If this new entry falls short of its predecessor, it’s mostly because the 2018 film set the bar so impressively high.
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| Okoye (Danai Gurira, left) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) adopt disguises in an effort to infiltrate MIT, where they hope to locate — and rescue — the scientist who has developed a controversial vibranium detector. |
And, in an effort to compensate — while also honoring the series’ ongoing heritage — they spend too much time on grief, lamentation and bleak dialogue exchanges between the story’s primary characters. You’ll find very few smiles in this long-winded saga, which at a ridiculously self-indulgent 161 minutes, overstays its welcome by at least one massive melee too many.
On top of which, this story’s central character — the science-minded prodigy, Shuri (Letitia Wright) — is burdened by an unnecessary amount of heartbreak.
A year has passed since the untimely death of Shuri’s older brother, King T’Challa, from circumstances left vague. Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) struggles to protect their nation from intervening world powers, some of whom — notably France and the United States — wish to get their hands on the African realm’s fabled vibranium metal, with its extraordinary abilities to absorb, store and release large amounts of kinetic energy.
This meteoric substance also remains invisible to conventional scanners, making it a potential game-changer in global rivalries … which Queen Ramonda knows only too well. She has no intention of sharing vibranium with anybody.
Ah, but elsewhere at sea, a U.S. research facility is monitoring the progress of a deep-water machine that CAN detect — and has found — an undersea vibranium deposit. But before this discovery can be celebrated, everybody at the facility is slaughtered by an ocean-going platoon of blue-skinned underwater denizens, led by the remorselessly vicious Namor (Tenoch Huerta), lord of the hidden undersea civilization of Talokan.
(A brief sidebar, for those unfamiliar with Marvel Comics history: Namor, most famously known as the Sub-Mariner, dates all the way back to 1939. Since then, he has become both hero and villain, generally in service of trying to prevent his undersea kingdom of Atlantis from being discovered and/or destroyed by “surface dwellers.”
(More recently in the Marvel Comics universe — given that both are hidden civilizations with advanced tech and militaristic tendencies — Wakanda and Atlantis have been embroiled in a punishing, long-term war that has wreaked havoc on both sides: hence, this film’s core plotline.)
(But I’ve no idea while Coogler and Cole made up “Talokan,” when they could — should — simply have used Atlantis.)
