The launch of Black Panther was like nothing earlier than it. The impression, speedy and abiding, was cosmic. That the movie premiered through the Trump years, a dystopian interval in 2018 when Black life felt extra precarious than ordinary and the decision for Black superheroes extra pressing, gave its message a particular cost. It was a phenomenon 3 times over—a industrial, important, and cultural triumph.

King T’Challa was a new-age hero for a brand new, unsure time. No stranger to larger-than-life roles, Chadwick Boseman introduced poise and charisma to the efficiency alongside an all-star ensemble that included Lupita Nyong’o and Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther had enamel, and it was sensible sufficient to skirt the straightforward lure of illustration in an business starved for coloration and that means. A credit score to director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, the film was about greater than the miracle of being acknowledged; it was a measure of real progress. It spoke to us and we answered again. New Black futures—intricate and plush and free—have been opening up.

Unforeseen in a kind of futures was Boseman’s passing, in 2020, from colon most cancers. Franchises are constructed on star energy, and with out Boseman, one among Marvel’s brightest and most promising, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is haunted by his absence, draped within the form of sorrow that may’t be ignored. MCU movies and sequence not often channel the turbulence of grief with such unflinching focus (WandaVision got here shut in its unconventional depiction of spousal heartache and its psychological aftershocks). The positioning is curious however efficient. I hesitate to name Wakanda Forever a brand new form of superhero blockbuster—it hasn’t completely reinvented the wheel—but it surely’s shut. Coogler has geared up his sequel with a modified vocabulary: It speaks equally from a spot of loss because it does triumph. Grief is its mom tongue.

The king is lifeless, and the eyes of the world are as soon as once more on Wakanda. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has assumed the throne, and, within the yr since her son’s passing, carried out her greatest to take care of the African nation’s standing as a sovereign energy. The solely identified nation to have it, Wakanda stays wealthy in vibranium—the magical ore used to create cutting-edge weaponry and tech—and refuses to share its assets with allies (in a single early scene, French troopers try and steal some and shortly get their asses kicked by undercover Dora Milaje brokers). Greed being the spark for all method of battle all through historical past, Cooler and Cole are eager to jumpstart the story in such a means. The US authorities begins a vibranium-tracking operation within the Atlantic Ocean however it’s mysteriously thwarted by an unknown energy—the individuals of Talokan, an underwater empire dwelling to the one different wellspring of vibranium on Earth.

Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is their wounded chief, and hell bent on preserving Talokan’s existence a secret. He’s received mutant superpowers—heightened power, aquatic regeneration, and flight (because of the wings on his ankles)—and instructions his nation with a meticulous, if forceful, hand. (In the comics, Namor is called the Sub-Mariner and hails from Atlantis.) The mining operation threatens to show his oceanic utopia so he devises a plan to cease it: kill the genius scientist who constructed the vibranium-tracking system (Riri Williams, introducing Ironheart to the MCU) and align with Wakanda in opposition to the floor world. But Wakanda refuses. And the 2 nations discover themselves staring down virtually sure battle.

A battle, because it seems, that isn’t fairly as persuasive because the animating ideas behind it. Like the US authorities’s relentless urge for food for international affect. Or the all-consuming rage Shuri (Letitia Wright) feels from the lack of her brother, and the very possible way it drives her to motion. Or how Namor’s villainy, if it ought to even be referred to as that, is rooted someplace deeper, someplace extra human. He’s lower from the material of basic MCU antiheroes. Like Wanda. Like Kang. Namor is regaled in paradox and never utterly unjustified in his wrath. It’s all in how properly his backstory is propped: He is the descendant of a Sixteenth-century Meso-American tribe that fled enslavement and was compelled to seek out refuge underwater. His morals have weight.