Brief Story Line
After the death of king T'Challa aka Black Panther, Ramonda (Angela Basset - Gunpowder Milkshake, Mission: Impossible - Fall Out etc) was instated as queen of Wakanda, while princess Shuri (Letitia Wright - Death on the Nile etc) drowned herself in experimentations and Okoye (Danai Gurira - All Eyez on Me etc) remained as the general of the special forces.
Their peaceful life though was disrupted when people from other countries were aiming to get Vibranium located only in Wakanda. Things got further complicated when a mysterious person called Namor (Tenoch Huerta - The Forever Purge etc) appeared and endanger the very existence of Wakanda.
So what would happen to Wakanda? You can find them out in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As a movie that is the sequel of Black Panther and we know for a fact that Chadwick Boseman has passed away before it began, we were already aware that the story would be heading in a new direction. This movie had a truly strong tribute feel to the late Boseman which was well done with the perfect silence in few scenes and nice background music in other parts. It is a very understandable and frankly a good move by the movie makers.
While this would definitely gain lots of praise from audience in general, it did make the film felt more dramatic instead of adventurous or full action. Yes there were some actions, but if felt lacking for a movie that has a duration of 2 hours 41 minutes. I personally felt like seeing a drama about superhero which was not exactly what I had hoped for. Now I am not saying that it is a boring movie and I might be getting backlash for saying this, but I wished there were more actions to be combined with the drama to make it more entertaining.
And then the mysterious villain Namor. For us who are unfamiliar with his character at all, we are fine with having a new villain and some background intro. However, my wife and I believe that it took too long to show everything about him. In fact I agreed with her who felt that his story would be better off be told in a separate movie (although the timing might not be suitable because of similarity to other movies that we were reminded of). This was likely one of the reason the movie felt overly long.
Aside from those though, I did enjoy the actions that involved Okoye (our favorite character who provided few comedic moments). And Angela Basset gave a powerful performance here as a queen but also a mother. We also got few of the cast from previous movie who reprised their roles including Lupita Nyong'o (The 355, The Jungle Book etc) as Nakia, Winston Duke (Spenser Confidential etc) as M'Baku, Florence Kasumba (Mute etc) as Ayo and Martin Freeman (The Operative, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot etc) as CIA agent Everett Ross. In addition there were few new characters such as MIT student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne - Judas and the Black Messiah etc), Wakanda warrior Aneka (Michaela Coel - I May Destroy You TV series etc) and few others.
This film was directed by Ryan Coogler who also did the first movie, so it really felt that he was able to capture the essence of Black Panther and Wakanda. I think likely he would be the one to direct the next Black Panther movie. Btw, there was an important mid end credit scene that you should not miss, but there was no post end credit scene. The visual effects of this film was amazing and I think better than the original. However I was not able to say the same about the sound effect since the sound system was the standard Dolby Surround 7.1. It was a bit disappointing for me as the reason we opted this theater was to be in awe of the Dolby Atmos sound effect.
Overall to me this was an OK experience. On the one hand I appreciated the gesture for the tribute to Chadwick Boseman and I also like some of the actions (even if it did not feel enough) and the visual effects. On the other hand though, the strong drama and the too large screen time for the backstory of Namor was not to my personal preference. And as a closing of phase 4 MCU, this did not give the strong excitement feel towards the next phase. But as a movie it is still an interesting one.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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