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modern namor.

Dug back to a couple of his recent Avengers appearances and he does indeed still have them, they’re just extra tiny and easy to overlook them unless you’re looking.

With the almost three hour runtimeI worry they aren't going to tell one solid story but try to shove four or five different stories together in an unsatisfying way.

I was at the store earlier and they had the Iron Heart action figure out so now I know what that looks like.

Very easy to read too much into these things, but 2 Panther helmets?

Both of those helmets seem to be masculine in their size and shape to me. Maybe T'Chaka and T'Challa's helmets?

Another mini trailer, but more new footage in this one. Also early reports are that Coogler has done it again and WF is a return to form for the MCU. Guess time will tell.

"I am not a woman who enjoys repeating themself."

Classic.

A nice little look at Namor:

I watched Wakanda Forever....

The story and acting are great, and then the Super-heroics really let it all down. The final "battle" is especially boring and lame.

They treat the death of Boseman really, really, like really well. His death is woven into the fabric and DNA of this movie, and acts as the inciting incident and baseline emotional motif of the entire film. It also forms the character arcs of several characters. Really strong stuff there.

Unlike most MCU films, I can not easily point to the genre they are trying to ape. This feels like a genuinely "unique" movie experience. They are not doing a genre with a super thrown into it. This is a film that was born naturally from the story and character developments of the first film. That is pretty strong vision from Coogler.

Then, we get to all the tie-in to the rest of the MCU, and I feel like Marvel is starting to drag their toes into DCEU territory. Too much tie-in that is cluttering up an otherwise amazing film. I am looking at you "Armor Wars" stuff!

Like I said, the biggest let down is the actual super-heroics of the film. They are kind of flat, despite a great build up of emotional stakes. The final battle between Wakandans and Tlaxocans is especially weak, even if the battle between Black Panther and Namor is pretty strong because the emotional stakes are high.

Finally, always good to see M'baku and he is the "heart" of the movie in some ways.

Yeah I’d agree with that.

Sadly whilst she’s not bad as such, Letitia Wright just isn’t quite there for Leading Lady.

Everyone else is really really good though. Especially Angela Bassett who oozes charisma, strength and dignity. The scene at the UN is a particular favourite of mine.

Overall I enjoyed with a few nitpicks that generally don't detract from the overall film. I thought the adaptation of Namor was interesting and the parallels they created between Wakanda and Talokan were well thought out. The big difference being Wakanda isolating pre-colonialialism and Talokan being be post colonial to explain their hate/distrust of the surface world. I was worried they wouldn't have a narrative focus but it really did all revolve around dealing with the passing of T'challa/Boseman. I imagine this is one of the most expensive therapy sessions ever but it was a good meditation on the loss of a friend/family.

A few nitpicks:
- The ship was a really boring design.

- Iron Heart having no connection to Iron Man in any way. For average audience goer not an issue and not really important but to a comic person it is a bit annoying. Even if it was something like showing some of the schematics were Stark Industries or hinting that he left an endowment or trust to explain a 19 year old student with a private garage full of computers and vehicles.

And the big one:

I don't mind the changes to Riri because it empowers her character more.

 Lance845 wrote:
I don't mind the changes to Riri because it empowers her character more. [spoiler]SHE is smart enough to figure things out and reverse engineer it. She doesn't need stark to hand her anything. She made 1k fixing the equations in that one kids homework. And she has been doing stuff like that for long enough that she is building up her own funding and scrounging for what she can get.

Nothing in my statement said she needed to rely on Stark to exist; being able to read and understand such advanced schematics would still be on her. Of course, for her to reverse engineer something she would have had to have something to reverse engineer. The number of equations she would have to fix to afford that set up would have been astronomical. As I said it is a nitpick and doesn't take away from the movie but it would have been nice to have some hint of it. Having influences and inspirations isn't "being handed something".

I’m pretty sure she had Stark Blueprints though. The ones she burned.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m pretty sure she had Stark Blueprints though. The ones she burned.

I'm guessing that it may be explored a bit in the upcoming Disney+ series. To be fair I also didn't like Venom being completely removed from Spider-man but, again, I know that it is just a minor personal annoyance and not a really big issue.

I just assume she got the blueprints from the SHIELD infodump in Winter Soldier.

To be honest it is a pretty blink and miss it shot. She was definitely working from Blueprints, showing a mostly triangular ARC reactor. I saw enough to be able to tell you that. Whether it had Stark in the corner, I’d have to watch it again.

But I’m skint until next Wednesday (stupid cost of living crisis. Stupid bills. Stupid stupid five week pay month!) so I can’t

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m pretty sure she had Stark Blueprints though. The ones she burned.

I don't think those were Stark blue prints. I think those were her blue prints mimicking Stark designs.

She goes... okay, it's a rig that can fly. Then it needs to be able to do these things. So here is how I am figuring that out. And it needs a power supply. That arc reactor is like 80 years old now. I can figure something out.

She spent years "on and off" working on solving the individual problems that make up a functional iron man suit. And the suit she builds is a much more ram shackle thing that is none the less capable of a lot of the basic actions of tonys suits. She has a energy gun on arm rigs with controls for thrusters. But her flight stabilizers are not on her hands. They are over her shoulders. So on and so forth.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:
I just assume she got the blueprints from the SHIELD infodump in Winter Soldier.

THAT is a really interesting point. She is definitely intelligent enough to decrypt some of those files and understand what she is looking at. Their technical assessments of not just Tony, but War Machine would give her a strong starting point from which to build her own designs.

 Ghaz wrote:

Why is the dialogue and acting so bad? This isn't unique to BP:WF. The Illuminati scenes in MoM were worse.

"I am not a woman who enjoys repeating herself." Why even say it? Why say it like that? Why not "I do not repeat myself"? No one talks like that.

Maybe try watching it? Because you say the dialogue and acting is “so bad” when it’s really, really, and I cannot stress this enough, really not.

Yeah that line was great.

I forgot to mention that M'baku was great.

 Ahtman wrote:
I forgot to mention that M'baku was great.

Agreed. I feel like he’s the touchstone of the movie. Whilst he’s never disrespectful, he’s quite blunt, almost forcing the others to put aside their grief for T’Challa, without denying or belittling their grief. He gives straight forward, if not necessarily good, advice without fear or favour.

I also like when he gak talked the queen.

"Maybe she will banish her for bringing back the princess. Glory to hanoman."

Though M’Baku does feature in my list of gripes

Saw it last night. Really impressed. The main disappointments I had were just that you can see, particularly at the end, where this film was salvaged from a slightly better version of itself starring Boseman. There are definitely scenes written for Shuri and scenes where she's forced to fill in but the movie makes that so much a part of what it's all about that you'd only know because it's impossible not to. In some ways it also enhances the film. Every person is bringing their real grief to the screen as is the audience and the movie deals with it all.

Riri is so much better here than she's ever been in the comics. Her relationship with Shuri works a lot better than trying to build her character off of Tony's hologram and if anything, I feel like we would have gotten more if Shuri didn't so often have to be out of the lab. There's a couple of scenes trying to ape Iron Man 1 that don't quite land because we're not given enough of the character to make them the right kind of charming. I wish we'd gotten a bit more of the Amadeus Cho style calculating too as that's the one bit where she brought something new to the suit and I'd have loved to see more of it.

The Namor rewrite was top tier stuff. The mixture of Atlantis and El Dorado is really inspired and Namor is such an incredibly presence throughout the film, being both terrifying and sympathetic. I so wish we could have seen Huerta and Boseman speak as kings but they did a great job adapting without pulling any punches in the finale. In a lot of ways it's the inverse of the first. The ship battle was an annoying distraction from the fantastic duel we get with the leads.

I'm not sure where this sits in my overall MCU rankings, but I feel it's pretty cleanly the best film of Phase 4. It doesn't QUITE live up to the original, but it's definitely well above the MCU average.

EDIT: Forgot No Way Home in the Phase 4 list. That one is probably better. Still put this one up there. Probably not top third of the MCU but easy top half.

 LunarSol wrote:
trying to build her character off of Tony's hologram

Yeah I can't imagine that would work well in the MCU. I just wanted a hint of a connection, such as being somewhat inspired by his work like how people are inspired by Tesla (the man not the car company) but the Stark AI would be far to much.

Oh, something we’ve not celebrated, if that’s the right word?

We have a decent villain!!

They’ve traditionally been the MCU’s weak spot, as they’ve served as ciphers to show what a Butthole could do with the hero’s powers.

Here, Namor serves as an interesting mix of T’Challa and Killmonger.

Like T’Challa, he and his are perfectly happy just being left the hell alone. Don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. A tragedy of isolation for sure, but understandable.

But, like Killmonger? If you do come knocking they are not going to be nice about it, and will burn the world to ensure they go from isolation to supremacy, the other way to ensure your left alone,

Overall the plot works because T’Challa isn’t around. Shuri was left in her lab, doing what made her happy. It’s not that she wasn’t groomed for power, so much as she never cared for that possibility.

Had things gone as they had with T’Challa still King? I think we’d have had a fairly different movie, as he and Namor do absolutely have common ground to come from.

Indeed, it’s T’challa’s passing that caused raids on the Wakandan outposts, hoping to get their hands on Vibranium (which of course leads to one of the best scenes in any movie ever. And some of the best lines!) which proves Other Countries aren’t above nefarious dealings.

I guess that having half of their population turn to dust and dissolve didn't concern the not-Atlanteans as much as the vibranium hunting boat getting a bit close to them (which isn't a problem which has gone away by the end of the film)...