136: Should You See or Skip ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’?

Welcome back to across the movie I’ll present to by Bulwark Plus. I am your host, Sunny Vonage Culture Editor of The Bulwark. I’m joined as always by Elizabeth rig of the Washington Post and Peter Suderman of Reason magazine. Alyssa Peter, how are you today? I’m swell.

I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First stop in controversy and controversy, Warner Brothers is trying to figure out what to do with Harry Potter. And not having a great deal of luck, rumors started circulating that the seemingly cursed fantastic beasts franchise, which has never put up the box office numbers, mourners hoped for in addition to being saddled with PR nightmares, Johnny Deppen, as remiller, has been kinda more or less Saravoche canceled following the disastrous outing of the latest, the secrets of Dumbledore. Those rumors picked up steam when w b head David Zaslowff said that the studio is trying to figure out what to do with Harry Potter franchise that hasn’t had a movie in fifteen years. We all kinda scratched our heads at that one since, you know, there’s there’s been three of them. Technically, not Harry Potter movies.

Exactly. But, you know, anyway, in his latest news letter highlighting the trabails of the franchise, Matt Bellini says the series is almost certainly dead. And it’s still unclear what exactly w b is gonna do with all of this fabulously valuable intellectual property of Part of the problem from their POV is that Rowling has a hammerlock on the rights. W. B.

Can remake the eight movies in the series without her approval, but that’s about it. They can’t adapt the hit play, the cursed child, for the big screen without her signing off, and they can’t really do anything with any spin off materials. It’s not like they can just pick up fan fic and adapt that. She she has again sign off. It’s worth noting here that rallying has no imperative to do anything whatsoever.

I mean, she is still making tons of money with the original books. Right? I checked Amazon today before we tape the show. The sorcerer’s stone still on the top hundred of Kindle books and still on the top five hundred of paperbacks. That’s all books folks.

That’s just there there people are just buying these books all the time still. I I don’t know what tell you. The Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios, Florida continues to be enormously popular as is the leads down attraction in London. Families continue to love the adventures of the boy who lived. Indeed, my own family does.

My wife reads Harry Potter too, my seven year old daughter every night. And while we, my wife and I were a little bit too old for the books, by the time the first one came out, I was fifteen, and thus starting to watch Stanley Cuprick movies, not really. You know, my my time to read the the the YA fiction. Kids today still love them. Still love these books popular as a Halloween costume song all over in neighborhood.

I don’t know what to tell you guys. But they very specifically love Harry Potter. It’s like very specifically, we like Harry Potter. And all the spin offs that have nothing to do with him may be doomed to failure. I don’t know, at least at the two hundred million dollar budget per movie level.

Right? I’m somewhat skeptical that the overly online controversy is about Rowling in her statements about trans folks have a huge impact at the box office, but it definitely is something on the back of Hollywood’s mind, Alyssa as a Harry Potter fan, what is W. B. Supposed to do with their marquee property?

Oh, man. This is it’s a hard one and, you know, if I knew maybe David Zaslow would be paying me millions of dollars. And instead of, you know, me just gaffing around with the Washington Post opinion section, But because and it’s hard to answer in part because I think in theory, WB did the right thing. Right? I mean, they greenlit a prequel that was sort of backstory on characters that you knew about that sort of set up the big con I mean, it’s almost a, you know, lord of the rings rings of power play.

It’s like, this is how we get to the big bad. It also, you know, takes a character who, you know, I think fans were interested in and who was revealed over the course of the series to have an intriguing backstory but that wasn’t fully revealed in the same way that say, you know, James and Lily Potter story was in the original text and fleshed it out tried sort of building on the existing magical concepts. I mean, these are all the things that I basically think you wanna do if you’re gonna do a spin off of an existing franchise. You know, you you wanna look for the spots where things are intriguing, but not fully revealed, you wanna expand the concepts, you know, you want to have a conflict that people can sort of pick hook into. And it didn’t work.

And you know what? It’s just it’s not always going to work. And I think that Marvel success, Star Wars two, a lesser extent, has sort of sowed the sense among movie makers that there’s always an appetite for more and also but also that people that fans always want the world to get bigger. And Harry Potter itself is a pretty big story. I mean, it’s sort of magically expansive.

It has a lot of characters there’s a lot of space for people to sort of imagine themselves in the existing nooks and crannies. And, you know, maybe the, you know, I think this success of the original actually may have made it harder to expand the world because if there’s already enough there for everyone to of latch onto and find a new. And if appeal in particular is of sharing these stories and these characters with a younger generation, then expanding and getting away from that core is maybe sort of behind the besides the point. I mean, I think I think it is inevitable that these movies will be remade at some point I don’t know how that will work, but I think that Warner’s actually basically did the things that you’re supposed to do and had some really bad luck.

Yeah. I mean, I I I guess my question here is how much of the appeal of Harry Potter is intrinsically bound up in Harry Potter. Right? I mean, we don’t call them the Hogwarts books. We don’t call them — Yeah.

— the wizarding books. We it’s the Harry Potter books. He is the he is the figure into which every lonely child can pour himself and say, I am I maybe I’m magic. And can go to the magic school. And

Sunny, you are magic.

Well, I know I am magic. I’m saying the rest of the people who aren’t as lucky. As me. I think that there is a very specific Star Wars problem here, which is that every attempt to get away from the Skywalker Saga has failed because Star Wars actually only is interesting on the level of family mellow drama. And I I wonder how much of that is true for Harry Potter, which is only interesting as a as a stand in for the eternal underdog who needs to triumph over a terrible monster.

Well, but it’s

I mean, I think that’s true. That undersells the extent to which people identify in particular, I think with Hermione Granger, who is just a, you know, a particular kind of character who is just born to appeal to the kinds of bookish girls who would be reading the books in the first place, but then also who are gonna become children’s librarians and pair who wanna pass this, you know, the book down to their daughters. You know, it’s a it’s a great sort of updated Cinderella story And I think that character has been hard to replace as well. I mean, you

know, you’ve had the attempt the sort of attempt to do that with Tina in the fantastic beast movies, but I think she has not really clicked in the same way. And, you know, I I think another challenge for the fantastic beast movies is that there is something

particularly appealing about that journey from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. And the prequels are largely about adults. And, you know, that may be the kind of thing that sells that,

you know, maybe that makes it more like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it doesn’t quite capture that particular, you know, the the end of innocence and the move into something

else that’s such key part of the Harry Potter books.

Yeah. Peter, we we a couple weeks back discussed IP mismanagement with regard to Star Wars. And, you know, I don’t I I don’t know if you guys been keeping up with Andor, which has gotten better as it has gone along. And maybe it’s back, maybe Star Wars is back, but that that that whole situation there is still unsatisfactory from Disney’s perspective, certainly. Just in terms of actual box office success ratings etcetera etcetera.

So do you see something similar at work here? I mean, what what What could what could Warner Bros. Learn from where Disney has failed? I

do think there’s some similarity. Although, I disagree with your assertion earlier that the Star Wars Saga is really only successful when it’s about the the skywalkers because there’s a bunch of side stories going back to all of the expanded universe stuff that Alyssa has talked about, you know, that I was at least aware of, when I was a kid. And and now the the Dave Felloni cartoon series and or is really quite good. The Mandalorian might not be completely groundbreaking, but it’s quite enjoyable and it’s not about the skywalkers, except when it I eventually was.

When Luke shows

up, it’s not it’s not primarily a a family domestic drama. I’m sorry.

The expanded universe stuff is all well and good, but the only thing that has gotten butts in seats in in the the into theaters to see these movies is stuff that revolves around Skywalker saga. Well,

Rogue One did pretty well. Which

is a pretty cool, it’s a Star Wars a new hope.

Yes. But I think the thing that you’re getting at is that the side stories, what either the ones that are relatively successful, either the ones that I think are quite good. And I think Andor is really quite good, not just getting better, but it started strong and has it has done better than my expectations in a lot of ways, exceeded my expectations. I think the thing that you’re getting at is that the the the the giant box office phenomenon where Star Wars is not just something that some people like a kind of niche culture, the giant box office phenomenon where it is the culture, where everyone knows Star Wars, is a product of the Skywalker. But there’s a bunch of there are a bunch of people who are sort of more niche fans who are into all the other stuff as well.

But Harry Potter doesn’t even seem to have much of that. I mean, fantastic really collapsed in, you know, as the films went on. They have not it’s I’m not, you know, able to think of a single successful story outside of the Harry Potter part of it. But I think the question that we’re sort of all raising here implicitly is just What is it that people like about the Harry Potter series, the movies, and the books? Is it that they like the the central trio, you know, or the central duo of Harry Potter and Hermione and the the other guy.

Ron,

Ron, we use slaves.

I forgot him because he’s it the design to be forgettable. Right? Is that what they like about the it’s just like the character dynamic. Is what they like about it that the characters start, you know, at at quite young. Right?

Like, be, you know, not even adolescent yet. And then they grow older and the series, you know, sort of the the both the book and the movie series tracked a a kind of childhood development. Right? Like, they came out over a period of about ten years. So if you started reading them or watching them when you were eight or ten years old, you know, by the time you were done, you would be at the end of high school or whatever it was.

Like, I don’t know. I don’t recall the exact publishing dates, but, like, they they tracked the the the development of the readers in a certain way. Is what they liked about it that it was said at school. I mean, this is something we haven’t talked about very much except for that you mentioned that it’s not called Hogwarts. But I think the school aspect and the fact that that Rowling was writing in the tradition of British school fiction, which is just which is a sort of a genre from the mid century middle middle of the nineteenth.

Nineteen hundreds that was, like, quite common in nineteen fifty. There was just all of this sort of boarding school fiction that she is borrowing from and then turn learning into a fantasy series that, you know, adding a bunch of fantasy tropes. Is it the fact that, like, it’s about kids who are dealing with authority figure because that’s something that’s very important here. It’s like, this is a these these are stories about how kids navigate the world of adult rules that have been placed upon them and learn both to survive within that, but also how to escape that and to make decisions on their own. But that’s adults you hear are, you know, the school administrators as well as parents.

I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that. And maybe the answer is, it’s all of those things. That Harry Potter was successful because it was a perfect synthesis of elements. And it’s not really gonna be possible to synthesize those elements again. So I think my answer is Warner Bros.

Should just give up and make and remake Harry Potter. And just like do the whole series again. Just and like they’re they’re trying to capture the same magic. The only way you were going to capture the same magic is by literally capturing the same magic, by just doing the same thing again. Otherwise, what they’re gonna need to do is tell completely different stories set in the same universe that have some tangential connection to the world.

Here is the story of a professor who, you know, is was at Hogwarts or was at a competing school or was at a, you know, what wanted to here’s a story of somebody who wanted to become a professor of magic at Hogwarts and what they had to go through. Whatever it is, Like your choices are, tell niche stories that may or may not take off. Or just do the same thing again because that’s what we know that people And what they’ve tried to do is, well, we’re gonna sorta do the same thing again, except not and without some of the stuff that people obviously gravitated towards. And that just doesn’t seem like the right decision. You know, the the other thing is The the Fantastic Beasts movies are not terrible exactly, but they’re just not very good.

And the Harry Potter movies are good, and I say that as somebody who has not read the novels. And so I can I feel like I can judge the movies on their own. They are very appealing, especially the later ones we from, you know, from three on. But even at the beginning, I found the I found the first couple really quite charming. The performances are, you know, they’re not like excellent Oscar worthy or whatever.

But, like, the the the actors and the dynamic between them is quite charming. All of the sort of the ins and outs of the school really kind of wonderful to just experience visually. And they’re good effective, populist, blockbuster. The Fantastic Beast movies are often pretty and boring. They are just boring.

And you have

to make good movies. And I was we’ll say one real problem with the Fantastic Beasts book is that it was an attempt to jump to piggyback on existing IP, i e, you know, like, Newt’s commander is the literal author of a textbook that, you know, the kids in Harry Potter study as part of one of their, you know, their care of magical creatures class and, you know, that it was something that rowling, like, wrote as a spin off that where I think the proceeds went to charity. But the idea that you need to, like, that that was the thing where you need to, like, Jerryrig like a guy who’s like really shy and into animals onto this existing story that they were gonna tell. I think that was really weird brand. Thing.

Right? Like, why is it, like, fantastic beasts of Dumbledore? Like or the, you know, the secrets of Dumbledore, the crimes of Grindelwald? I mean, just like, just do, like, you know, young Dumbledore, like, young, hot Dumbledore. That was what the people wanted and they didn’t do it.

By

the way, that’s my rap name, Young Dumbledore, Young Hot Dumbledore. My I I guess this gets me to my last point, which is which isn’t the real issue here. That they are trying like, they’re trying to reverse engineer something for the big screen or the small screen based on stuff that already exists. Instead of having Rowling do what she does best. She needs to write another series of books.

Yeah. Well, she the thing is she is doing that. They’re just detective novels where she, like, gets revenge on her enemies. And they’re actually pretty good detective novels. I mean, she needs

to write a Harry Potter series of books where she gets revenge on her enemies. Not not these these detective books. Because I I like, the whole the one one thing we haven’t discussed in the reason for this success of these movies is that people enjoy watching the things on the screen that they read and loved and shared with each other. Right? That is that is why they wanted to go these movies.

And that is why they are often very plain and straightforward is because they are they are just there. They are movies that are showing you the things that happened in the books for the most part. I mean, not, you know, obviously, there are some changes, but but, like, I I I really feel like the the the issue here is if the if if Warner Brothers wants another run of successful Harry Potter films. They should just throw a bucket of money at JK Rowling. And say, I know you have everything you could possibly want, but here’s a little bit more.

Now go write some books. So

last I checked, she didn’t just have everything she wanted. She was literally a billionaire. And I’ve seen

a fellow in Chicago. I

believe she is the first and maybe only person to ever earn a billion dollars just from writing books. She There’s not an amount of money that Warner Brothers could throw at her that would

I agree. I agree. Which is which is, you know, look, again, this is this the the real problem here is that they they need her sign off on everything. There’s no reason for her to she’s the Joker in this situation. You know, she’s just laughing and saying there’s nothing you can do to me.

That would that that will make me either, a, sign off on something I don’t wanna do or b, you know, sit but, like, I I really think the answer here is, like, JK Rowling just needs to write more Harry Potter books and then they can make those into movies and people will go see them or not. But this this whole trying to Jerry Rigg, a a a universe out of, like, scripts and scraps of everything that’s in her notebooks is insane. That’s never gonna work. Just

remake the originals except for every movie that they had for each book should be two books and the last book should be four books. Or each book should be sorry. Each book should be two

movies, and the last book should be four movies. So we’re looking at sixteen movie series. Is that right? Is that Oh, that’s what you’re saying. I I

there were there were so many pages that weren’t perfectly translated. In the first set of movies. Or do a dark

and gritty, like, adult reboot, or dumbled, or, you know.

Zach Schneider presents. Harry Potter, there

we go. Harry Potter

and the Philosopher Stone. And it’s actually just Harry Potter stoning a philosopher to that Alright.

Alright. So what do

we think? Looking forward to Rip

Terry Potter. So what do we think? Is

it a controversy that Warner Brothers has yet to sign off on my amazing Zach Snyder Harry Potter idea. Peter? Yeah. Sure. Counterency.

Counterency. Okay. That’s a silly exit question. Make sure to listen to our special bonus episode, which will be less silly. Alyssa and Peter and I are gonna be talking about good kids books.

And, you know, what what what we recommend folks read. Alyssa’s putting together a nice little list of books for folks, there’s lots of controversy about, you know, who should be reading what and blah blah blah. But we’re we’re gonna we’re gonna give you some nice normal choices for a for a nice normal podcast. Right now on to the main event. Black Panther, Wakanda forever.

The sequel to the seven hundred million dollar domestic grossing Like, Panther has big shoes to fill, not just in terms of business, though I’m sure Disney could use a billion off box office box right now given everything that’s going on in the world of streaming and stock prices, etcetera, etcetera. But the original film also scored a coveted day plus from cinema score. It was ninety six percent fresh on rotten tomatoes and one hundred percent fresh. From top critics. And it was the first MCU picture to earn a best picture nomination.

Sadly since that film’s debut, the world lost star Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer, which in addition to being a tragedy to his friends and family, scrambled the MCU’s overall plan, not just for this movie, I think, but for the franchise in general. Director Ryan Coogler was very firm in his decision not to recast. King Tuchalla was the titular defender of Wakanda, but that left open some questions as to what should be done. Black Panther with Wakanda Forever is basically three movies in one. The first is a mournful ode to Bozeman.

It opens and closes with tributes to the actor via the death of the character who passes off screen to an unnamed illness. The second movie is a fairly straightforward action adventure movie with big mediocre CGI setpieces. And the third is an extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As we are introduced to the character iron heart. We spent a lot of time with Julia Louie Drive us for some reason.

She’s been seen in some of the TV shows on Disney plus There’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of Marvel stuff in this movie, a lot of Marvel stuff. And and that’s a big reason why the whole thing is kind of a cluttered mess. I think I think look, I think Ryan Coogler could have made a two hundred million dollar morning movie just like a movie in mourning and about sadness and, like, how to overcome grief and that sort of thing. Or Marvel could have, you know, just kind of pushed that aside and made the this all about introduced you know, kind of lame new characters. And and then you could have done both of those with the standard CGI set piece.

Oh, look, here’s our third action battle on a floating whatever. But doing all of this simultaneously, it just the whole thing is a slog. It’s just a huge slog. I haven’t even talked about the introduction of the film’s nemesis Namor, who is no longer at Atlantian as he is in the comics. I guess they were trying to avoid the whole Aquaman trap here.

But instead, he’s the descendant of a mezzo American culture that was forced into the ocean after the arrival of the conquistadors. They drank some vibranium juice and that gave them gills kinda, they could absorb oxygen. It doesn’t matter. The whole point here is that colonialism is bad. Colonial Colonialism is bad.

That’s the lesson here again. And one problem with going back to this theme is that it makes no sense for telecom, the Alcon Water Kingdom to go to war with Wakanda even with the carefully constructed rub goldberg device of a plot they have here. There’s a vibranium detecting device and that’s a scientist. That’s iron art. They they gotta protect her from the the talconites.

I don’t know. Whatever. Another problem here is that the initial film covered very similar ground and did it better. Michael B. Jordan’s kill monger was basically right in that movie about the cowardice of Wakanda, which kind of sat idly by as Africa was carved up by the colonial powers rather than building on Wakanda’s status now as an undisputed world power is basically the most powerful nation in the world.

Kind of they they don’t really get into that very much. It which is kind of interesting. But whatever, the film retreats. It retreats again, and it treats Wakanda as a nation that is just kind of bullied. And put upon, and they’re they’re standing up for themselves and they’re saying that, but when you were a world power, you have more responsibilities than that.

There’s a version of film criticism that is kind of lame and I don’t like to do it and it is this. It’s right, quote, this movie should have been a different movie and it would have been better if it was that movie Right? That’s that’s not a great form of criticism. But I, like, really feel like that’s the case here. There there’s a there’s a better version of this movie that treats telecom as more straightforwardly villainous, I don’t know, reincarnation of the Aztec empire.

Right? Like, getting in there and doing some human sacrifices with vibranium weapons, something. Just literally anything. Like, you could even pull stuff from the comic books, have name more, say, drown, New York City. And threaten to do the same to every other major city in the world if the world doesn’t stop trying to steal their vibranium.

Something like that. You wouldn’t need to change too much from the film as it exists. Just make it more simple. Just simplify it a little bit. Even if you don’t do that, one thing you could do is bring some lights to the sets because this movie is exceptionally hard to see in a number of places.

Like, I watched it on IMAX in a in, you know, a standard kind of multiplex IMAX. And I literally could not make out what was going on the screen in certain scenes, particularly at night on the Riverbank. And then in the underwater city that NAMOR runs, I it just it looks so bad. I I cannot imagine how bad this movie looks and like your kind of standard shoe box multiplex. It’s it’s I I don’t know.

I’ve heard I’ve heard some folks who were not thrilled with how it looks. I’ll put it that way. I don’t know, man. The whole thing just doesn’t really work for me. It’s got some good performance instances, it has a nice tribute to Boesman that that the the film really peaks emotionally in the first five minutes, which is another problem.

But in all, it’s just kind of a disappointing slog. Peter, am I being too harsh here? What did you make of Black Panther Wakanda forever? I don’t think

you’re being too harsh, but I I wanna start by giving this movie some credit. I do think it’s kind of ambitious in interesting ways. I think it’s the decision to not recast, Chadwick Boseman, not only to not recast him, but also not to try to fill the his sort of his energy into the movie. Right? There’s no sort of comparable, you know, charismatic male superhero lead.

What this movie does is it brings the supporting cast, mostly female from the original film, and lets them share center stage. Right? It moves them into the sort of central roles to great effect, I think. That is the in many ways, the the the best decision I think that was made about this movie. And the fact that it exists at all is in some ways like kind of amazing.

Is a movie that was in development when the lead actor died, you know, like totally unexpectedly as your reports are that no one at Marvel knew about this. That this was either that he’d kept his his cancer secret, which you can totally understand because if you’re a big box office are. That’s the kind of thing that is, you know, is going to cost you and you wanna be able to work as long as you can. And as we know, he worked right up to the very end and, like, that’s what he loved doing. So I I think the movie works as a tribute.

I think the the decision to let, you know, Leticia write and Lupita and Young, and and some of the others, you know, step into the central roles is was a good one. But I largely agree with you. This movie is a disappointment and a mess. And it tries to do try to do way too much. It is far too far too focused on setting up future Marvel properties.

So that whole that whole long, you know, sort of segment where we go to MIT and we meet the, you know, the inventor of the Vibranium machine, and she’s built an Ironman suit for herself, and she’s oh, she’s gonna be Iron Heart because there’s an Iron Heart series that’s in development for Disney plus and then there’s also an armor wars movie that’s in development that we used to be a TV series as blah blah. Who cares? And then like all the Julia Louise Dreyfus stuff, does anybody even know her actual named Valentina Allegra Desfontein. Right? Like who cares?

She’s just Julia Louise, dreamt as his like bad spy lady. And like, this is a two hour and thirty five, two hour and forty minute movie, and there’s probably a solid forty minutes of subplots that are not really directly relevant to the central conflict that are just there to set up future MCU properties. It’s like it’s a forty five min it’s forty five minutes of advertisements inside a two and a half, two hour and forty minute movie. And and the advertisements aren’t for like, they don’t fit. They don’t make the movie better.

And then I totally agree with you about the the visuals in this movie it is it just looks shockingly bad. It it’s dark. It’s muddy. The CG is really ugly. In many cases, even when it’s bright, so the big attack seen on on Wakanda, you get, you know, a namor flying around with his low winged feet.

He’s like bouncing around and stuff. And it it he’s just like obviously changing size and scale relative to the buildings. He’s obviously weirdly sort of goopy animated because because as we know, Marvel doesn’t care that much about this stuff and is constantly making changes right up to the last minute, which both expensive and and it leads to terrible looking effects. And then in addition to that, I I am willing to accepts shots that don’t look great. As long as the shots are nicely composed and as long as the director has the confidence to give us to, like, let us understand what the shot is supposed to be.

And so this is why I’m less hard on say some of the sort of underwhelming CG and something like House of the Dragon. Because often the directors will give us these really interesting looking shots of, you know, in the Denali there. There was a that bit of the the dragon flying through the clouds, and it was too dark. It was too dark for sure. And like the dragon rendering, looked like it needed a, you know, another couple of passes.

But it was a really smart looking shot that was like, oh, that’s a cool idea. I don’t think there is a single memorable visual idea in this entire movie unless you wanna count the water explosions, which, like, that’s a sort of cool tech technology, but it doesn’t actually produce any shots that I was like, oh, that works. That’s just Even if they like, even if the the CG is sorta janky, even if it looks a little bit animated, that is gonna be burned into my brain. And and Marvel for all of it cared sort of, you know, crappiness does have those moments. But this movie had none of them, which is really pretty shocking for something this big that that it really just felt slap together and kind of careless and artlessly crafted.

And I I don’t, you know, Like, I feel in some ways kind of bad slagging people’s work like this, but it’s it’s really quite bad. And it’s pleasant to watch. And when you combine it with a narrative bloat, this movie just doesn’t work. It’s a huge disappointment. I don’t think it’s quite terrible, and it suffers from some of the same problems as say the eternals, but it’s a much better movie than the eternals.

But it’s still not a very good one. And it’s that’s especially frustrating and disappointing since Black Panther, the first film, was a much what it really is one of the the better Marvel films, probably top certainly top five and maybe top three.

Alyssa, what did you what did you make of this? Because I I I wanna specifically ask you about the the the look of this thing because you wrote a column for the Western Post about how how, like, shockingly terrible it looks. And I think we all agree with that. Any it I I I just I don’t understand how something like this can make it to the big screen. Yeah.

And, you know, Peter was sitting next me while I was watching this. And I think could observe that I was getting just increasingly agitated watching it. And it’s particularly frustrating to me because there is some extremely strong design talent working on these movies. I mean, you have, like, legendary costume designer, really, you know, really interesting production designer. This sort of close-up look of a lot of what’s happening in Wakanda and even some of what’s happening in the sort of cave complex, sort of outside of telecom.

Is really beautiful in some ways. Like, if you look at the costumes that T’Challa’s, you know, relatives and you know, like, former guards are wearing during his funeral. You know, just the care that the movie puts into hairstyles, makeup, you know, jewelry. Like, anymore jewelry is really interesting. The, like, the sort of epic paintings that he’s doing are really beautiful and, you know, colored in really interesting ways.

And then for so much of the movie to just look like garbage is frustrating simply on it. Like, I think it is a disservice to the costume and production designers for Marvel to put out a movie that looks this bad in so many other respects. But to me, the failures of the visuals you know, they undermine the narrative and ideas of the movie. Right? You know, I mean, if you are supposed to be introduced to this undersea city of telecom and it’s supposed to be just totally overwhelming and you know, beautiful and, you know, a little bit terrifying because, oh my god, there’s this huge technically advanced undersea civilization.

You have to be able to see it clearly. I mean, if the whole point of this scene is that we and Sherry are supposed to be just completely blown out of our seats by this. You have

to be able

to see what’s going on in any given moment in that introductory scene and you can’t. Right? I mean, the charitable argument is that this is like shot, you know, as if you’re seeing it through real ocean water. But,

like, this

is this is a marvel movie. It doesn’t need to be realistic. It needs to be convincing. And that scene in particular just is not you know, in the same way, the scenes of Namor, like sort of descending into his, you know, big, sharp, jaw thrown. Just look like badly rendered video game stuff.

I mean, I don’t play a lot of video games. Like, my understanding is that graphics there have gotten more sophisticated than even some of what we’re seeing here. And it was just frustrating. I mean, a huge you know, I really really hate very quick cut action scenes in part because they destroy, for me anyway, sort of a sense of narrative And they also just always seemed to me to betray a lack of confidence in, you know, the the stuntables or the actors, you know, it seems to suggest that the director and the editors don’t think that what they’ve captured on screen is convincing. And, you know, to do this with, you know, the Durham Lager repeatedly to shoot the, you know, Boston Chase and Fight sequence at night such that just narratively incomprehensible.

It just feels like malpractice to me. And again, like just a disservice to the actors to the second unit. I just find it really frustrating. Well, it’s also it’s also a

mark to downgrade from the original’s So the original had had a very bad CGI action sequence at the end of the film. But the but it had some very good action stuff at the beginning of the film. The the sequences set in Korea were were actually very well done. There was a there was a almost a James Bond type vibe to some of that stuff. Yeah.

And then, you know, a big fight in a club that leads

out into a car race. And — Right. — my those sequences, I think, I have some I have some qualms with, but they are really pretty good overall. Yeah. Yeah.

Certainly compared to

what we see here. The the chase through Boston in this movie is incomprehensible shot. Yeah. Just just very bad. But the but let’s let’s get away from the visuals for a second because I I the biggest disappointment again to me was that this movie just does nothing interesting, ideologically, or intellectually with the actual story that it’s telling.

And I I one of the reasons I I really like the first Black Panther is that it has it. There’s an idea there. There’s an I you know, kill monger who’s played by Michael B Jordan. This movie is also really missing Michael B Jordan. The best scene in the film

Yes. In

this in this film is

when he appears in the, you know, in the the spirit world or whatever, the the that the you know, that like, that the ancestral plane. You know, like, he is he’s very he’s very good and he is, like, compelling to watch on screen and he is, just magnetic in a way that sadly nobody else in this movie really is. But there there was an interesting idea there. Kilmanger had an idea about what it means to be Wakanda, what it means to actually push for you know, equality and and black liberation and whatever. Like, there’s an interesting idea.

There’s an interesting idea. And this movie just doesn’t do anything with it. Like, it does a almost a watered down version of the same thing with the with the the telecons. And I I just, like, I found the whole thing very frustrating. I found the whole thing very frustrating.

I was like, you there there was a better there’s a better movie in here if you if you are willing to not treat Wakanda as an eternal victim So

there’s a there’s an essential script problem, which is that Nomor’s conflict with the Wakanda’s is almost not dramatized. He shows up at the very beginning to sort of say, hey, we might invade you. And then there’s this you know, mid movie sequence in which he explains his backstory and gives you a little tour. And then there’s a big fight at the end. But there’s no like, Nomor doesn’t do anything to advance his cause in a real direct sense, except kinda sort of either the kidnapping, whatever.

But, like, even then, it’s just so that he can deliver a monologue backstory to sort of explaining his motivation. And then and then we just get a fight. And it’s there’s no, like, in order for for conflict to you know, to sort of to have meaning and to come alive in a movie, the characters have to actually be working to advance their call. And Namar doesn’t do that here. He just sorta says stuff and then there’s fighting.

Well,

and it’s particularly a shame because you could build on the argument that was made in the first movie and say, look, you know, telecon and Wakanda are rooted in very different experiences of colonialism. Right? Like, Wakanda avoids it altogether and commits this sort of great moral trussity by sitting outside of it. The people of telecom or at least their leader have direct experience with what it means to be colonized on every level. Right?

I mean, they you know, they understand the Resource Expo’s exploitation. They’ve experienced disease. They’ve seen, you know, just slavery and total brutality. And if you saw what kinda sort of acting more in the world earlier in the movie. And if you saw sort of that pressure ratcheting up on them, to start selling vibranium and saw that being something that was just a harder for Queen Romonda to resist.

Like, if that was sort of the price of becoming part of the international order, you could have a debate about, like, international engagement. You could have a different fast of the sort of international engagement versus isolationism argument that I think would be interesting. But I think it would require a

different conflict.

Right? Like, and I think that a situation where you’re talking about where, you know, telecom launches some kind of first strike. Would be really interesting. And then you have sort of a debate around that. And if you have Sherry b, like, you know, you have this early thing where she’s like, oh, I just wanna see the whole world burn.

Okay. But that’s not intellectually developed. Right? I mean, like, what if you actually say, like, king king T’Challa dies? Like, what if he’s murdered by a bioterrorism?

What if it’s an assassination? Right? Like, what if there’s some actual tension around generated out of his death that makes Sherry, like, much more actually inclined to align with telecom other than, like, VMware’s kind of hot and charming. And I will say once again, just like the essential sexlessness of these movies is kind of a problem. Like, you know, the whole sort of vibe between the two of them is much more comprehensible.

If Shuri, like, runs off and, like, bangs him for a while, like, has her been like, they have a, you know, they have an affair. There’s some sort of, like, you know, she’s sort of sewing these like, there’s but the the lack of sort of sexual vibe, especially, you know, the movie sort of essential secularistness when you realize it, like, oh, you know, Chachala had a secret kid. It just Sure. It it emphasizes the extent to which these are just not really grown up movies. Right?

I mean, Like, Nikyo might as well have had that kid by, like, parthogenesis for all the, like, actual contact we saw between her and Dachala.

Yeah. It’s

just it’s very weird. Yeah. Alright. Running along

here. So what do we think of Black Panther or Wakanda forever or thumbs up or thumbs up, Peter? Thumbs down, sadly.

Alyssa. Yeah.

Regardable thumbs down.

I I told my husband I would not willingly see it again.

Wow. That that’s bad. Alright. Thumbs down. It’s not it’s really not very good and it’s disappointingly not very good, which is the worst part.

I don’t I don’t mind when a movie is an interesting failure, but this is an uninteresting failure. And that’s inexcusable. Alright. That is it for this week’s show. Make sure to swing by a t m a w bullwork dot com for our bonus episode on Friday.

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