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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - ***Spoilers***


Acgott

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Alright time to rank this. Not including D+ shows

Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Avengers: Infinity War
Thor: Ragnarok
Avengers: Endgame
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Avengers
Wakanda Forever
Spider-man: No Way Home
Black Panther
Iron Man
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Shang-Chi - Legend of the Ten Rings
Black Widow
Captain Marvel
Spider-Man: Far From Home
Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness
Thor: Love and Thunder
Ant-Man
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Captain America: The First Avenger
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 2
The Eternals
Thor
Thor: The Dark World
The Incredible Hulk

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Heres my list

Fully seen

1. Thor: Ragnarok

2. Guardians of the Galaxy

3. Avengers: Infinity War

4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

5. Iron Man

6. Avengers: Endgame

7. The Avengers

8. Iron Man 3

9. Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness

10. Iron Man 2

 

Partially seen

1. Doctor Strange

(Big gap)

2. Ant-Man and the Wasp

3. Black Panther

4. Captain America: Civil War

5. Captain Marvel

6. Avengers: Age of Ultron

 

not seen (or not seen enough to form an opinion)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Wakanda Forever
Spider-man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Shang-Chi - Legend of the Ten Rings
Black Widow

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Thor: Love and Thunder

Ant-Man

Captain America: The First Avenger

The Eternals

Thor
Thor: The Dark World
The Incredible Hulk

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1 hour ago, Malfatron said:

Heres my list

Fully seen

1. Thor: Ragnarok

2. Guardians of the Galaxy

3. Avengers: Infinity War

4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

5. Iron Man

6. Avengers: Endgame

7. The Avengers

8. Iron Man 3

9. Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness

10. Iron Man 2

 

Partially seen

1. Doctor Strange

(Big gap)

2. Ant-Man and the Wasp

3. Black Panther

4. Captain America: Civil War

5. Captain Marvel

6. Avengers: Age of Ultron

 

not seen (or not seen enough to form an opinion)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Wakanda Forever
Spider-man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Shang-Chi - Legend of the Ten Rings
Black Widow

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Thor: Love and Thunder

Ant-Man

Captain America: The First Avenger

The Eternals

Thor
Thor: The Dark World
The Incredible Hulk

---




 

How tf have you not seen Winter Soldier

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27 minutes ago, beekay414 said:

I didn't stay for the post credit stuff. Can someone tell me what they were?

Spoiler

Picks up right where we left Shuri, Nakia starts walking out behind her to come sit down. After a second or two, you see a little boy running to catch up with her.

He sits down they talk, tells her his name. It’s then confirmed that he’s T’challa’s son, and her nephew. His mother and father wanted to raise him here to not be mobbed with the pressure of becoming king one day. Was born right after the snap.


He then reveals that his Wakanda name is also T’challa. So instead of recasting, T’challa will return to the MCU as (Chadwick’s) son. With time jumps and stuff, probably looking at like 9-10 years til he’s 18 in universe. Could start doing stuff sooner.

 

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Saw Wakanda Forever on Friday. I really enjoyed it, while it didn't always have moments the stand out to me, the whole thing is exceedingly solid and enjoyable. It's basically j ust minor quibbles. And I thought Namor was amazing. I'm guessing it'll end up about 10-15 range when I rank everything, including D+ shows.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a good film, with some great things in it. But I am honestly shocked to see anyone say this is on par with the original Black Panther, much less that it surpasses its predecessor. There are plenty of parts that dont really work, and feel very forced, falling to the trappings of the Disney Machine. 

Everything memorializing Chadwick Boseman was handled amazingly. It pulled at your heart strings, and was tastefully used as important plot points. I think that is what is driving the love for this movie currently, and will fade with time, revealing this as just a very above average film.

Angela Bassett is great, she is so powerful in the opening UN scene, that it then almost feels alittle over-acting in the throne room scene when she casts out Okoye. They are clearly going for pot boiling over, but it comes off more like an explosion of wild fire. There is no previous inkling that she held any real grudge against Okoye, especially not the specific Killmonger stuff that is referenced. And while sure she is hesitant to let Shuri go on the mission, she doesnt really fight that hard against it. She starts off looking like such a strong leader, but descends into a bad Queen very quickly. I also feel like her death didnt play as well as they thought it would. She gives herself up to protect Riri, which is noble, but in the state that Shuri is in throughout this movie, she would for sure hold resentment toward her for some period.

Letitia Wright was surprisingly great, she played the smoldering fury very well. I do wish we had some more breadcrumbs throughout that show us the turn back to nobility that spares Namor's life. I actually liked her BP suit alot, the mix of the silver of T'Challa and the gold of N'Jadaka, shows the internal struggle she still has, and will likely always carry. The reveal of Killmonger was great, was the perfect use of him. Especially as it felt like, for a split second, they might try to use the awful CGI recreation stuff for Boseman in that moment. I will say her fiddling of the Double Helix for the Heart Shaped Herb was almost deus ex machina, she just kept chaining something and then replacing, but we never had any idea what she was actually doing. And I get the idea of Namor giving the "weapon" of his own demise to her, but he straight out tells her, she doesnt really figure it out or anything like that.

I do have to say this, Winston Duke is the man. He is so good in this role, and he is criminally underutilized in this film. He got a very tiny bit of being the confidant of Shuri, it should have been much more. He steals every single scene he is given even the slightest room to breath in. Im not sure how I feel about another Black Panther film any time soon, but I do hope he is very involved and allowed to shine as the King of Wakanda in some other projects that bring in the nation (maybe a Namor movie, possibly Armor Wars or Thunderbolts). Using M'Baku as the voice of Wakanda and Shuri's Black Panther as the protector could be very powerful now that they are separate once again.

Riri Williams felt completely tacked on, she doesnt really need to be in this movie. They could have hinted at her as the one who created the machine (she didnt even know that it was being used) and we could have avoided that awful Big Bad Beetle Borgs suit she has in the climax battle. We didnt even get much character development going into Ironheart. If the gold standard for shoehorning new characters in order to set up their own movie/show is Spider-man in Civil War, Riri might fall even below Natasha Romanov in Iron Man 2. Somewhat on a similar frequency, it felt like they were way too excited about the Midnight Angles stuff. That sort of thing used to be something we saw in the background of these movies, and was a surprise usage later, here they kept hammering us over the head with this nearly inconsequential easter egg. (not to mention, Okoye was correct, they didnt look good)

And worse than that, the Everett Ross/Valentina stuff should be scrubbed from this film. It does not give any additional anything to Black Panther. It is wholly a set up for other projects (Thunderbolts and probably more). Forget the sit-com level exes stuff, its a completely different movie happening inside of Wakanda Forever. You could have used Everett as a phone call, or he has his own set of beads from Shuri, and never even seen his face, and absolutely nothing in the movie changes. It is legitimately a Marvel One-Shot, sliced up and stapled into different spots of this movie.

I really enjoyed Namor, he was a nearly fully fledged and layered character. They did a great job of showing us why he has protected his people forever, and why now he is coming to light and his reasoning for wanting to attack. I didnt love the reveal of Tolakan (I do love they used this instead of Atlantis) it was just so dark. Atuma and Amaora were not distinguished enough, nor were we given why they should be, but thats a minor gripe. Namor was also one of the only people who were having any level of fun in this movie. I know thats hard to do around such a somber situation, but man there was nothing but the morose cloud over nearly every frame of this movie. Im not saying I need knee slappers or GotG level stuff. But something should have been fun in this movie. They tired a bit on the mission to get Riri, but even the 'mount up' montage with Shuri and Riri could have been something that was enjoyable. Its hard to sit through a nearly 3 hour movie, and the whole thing is sad. That is where it does feel like its dragging in a few spots.

The 3rd act fell into the same old MCU trap of needing a large scale CGI battle. Which the resolution felt almost completely unearned. But I just expect that from these films at this point, and then everyone to completely handwave that major flaw in all of these movies.

The ending(s) definitely got me, they were powerful. But I cant help but walk out of the theater feeling a bit uneasy about it.

Spoiler

It is nice that the legacy of T'Challa/Chadwick will live on through his son, but it also felt kinda dirty, you know? Like I know these are major movie franchises, but it felt like maybe we should just leave the T'Challa stuff (specifically, not Black Panther) alone and to ride off into the sunset. If they prove me wrong, and just leave it as is, great, but Im going to feel really gross if its 2027, and we have time jumped like 15 years in the MCU and they cast someone else as T'Challa, just to get the money machine going again. There is so much else they could do in the world of Wakanda, and soooo many other super heros to use, that we dont need to invoke this again.

But we will see.

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Im not going to rank every movie/show again, but looking at Phase 4, its pretty easy ranking to me;

  1. Spider-Man: No Way Home
  2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
  3. Shang-Chi: Legend of the Ten Rings
  4. Black Widow
  5. Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness
  6. Thor: Love & Thunder
  7. Eternals

And honestly, Im not sure anything outside of NWH and WF are in the Top half of MCU films. Wakanda Forever isnt even all that comfortably in the top half either. MAYBE Shang-Chi is in there, depending on what ive most recently watched.

Im not even going to include the Disney+ stuff, its all shades of middling to me. Some really good episodes in a few shows, some really bad or boring episodes too. They are all movies that they stretched out into miniseries, which creates sub par entertainment. 

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30 minutes ago, StLunatic88 said:

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a good film, with some great things in it. But I am honestly shocked to see anyone say this is on par with the original Black Panther, much less that it surpasses its predecessor. There are plenty of parts that dont really work, and feel very forced, falling to the trappings of the Disney Machine. 

For me liking WF more stems from thinking the first one is wildly over rated.  Boseman was great, but I don't think Killmonger was nearly as good a villain as some think and you can nitpick that one just as much if not more than WF going down its plot points.  Some of those nits are also pointed out in WF, M'Baku alone calls out a few of them.  I was highly skeptical of Shuri taking over as the BP, but I think this movie did a great job of taking us on a journey to get to that point and have it be believable.

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48 minutes ago, THE DUKE said:

For me liking WF more stems from thinking the first one is wildly over rated.  Boseman was great, but I don't think Killmonger was nearly as good a villain as some think and you can nitpick that one just as much if not more than WF going down its plot points.  Some of those nits are also pointed out in WF, M'Baku alone calls out a few of them.  I was highly skeptical of Shuri taking over as the BP, but I think this movie did a great job of taking us on a journey to get to that point and have it be believable.

Ok, well we will completely disagree on Killmonger, I thought he was great and was extremely refreshing for a villain to be driven by something other than taking over the world. 

And while I agree they did great job of getting Shuri to the Black Panther mantle was great, once she got there she is just. Suddenly noble? They didn’t earn that and the ending of the Namor involved plot really irked me. But they immediately bandage over it with the conclusion of the T’Challa story

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33 minutes ago, StLunatic88 said:

Ok, well we will completely disagree on Killmonger, I thought he was great and was extremely refreshing for a villain to be driven by something other than taking over the world. 

And while I agree they did great job of getting Shuri to the Black Panther mantle was great, once she got there she is just. Suddenly noble? They didn’t earn that and the ending of the Namor involved plot really irked me. But they immediately bandage over it with the conclusion of the T’Challa story

Say what?  His stated plan was for Wakanda to essentially take over the world.

It's not like Shuri was some savage before, she just moved past her rage over her family's death and showed the traits taught her by her mother and brother.  She was fully out for blood as the Black Panther when they were trapping Namor, it certainly wasn't sudden.

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