Wakanda Forever doesn’t just have a tribute to Chadwick Boseman — it is one

The shock and sorrow felt by Chadwick Boseman’s fans when he died late in 2020 was almost universal. The details of Chadwick Boseman’s battle against cancer were kept private. Even his close friends and colleagues on the final projects weren’t aware. In all the grief and surprise was a strange question. How would Marvel Cinematic Universe cope with him?

That ask can have a ghoulish tinge of mercantilism — or at least a reminder of the ghoulishly unstoppable momentum of the Marvel corporate machine — but for many it was asked out of love. His role as King T’Challa in 2018’s Black PantherHis inspiration was evident to many and his work to create that role was a major part of the movie. It was just as hard to imagine moving forward without him as it was to imagine abandoning the character’s legacy and potential.

It was exactly what the production of Wakanda Forever had to navigate — the question of how to move forward in grief for their friend, colleague, and mentor, while still maintaining the icon he’d brought to life.

However Wakanda Forever doesn’t have a tribute to Boseman’s passing. It is simply Is a tribute to Boseman’s passing, from its first shot to its last. Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole and Joe Robert Cole manage Boseman’s grief. They make the film the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first attempt at trauma.

[Ed. note: This piece contains significant spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.]

Hollywood blockbusters have mastered cultural grief. But the only truly commensurate challenge might be the modern Star Wars trilogy dealing with Carrie Fisher’s death. She wasn’t the face of the franchise, but like Boseman, she was a beloved personality with a singularly iconic role, and she was reportedly intended to be a central pillar of the trilogy’s third installment.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Fisher appeared in spite of promises. Rise of the SkywalkerYou could also use footage you don’t have. The Force AwakensInconsistantly inserted into scenes with new actors and CGI enhancements. Many viewers felt her role was closer to necromancy rather than resurrection. Audiences had every reason to be apprehensive about the way Lucasfilm’s sibling, Marvel Studios, might handle a similar situation.

But it’s as if Coogler and the rest of the Wakanda Forever Crew realized that they could not eulogize Boseman, and instead just move on. This would reduce both the film’s eulogy as well as the disconnected events. Instead, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s King T’Challa dies with Chadwick Boseman — he dies AsChadwick Boseman

There is no one who can Wakanda Forever says the word “cancer” out loud, but when T’Challa’s death comes only minutes into the movie, it has every hallmark of the public story of Boseman’s passing. Only a few viewers go to see the movie. Wakanda Forever in its first weekend won’t feel a spark of recognition in the unexpected reveal of a terminal illness, a culture-wide outburst of mourning, and a family — some bound by blood, others by loyalty and love — left wishing they could have done more, could have had more time.

The scene is told through Letitia Wright’s Shuri and Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda, without Boseman’s presence. He appears in very brief clips from MCU movies, which are memories and not current events. That may have been a logistical choice, but it’s also an adroit, immediate way of establishing where the Black Panther franchise will turn now that it can’t orient itself around T’Challa: to his younger sister Shuri.

Image: Marvel Studios

Shuri is not the only one who grieves his loss. All Wakanda mourns. The Dora Milaje are in mourning. Bassett’s turn as a leader steadfast in the face of her husband’s and son’s deaths is electrifying. Even the film’s antagonist, Namor (Tenoch Huerta), grieves in Wakanda Forever, inheriting his mother’s heartache over a culture destroyed by an aggressor. The true difference between Wakanda and Namor’s home city of Talokan, Coogler told Polygon via Zoom, is that Talokan was born in loss.

“The Wakandans never had to leave,” the director and co-writer said. “They don’t know what that’s like. Namor’s character looks at them through that lens. There’s envy there, but also, he feels that the Talokanil have a better understanding of how evil the rest of the world is, and how destructive it can be, because of what it forced upon them and what they had to give up.”

But Shuri’s grief — lingering, compartmentalized, and compounded by further events — forms the backbone of the movie. It’s the foundation that allows Wakanda ForeverTo cross the line between supersoldiers in supersuits, slugging one another with fists, and a meditation about actual human loss without falling down.

The MCU has been trying to talk about superhero trauma in one way or another since as far back as 2013’s Iron Man 3. Since Phase 4 began, the scene has seen a lot of traumatization, especially with the Disney Plus series. As creators search for characters to fill these longer runs, they look to find ways to include more people in their stories.

WandaVisionThe Scarlet Witch magically made an entire community believe she was a witch and enslaved them into submission. You are In The Falcon and Winter Soldier, we saw Bucky in a series of increasingly unprofessional therapy sessions, mandated by a court as penance for crimes he’d had no agency in committing. Moon KnightEach of the three attempted to address punch-fights and Egyptian cosmology simultaneously.

Image: Marvel Studios/Disney Plus

What all these stories have in common is a view of trauma-motivated behavior that puts emphasis on how it affects the people around the traumatized person, not about how it’s tearing the actual victim apart on the inside. Very few of these stories feel as though they’re coming from a place the creators have have been themselves — only, perhaps, what they’ve observed when interacting with a friend or loved one whose mental health is at an all-time low.

But even if you have no idea that Chadwick Boseman’s secret four-year battle against colon cancer shocked not only the world, but many of his closest colleagues, Wakanda Forever makes it obvious that its story and its performances come from people who are, if you’ll pardon the phrase, It is worth going through.

Shuri tells Shuri that her thoughts about her deceased brother make her want to destroy the world. My mother immediately recognized a time when she felt exactly the same. After my mom’s sudden, short battle with colon cancer in 2011, I was struck by a man on the streets who looked exactly like me, only ten years older. It brought back a sense of terror and anger.

It wasn’t rational, and it wasn’t something anyone other than my therapist would ever have to contend with, much less a town of innocent people, a military court, or a moon god. This was a grieving shout about the unpredictable nature of death. Is it possible for a woman to live beyond her mother’s age?

Image: Marvel Studios

“Loss is an interesting thing,” Coogler said in our conversation, “because it’s not something that ever goes away. It’s profound that way, because we’re so used to things on the body, or in the physical, healing. You can sometimes heal a wound if you are cut, shot or stabbed. But those emotional wounds that weren’t healing — I don’t even know if that’s the proper term. [laughs] Because it implies that it’s possible; often it isn’t. It’s something that you’ve got to learn to live with, more than anything.”

Wakanda Forever doesn’t end when Shuri decides not to throw her people To a potentially endless existential war for the sake of grief-motivated revenge. It doesn’t end when her grief ceases to be a danger to those around her. The screen doesn’t go dark until she finally sits down to acknowledge that her losses belong to her, not the other way around — when her grief ceases to make her a danger to herself.

Coogler and his team handle Chadwick Boseman’s death by turning Wakanda Forever into It was a lovely eulogy. And they handle Shuri’s ascension to the role he embodied by modeling how everyone else can find their own peace after a loss, even if they do it in their own ways, and on their own time.