Review: In 'Wakanda Forever,' an empire mourns and rebuilds

An image released by Marvel Studios shows a scene from "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever." (Marvel Studios via AP)

Made in the wake of tragedy, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" reverberates with the agony of loss, piercing the usually less consequential superhero realm. Like someone going through the stages of grief, Ryan Coogler's movie is at turns mournful and rootless, full of rage and blessed with clarity. In the fantastical Marvel Cinematic Universe where mortality is almost always a plaything, wrestling with the genuine article, in the death of T'Challa star Chadwick Boseman, makes for an unusually uncertain, soul-searching kind of blockbuster-scale entertainment.

It's a fine line, of course, between paying tribute and trading on it. I did cringe a little when the Marvel logo unspooled with images of Boseman within the letters: Eulogy as branding. That "Black Panther," a cultural phenomenon and a box-office smash, would get a sequel, at all, was momentarily in doubt after Boseman's unexpected death from colon cancer in 2020. Radically reworked by Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole, "Wakanda Forever" pushed ahead in hopes of honoring both Boseman and the rich Afrocentric world of the landmark original. In its admirably muddled way, it succeeds in both.