I’m thinking of ending things with the MCU.

I’m thinking of ending things with the MCU.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever might have broken me. I do not think I want to see any more of these movies. (Spoiler warning, I suppose.)

Frankly, I’ve always been thinking of ending things with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Reading back ten years ago to my review of Iron Man 2, I was ambivalent even then on the whole project. I wrote: “If you just want an afternoon's entertainment and have a dire medical need to polish off a bag of overpriced popcorn, here's your movie.” And I could use that same bitter detachment to sum up my thoughts on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It's three hours long, it has a lot of shit in it, it sure is some calories.

After a decade of ups (Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy) and downs (Thor 2, Age of Ultron), I’ve ended up in the same disposable nothingness of "...eh". All the swerves, twists, and corporate mergers have added up to something like six billion dollars spent on this project; the MCU is probably the most ambitious artistic endeavor in human history. All that so that space opera Africans can fight aquatic Mesoamericans in the middle of the ocean over some stupid fucking glowing rocks. I’m struggling to even keep my energy at an "eh". My mood can be better summed up as "bleh".

Black Panther 2 feels like an especially cruel movie to end up as “just more of that”, considering the context around its creation. I am not daring to accuse director Ryan Coogler of desecrating the memory of his late star, Chadwick Boseman. As a piece of filmmaking mourning Black Panther’s memory, Wakanda Forever is at times beautiful and loving. There are scenes that have an emotional vulnerability that the overall MCU project is allergic to. But they’re also scenes merely bracketing the movie. This reality is that Black Panther 2 is not about grief or the process of accepting that somebody is gone. It is a movie about space opera Africans fighting aquatic Mesoamericans over glowing rocks. We are not mourning a man, we’re mourning the vast international corporate strategies that died with Boseman, and celebrating the new action figures that have taken his place.

Now, I do not think Black Panther 2 is particularly incompetent at this new product roll-out. Many of the new toys are extremely cool – one is not to my taste at all, but that’s fine. (Dominique Thorne is a great actress but holy shit is her wise-cracking character Ironheart out of place here.) I’m sure the new five years of sequels and Disney+ miniseries and cartoons and whatever will all be fine. In fact, to be more positive, Black Panther 2 is maybe the best possible movie that the MCU machine can produce at this point. However, that also feels like a damn miserable upper limit.

This year I skipped Thor: Love and Thunder, and all reports out of that movie seem to support my decision. Apparently, it is just a complete mess, especially on a technical level. I am not too surprised, since the quality control at Disney has been in the toilet for some time, with some downright shockingly bad CG work in marquee projects. They released a Star Wars TV show this year where Obi-Wan and Darth Vader had a battle that looked roughly as bad as the CG compositing in the 1995 FMV game Rebel Assault II. I still cannot believe how bad The Lizard looked in Spider-Man: No Way Home. The problem is that things like Thor 4 seems to be the standard, that's the kind of movie they want to be making. Black Panther 2 is the exceptional outlier.

And even then, the movie looks murky as shit! I thought my local AMC theater was somehow screwing up the presentation and the projector was off. Not the case. Considering how blurry dingy so many scenes looked in the theater, this is going to look like complete brown gunk on your television in a few months. They are making very ugly movies and the MCU is not getting better. They’ve so badly abused their tech houses and pump out so much raw product, Disney as a corporation has completely fallen out of love in any pride of craft. Labor abuses rarely result in better products. Black Panther 2 looks like it was shot under a foot of mud. I really hope Ryan Coogler works with anybody other than the MCU for his next project, because he is better than this.

The brutal truth is that Black Panther 2 was gifted a magnificent emotional resonance thanks to Chadwick Boseman’s passing. It is a terrible loss, he's was an incredible actor and from all reports, a great man, nobody would want this to happen. But this was also an opportunity to channel all that pain into a different kind of Marvel movie. There are real feelings of grief, the loss of a son, the loss of a brother, the loss of a lover, the loss of an inspiration figure, that could ground all this fantastic imagery down into the temporal. Something that means something to people beyond "wow, that looked sorta cool for an afternoon". Instead, the MCU is barely interested in any of that. We have to brush all that aside to make room for confusing, meaningless international politics between two imaginary kingdoms fighting over resources that do not exist.

Three hours of this. 

If any movie could have landed its point in two hours, it should have been Black Panther 2. Instead, its flabby and exhausting. We need to keep cutting away to comic relief characters played by Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus a thousand miles away shot by some third unit. We need to create an entire subplot for an Iron Man successor because the Content Gears need to keep turning. And also, somebody has to find a way to make a Return of the Jedi reference in the same breath as a Beauty and the Beast pull. (Such delicious synergy to Disney-owned properties, you can experience all of this wonder with a Walt Disney World vacation for the entire family, now more out of reach price-wise for the average American than ever.) We have two entirely different action climaxes full of whales and mermen and cyber-suits and lasers and winged feet and bullshit, all these incredible things to dazzle and numb you. Please stop thinking about real things. We need to set the stage for stupid crap to happen in Ant-Man 3, people, no times for tears!

I just wanted people to be people. To take a moment and cry. Those scenes exist, and as mentioned, they are are literally ghetto’d off. A funeral scene is shunted away in a cold open before the Marvel logo starts up, and a dramatic reveal of new-found family happened after the end credits start. All that pushed to the margins, because the MCU proper cannot stomach this kind of universal emotion. There’s no way to mutter after a funeral “well… that happened” and not look callous. Between Lupita Nyong'o and Angela Bassett you have some of the greatest black actresses working today, and they need to be shoved off so you can flip a muscle car with a water bomb or something. Is that better?

Black Panther 1 was this beautiful statement of mythmaking, a special thing that movies rarely achieve blockbuster or otherwise. It offered a dream of an Africa still safe and not marauded by European colonization and capitalism. Wakanda could be the shining beacon, if only in our imaginations, of a homeland for people whose culture and history had been stolen from them. Black Panther 2 tries to double the trick with a new Mayan/Aztec Atlantis, but also completely drops the ball on any decolonization fantasies. Instead, the untouched refuges from white domination are also brutal theocracies prone to genocidal rage to control precious resources. A better world isn’t possible, because in the end, we’re all the same kind of asshole regardless of the color of our skin. Wakanda Forever did not just bury Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, it buried Wakanda.

Maybe I’m alone, maybe I’m a grump, maybe I’m just somebody who does not want to be pleased. But also, I am somebody who tried to make Black Panther 2 one of my rare event films, I invited as many people as I could to go see it on Saturday – and got very little interest. Maybe the MCU is not the invincible thousand-year empire of filmmaking that it thinks it is. My little brother muttered at one point "...three hours of this" while watching. I’m not opposed to big ridiculous superhero spectacle on principal, I saw One Piece Film: Red a week ago and thought it was wonderful. I just finished Bayonetta 3 and that is going far sillier and to far more absurd places than anything the MCU would ever dare achieve.

You could get a talented director, the most unfortunate yet fertile of artistic circumstances, a great cast, one of the most inspiring pop culture new fantasies in my lifetime, and put it together, and this is the best we can do. Space opera Africans fighting aquatic Mesoamericans over glowing rocks. If you want to mourn Chadwick Boseman, go watch his performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, he's sublime in that. Don't go see Black Panther 2 unless you want three hours of glowing rock wars.

Adding the X-Men or the Fantastic Four or Squirrel Girl or whatever else is not going to fix it. It's just going to be more of this, for decades and decades. I just can't imagine going to see any of it. What useful art is there left to gleam? What surprises will there be, other than the next movies somehow looking worse and being less interesting than what came before?

I’m thinking of ending things with the MCU.