Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is here after nearly five years since the release of the first one and here are my thoughts.

I would like to start off by saying that the acting in this film is amazing. There are some especially good performances by Winston Duke as M’Baku and Danai Gurira as Okoye. But who really steals the show is Angela Basset as Queen Ramonda, who I  believe should receive an Oscar nomination for her performance.

The score by Ludwig Göransson(The Mandalorian and Creed) does a great job of complimenting the film’s visuals and expanding on some of the themes from previous installments.

This movie does introduce some new characters. Namor(Tenoch Huerta) is the antagonist of the film. While his motives were strong, Huerta’s performance helps wrap up the character in a nice package and I look forward to seeing what Marvel does with him next. Another new character is Ironheart(Dominique Thorne) who has a lot of energy and is an overall good character but her inclusion in this movie simply felt like Marvel was trying to introduce a character.

One problem with the movie however is the runtime, a whopping 2 hours and 41 minutes. Couple this with the fact that there is a subplot with Everett Ross(Martin Freeman) that feels virtually unnecessary. If that subplot were cut from the movie entirely, it would tighten up the runtime and let the emotion of the film set in better.

All that being said, this film does a good job of handling the absence of Chadwick Boseman who passed away in August 2020. His absence of course does not take away from the movie, but it makes you wonder what could have been.Overall its a good movie and fans of the MCU are sure to like it.