because we then cut away to night time where she and queen raimonda are sitting outside in the bush by a campfire watching the elephants they have a long conversation about the Chala uh he's dead remember you might not have picked up on that yet and queen ramonda Valerian first of her name talks about a ritual she used to meet to Charter again something again that shuri rejects on the grounds that she doesn't like tradition this is another piece of The Reluctant superhero Trope being put into place but I can't help but think that this might have been the moment to explore that aspect of her character described above how tradition technology and her memory and sadness at the loss of her brother all linked together that is certainly what the film wants to convey I'm just not sure it's conveyed it particularly well at this stage Queen ramonda's ritual involves sitting and looking at the fire and burning some ritual clothes shuri delivers a fairly well crafted but somehow slightly uncanny line she says that if she sits and looks at the fire too long it won't just be the ritual clothes she Burns it'll be the world um well it's a powerful line but I think the film risks being a bit presumptuous it's basing an awful lot the entirety even of its emotional force in the death of a real world actor channeled through the in-universe death of a character the real world death of the actor is of course a tragic thing but these two worlds are separate it's not easy to bleed one into the other I'd be willing to bet a large number of the real world audience registered Bozeman's death but didn't feel it as any kind of familial loss it was a sad thing that did happen for the cast and the right as it evidently was a deep loss indeed but you can't perfectly transpose the person the loss of people who knew and worked with Bozeman into the audience's response to the death of a character off-screen Black Panther the character was as I said in the video on my other channel cool enough he had his moments to people who bought into the first film's cultural moment and who did see him as an icon well yeah sure the character's death would have a more than usual impact but we are still forced to remember that in the grander context the Black Panther was a late arrival with a sole dedicated film that had quite particular appeal and without a huge amount of consequential screen action or time to engage in the relationships we're here being asked to inhabit so sure on an intellectual level the audience member can understand the reactions of these characters but the film seems not so much Keen that we feel everything they feel but rather to just assume that we do only if that assumption is correct can we really invest in scenes like this or make sense of lines that sound so drastic as shuries about burning the world and with all respect to the late actor his friends and his colleagues I'm really not sure that our own relationship with the character is strong enough for the film's desired emotional way to impact us as the film wanted to the sense of loss of an absence in the universe that followed Tony Stark's sacrifice and it didn't need screenwriters dialing the emotion meter up to 11 to emphasize the point because as the best established and generally best-loved character the franchise totem his absence spoke for itself the child is dozen to the same extent or in the same way in any event this is a Marvel film and even the lament can't be allowed to go on too long without being interrupted by stuff so we get a weird noise and a scared elephant and then we're introduced to Neymar who floats out of the water on little winged shoes or those wings no their wings from his ankles he has little white Wings on his ankles much has been made of Neymar's race swapping and the race swapping of his people and we might come back to that presently for now I have to point out that a not a specially shapely man of not ever so imposing height played by a not all that intense actor who emerges from the water wearing a green nappy with little white Wings on his ankles doesn't make for a particularly imposing Villain at all curiously and as we'll see later he appears to have worn the green nappy since he was a child absolutely no change in outfit at all over the course of several centuries he's probably got Barnacles on his balls Neymar wants wakanda's help because the childhood revealed vibranium to the world even though Queen Ramada said earlier that they weren't sharing it with the world and that they're the American scientists to develop the machine that detected vibranium beneath his people's domain remondo says vibranium only exists in wakanda but shuri points out that he's wearing it so nah this of course doesn't answer any of the questions I posed earlier it simply invites us to ask them again how where why with the additional question how is Neymar here how did he find wakanda given the film has shown us that it still cloaks itself even though t'challa said that it wouldn't how did he get through its magical [ __ ] security field is that why the film randomly decided to have its cloaking device controlled by banging a tray of water just so this Aztec mermaid could float through it uninterrupted because water also how did he float up to precisely this spot precisely this time to find remonda and shuri preparing to Ritual trip what if he turned up a mile away or an hour ago anyway he asked for their help in finding the American scientist who made the machine given this film setup was that ramonda in particular is Keen the vibranium not get out into the wider world you would think this point of acute the important shared interest would well interest her but instead she just has a [ __ ] about him turning up uninvited so he threatens to invade with his massive armies now look I know we're all pretty much deaf to this kind of thing by now because we're so used to it but this is not how people speak this is not how people interact this is especially not how people speak or interact if the premise of your film actually makes cooperation between these two peoples the most plausible thing to do the goal is clearly to get Atlantis I mean the Aztecs and the wakandans fighting but if that's your goal you either set up the film with the direct line to that point or else you take care to work from the existing premise to that conclusion Simply Having freaky fish guy here pop up in the middle of the night and threatened to invade because the wakandan stupidly refused to listen when he outlined their shared concern well that's just contrived it's the least plausible of all possible outcomes to their brief exchange except insofar as it's the most convenient one for the writers to take in which case it only makes sense if you assume that the writers are [ __ ] that is a safe assumption but it's not really one we should have to make having threatened to invade them Neymar then gives them a seashell and tells them to blow into it when they have the scientist he asks them not to tell anyone outside wakanda about him and then he leaves though when they turn around they find that a great big old CIA machine is just sitting on the beach next to them I mean how did they not notice can he use telekinesis as well as live underwater and fly about on his winged boots or precisely is his power set I hesitate to say it but they had no reason to fear people confusing Neymar with Aquaman Aquaman actual Aquaman makes more sense than this character and that's really saying something because Aquaman quite proudly made very little sense in any case Neymar seems like a very dodgy plan not only do these people not like you but the CIA also knows exactly where their ship and helicopter went down combine the wakandan's knowledge of you and the cia's knowledge of the location of that vibranium and the entire vibranium-hungry world knows who you are where you are and what you have not to mention the fact that if your goal is to have science girl kidnapped in order that you can remain hidden invading a powerful Sovereign Nation that is at the center of the world's attention is probably the most counterproductive thing you could threaten to do since that kind of thing is liable to be noticed anyway it's worth taking note at this point a note about Neymar's goals intentions and methods intention remain hidden goal remain hidden method kidnap science girl it's worth noting this down now because the film will change this up several times over how the next however the [ __ ] long and it will not acknowledge it once the day or morning after Queen ramonda calls the council where embaku and Michonne trade insults and then everyone has a perfunctory debate about what to do I quite like umbaku by the way he's characterful and he's humorous and his humor actually befits his character unlike the cotton Pace Joker minute style of most MCU entries he also refers to Neymar as fish man which is a name I'm basically using already and he calls Michonne a bald-headed demon which is also quite funny they all seem to take freaky fish guy's word about his massive armies but mbaku betrayed as a bit simple and bone-headed nonetheless asks the most pertinent question if they do what freaky fish guy asks what would stop him coming back and asking for more but we don't get an answer to that yet because we're back in the science lab where Michonne and raimonda find shuri playing about with the CIA machine which she confirms does indeed work it can detect vibranium Michonne raises the how is their more vibranium question again sure he reasons that there was probably just another vibranium meteor that landed in the sea um no that that no that still doesn't really answer most of the important questions and in fact it invites yet another one how many vibranium meteors are out there in the galaxy is the asteroid belt just full of them how many have crashed on Earth over the years if it's multiple the odds of it remaining undiscovered shrink have they landed anywhere else does anywhere else in the Galaxy now have access to vibranium this planet now has ready access to space and apparently a device capable of detecting vibranium if it's just floating around out in the asteroid belt what's to stop someone building another device remember though for plot convenient reasons there's only one of them at the moment and Mining some off Planet vibranium proliferation has profound consequences for the Galaxy for this planet and especially for the wakandans the film is ever so slightly aware of the consequences for the wakandans but it doesn't really seem to have truly appreciated their extent this affects the entire existence of wakanda the only thing they have to their name the only thing that makes them notable at all to the rest of the world well besides Rhino milk obviously if vibranium is found elsewhere they are completely and utterly [ __ ] as a nation and yet at the moment the only question it even occasionally occurs to someone to ask is wait how have we just destroyed the setup to the first one oh no I mean sorry wait tell me again how there can be more vibranium Michonne just moans that the Fable she heard as a kid might now be incorrect I think there are more important things at stake Michonne and shuri then bugger off to meet Bilbo Baggins with remonda's permission shuries favorite colonizer [ __ ] please if you've been colonized you would not be sticking vibranium in [ __ ] Spears Michonne tells Bilbo that they're looking for the scientist who've built the vibranium detector assuming from the off that he would know which leads him to say that it was the wakandans in the Atlantic was it they deny wakandan involvement of course they have an argument with Bilbo and Bilbo tells them that there's only one kid in the world capable of building the vibranium scanner thingymy which the CIA presumably just stole while leaving its inventor free and unguarded so Michonne and shuri go off to kidnap a girl from school they have an argument about who is best placed to infiltrate the school and kidnap said child because for all their complaints about colonizers and Whitey pillaging ancestral African homes the door of the Explorers are basically the CIA with less oversight jurisdiction finds themselves which makes wakanda a [ __ ] terrifying Prospect for people of all places and Nations honestly at this point would you bet against the door of the Explorers drone striking American weddings and it'd be fine though because black power because bitey did it because America's no better because drone strikes the voice of the unheard because colonialism because imperialism the leap is expedient sure he looks like a child sounds like a child dresses like a child and basically is a child so she's the one who gets to infiltrate the school she immediately knows where child's dorm room is and child immediately recognizes her as Princess of wakanda meaning I'm once again compelled to ask just what wakanda's relationship with the rest of the world is it opened up in the last film except that it was closed again at the beginning of this one it remains highly secretive yet its minor royalty are immediately recognizable to American teenagers it doesn't trust the rest of the world yet it happily sends its secret agents to carry out often violent missions and in this case abductions in in the rest of the world it is simultaneously the last and only underspoiled African Paradise yet it is also incredibly limited and at the same time Unlimited in its International agency it's almost as if wakanda makes no [ __ ] sense it turns out schoolgirl whose name is free Williams didn't make the detector for the CIA she just made it for a school project her professor said she'd never be able to do it and if this film had any regard for internal consistency the professor would have been right how can you make a vibranium detector without access to vibranium against which to test it how does this school even know what vibranium is given the wakandans don't share it and don't like talking about it how does this school girl know the first thing about the properties the machine is supposed to be detecting but it's fine because she says she is gifted and black you [ __ ] go girl you slay Queen we was science Majors Etc Sherry explains that the school is no longer safe for her which given Bilbo was talking about other nations taking an interest in her should also have been the cia's conclusion some time ago so why is she still in school why did the CIA presumably raid the science lab to pinch the school project but not conscript the person who built it they must have known about her her talents and her potential otherwise why would they have stolen the machine she built they know how important the machine is and how unique she is and therefore how valuable she is these [ __ ] waterboarded random goat herders for years because their last name sounded vaguely Muslim are you telling me they wouldn't have gone all I'm going to extraordinarily rendition your ass given the girl is both a national security risk and an incredibly valuable asset that they could have used to create more vibranium detectors well whatever apparently the CIA have more regard for child welfare and territorial Integrity than the wakandans so they just left her in school so now the wakanda get to Napa instead she goes to the bathroom in a fairly transparent attempt to escape but Michonne strolls out stops her and so she starts throwing crap at them in a segment the studio thought funny enough to pre-release it's not especially funny the acting is a little bit cringe but it has one redeeming moment Sherry deploys reverse psychology and tells Michonne that Riri Williams can definitely handle that merman with the winged ankles who wants to kill her and riri's response is a disbelieving which is yeah that's basically my response to the part of this film well done Riri you're you're connecting with your audience incidentally the film does what a huge number of disproportionately Marvel films do in telegraphing Allegiance you and I know that the wakandans are the good guy and will actually know you and I know there are a bunch of supremacist shits but we know the film thinks they're the good guys we also know that Riri Williams here is supposed to be a good guy and because we know that all these people are good the film skips over them actually discovering that about each other as Williams goes from being threatened by Michonne to threatening to throw something at Michonne to slagging off Michonne's non-existent haircut which is played for laughs yeah I mean it's an MCU film yeah sure okay fine we have to get that joke quota in but this kind of telegraphing this filling in the character's lack of knowledge with the audience's foreknowledge just great oh my God you're gonna kidnap me LOL you have no hair let's be friends is not good character writing characters have to build relationships crucially they have to build trust this is especially true in the case of Riri Williams as she's established neither of these things yet and is but for her inexplicable recognition of shuri being faced with two factions soon to be three when the FBI shows up who want to kidnap her for unstated and possibly nefarious purposes if the film were actually interested in Williams as a character this is the most fertile ground to begin building that character but as we'll go on to see the film isn't at all interested in her as a character it just wants her in this film as a prop so they go to her garage Workshop what the film is trying to do here is Fast Track a relationship between shuri and Riri Williams by making them basically the same character or functionally the same character anyway Riri does science stuff just like shuri Riri is a computer whiz just like Sherry Riri is building Max suits just like Sherry again it's like portraits so if they rhyme shuri presciently points out that it's a bit weird to be working on this hyper-secret stuff and just leave your laptop unattended in a garage which it is if you believe that what you're doing is top secret and of interest to foreign governments which Riri supposedly doesn't having just finished telling us that she only cooked up the machine for a school project she does have some kind of Mega encryption on her laptop but that's basically it so she simultaneously acts as if she's half aware of the significance of her work when it's convenience but is otherwise a perfectly normal kid with no such understanding um all right yo then shuri's AI friend then chimes in to inform that an American law enforcement has arrived Riri is extremely miffed by this and they have a brief argument in which Michonne unironically uses the term popo to refer to the police cringe but sure he compels him to work together and get out of the pickle they are presently pickling in Riri has an old muscle car hmm muscle cars Tech wizard builds flying Mech suits I wonder who she is going to turn out to be you're right she's the Red Power Ranger we finally have Power Rangers in the MCU or is it that gay transformer nobody remembers what's that you say all Transformers are gay and Gundam is cosmically better in every conceivable way well you said it either way crossover event of the century people will rightly hail this as the best MCU film since love and thunder probably better than infinity War even who needs the X-Men when you have a gay transformer Michonne Escapes in the muscle car while Sherry takes a motorbike the CIA is tracking the chase with a drone but since Barack Obama isn't flying it no civilians get killed Riri Williams Hereafter referred to as iron child flies up takes out the Drone and then runs out of oxygen and faints putting her into a free fall remember Iron Man I remember I remember origin stories are so much easier if you can just copy paste existing material into nominally new characters she recovers at the last second and pulls out of the dive just like Tony and then her suit gives out and she crashes just like Tony but before they can get to her a water grenade lands on the road and shuri and Michonne crash well I mean I guess that's new then and you will have to to bear with me here banquility they've shown little bits of this in the trailer so so hopefully if you see it you'll believe it anyway then a troop of merman leap out of the water on the nose of a killer whale and confront Michonne I suppose this explains what one cringy shill media site described as their indigenous rage they were evidently colonized by Sea World and they've learned all the tricks an Aztec mermaid runs back to deal with the police that parked behind them the police who presumably just saw them jump out of the water riding whales the police who presumably just saw them use water grenades to blow up fleeing Vehicles the police who can clearly see that the mermaid is armed yet as she runs at them the only remark one of them thinks it worth making is hey is she blue why yes yes she is she's also armed and she just left off a [ __ ] whale she's clearly coming to kill you do you not think a policeman might have remarked upon anything else I'm reliably informed the police empty whole magazines at the backs of black people who looked at them funny but in this state apparently they just make mundane observations and wait to be killed we've already had the their blue observation earlier in the film besides making the scene vaguely and unintentionally comical just dude what the hell was this supposed to accomplish but mermaid kills the police while Michonne beats the [ __ ] out of the remaining merman but they recover the implication being by some kind of Aztec magic one of those incredibly useful but undefined Powers you can be pretty sure won't pop up later when it would be just as useful and then she has a fight with head fish guy or fish head guy if you prefer who steals her Spear and [ __ ] her in the head then knocks her into the water with another of those water grenades shuri then intervenes and demands to be taken to neymor thus saving iron child's life so the moment kidnap both of them even though their mission was to kill iron child and they don't profit at all from letting her live Michonne tries to swim after them but she can't catch up because she's not a fish and black people can't swim no no no no no it can't be racist I read it in the guardian it's a thing honestly we then cut away to the CIA where Bilbo Baggins meets up with uh president Selena Meyer and she is Selena Maya as in Dreyfus is basically playing the same character only in this film of course she's not the president she's a CIA bigwig and we learned she used to be married to Bilbo they're investigating the aftermath of that fight between the merman Michonne shuri iron child on the bridge and Bilbo picks up some suspicious looking piece of tech wakandan anal beads quite possibly then we're back in wakanda where Michonne is urging Ramona Valerian to let her go and rescue shuri but instead rimanda strips her of her ranks and titles and kicks her out of the door of the Explorers ramonda does put in a powerful performance by the way in giving her reasons that she stood by Michonne in the first film even though Michonne protracted killmonger and she's now lost both her kids that she never wanted shuri to go on the mission to begin with the performance is strong it's well acted it's really nobody well written in the moment but I can't help but recall that about a second before all of this she exclaimed that she was the queen of the most powerful nation in the world and I can't help but remember that she was in the room with Sherry and Michonne when it was decided that shuri should go on that mission she was party to the decision she could have said no she could have stopped it at any time now to be clear this will only be a flaw if the film continues to pretend that this was not so it can be made explicable it can even be made to Aid the story in the characters if this is raimondus fit of rage leading her to blame Michonne for what was essentially her own mistake that's something she will have to realize and apologize for you can maintain the Redemption mission that I'm sure Michonne is about to go off on but the two characters will have to meet in the middle because the Redemption cannot solely be michones sure she failed to protect Sherry but it was ramonda's failure of foresight and indeed as a mother that put Shiri in that position to begin with that is something to keep an eye on as the plot progresses because it'll determine whether the writers have a coherent Journey for their characters or whether they've here opted for the quickest and easiest way to get the plot moving into its next ACT past experience would suggest the explanation from contrivance but failure isn't set if it's made right it'll constitute not spectacular but at least decent writing the kind of thing that's been sorely missing from the entirety of phase four and I'm sorry to say much of this film so far that brings us to the close of part one of this review as some more regular viewers of the channel will already be aware I've just taken on a very exciting but alas super secret legally secret writing project so I've split this review up it was going to be over two hours long into segments probably no more than three in order that I can get stuff out while still having time to work on the other project my plan is to get parts two and three up over the course of the next week of fortnight at most it will be with you soon enough if however you want to fast forward to an overview of the entire film as mentioned there is a short one over on my second Channel and my good friend the movie cynic has done a very good video of his own which I urge you to check out link for that is in the description as well for now see you next time

Channel: The Little Platoon

Views: 597,411

Keywords: Black Panther, Black Panther 2, Wakanda Forever, Wakanda Forever trailer, Wakanda Forever review, Wakanda Forever critique, Wakanda Forever post credit scene, Wakanda Forever interview, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, Namor, Namor vs Black Panther, Namor vs Shuri, Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther vs Killmonger, Thor Love and Thunder, Multiverse of Madness, MCU, MCU Phase 4, Marvel, She-Hulk, Aquaman, Aquaman 2, black panther 2 review, Wakanda Forever is bad, The Little Platoon

Id: pdWtRr_QNZs

Length: 51min 33sec (3093 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2022