![]() Partway through the film, Namor explains that Talokan came to be hundreds of years ago, when European colonizers came to the Yucatán peninsula, bringing disease that spread among the Indigenous peoples like wildfire. This new version of Namor comes from Talokan, an underwater nation founded on and around this other source of vibranium. The film’s biggest twist is a small one: the revelation that vibranium, the mystery metal that fuels Wakanda’s technology and economy, exists somewhere else on Earth. It’s also effectively meaningless: This arrogance isn’t necessarily rooted in anything it’s merely who he is.Īll of this is different in Wakanda Forever. ![]() This means he’s tremendous fun to have in a story, and why he’s endured for nearly a century. He’s arrogant, rude, proud, thoroughly convinced of his own superiority and not shy about telling you. Inheriting the mythical kingdom’s throne, Namor would quickly come to favor his Atlantean heritage after witnessing the surface world’s negligence toward the ocean, with the superpowers to back up his frequent threats to the land-lovers of Earth.Ĭomics Namor is also an absolute pill. In the Marvel comics - where Namor, also known as the Sub-Mariner, was one of the publisher’s first superpowered adventurers - the character’s origins lie in Atlantis, where he is born the son of a human explorer and an Atlantean princess. What Wakanda Forever does with Namor and his people is something more radical. ![]() Concurrent with an acclaimed comic book relaunch by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Coogler’s film gave the Black Panther and his kingdom a creative and thorough refresh that also highlighted much of what was already there, to make Wakanda a more perfect dream of an African diaspora. This is by necessity: Much of the comic book source material wasn’t suitable for modern sensibilities, trafficking in stereotypes and dated tropes in dire need of an update. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther films aren’t just works of adaptation, but reinvention. And like the best villains in any fiction, he’s simply inevitable, the effect of causes that should not have been forgotten. Like the few other good villains in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he is angry about something that matters, both to other characters in the film and to the real-world cultures he is a stand-in for. This is the first, powerful suggestion that there is an edge to Namor that is both different and familiar, one that, upon close examination, takes the cartoonish rage of the comic book character he’s based upon and roots it in something real. He is also, as he intones to Queen Ramonda, Namor to his enemies. He is K’uk’ulkan, as his people call him. In less than a minute, Tenoch Huerta’s performance adds to the myth, imbuing his first, brief monologue with wonder, curiosity, history, and menace. They call him K’uk’ulkan: the feathered serpent god.” It’s a level of mystique that Namor lives up to the first time he speaks for himself, sneaking into the hidden land of Wakanda. “His people,” Winston Duke’s M’Baku says in one of the film’s most memorable line readings, “do not call him General, or King. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever stresses this about its antagonist, a mysterious, superhuman man who emerges from the ocean’s depths to threaten the film’s heroes. They don’t have a word for what Namor is.
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