kata 🌊 aqua!

I’m not even going to try and rate this because I don’t know if it’s possible. This is a really good movie, but for a lot of very challenging reasons.

It is a tremendous tribute to Chadwick Boseman. I cried on more than one occasion and deeply appreciate the movie giving itself and viewers a chance to quietly reflect on a career ended far too soon. It’s clear everyone involved felt this loss a ton, and as a result there are several deeply moving performances, particularly those of Lupita Nyong'o, Angela Bassett, and Letitia Wright. 

Beyond the tribute, though, there’s the core conflict with Namor (K'uk'ulkan) and the underwater nation of Talokan, which appears largely unchanged from what was likely originally pitched. Tenoch Huerta Mejía’s performance is just awesome and he’s just cool to watch on-screen. He darts about the sky like some fantastic otherworldly thing and absolutely owns every single scene he’s in. But the choice to make the core enemy of this movie a mutated group of Mayans who hid underwater to escape Spanish Conquistadors is uhhhhhhhhhhhh fuckin questionable my dudes! Huerta does his best to sell it but good god! The fact that Polygon and other outlets are using the phrase “indigenous rage” to describe the actions of the people of Talokan fucking sucks, no way around it! Namor is right to want to burn the world down and a braver version of this concept would have empowered him to do so. 

So that’s the complicated part. Chadwick’s loss is felt here in every single way but if it weren’t for that what we’d have left is a movie where a recluse-yet-powerful African nation follows up on the events with Killmonger by proceeding to make an indigenous people kneel to their own morals. So! MCU politics!!

As far as MCU stuff goes, the action sequences are fantastic, and like the first, they very much reflect Coogler’s love for anime—except there are far fewer CGI issues in this one. Someone please let Ryan Coogler direct a DBZ adaptation, okay? He is the only director who would capture the cartoon aesthetic that movie deserves. Admittedly, the lighting in a lot of these sequences is just straight up bad, but like, Disney hasn’t released a movie with decent night shots in nearly a generation, so that’s to be expected. 

Coogler also commands some incredible performances across the board, with some real fun stuff for unexpected faces like Julia Louis-Dreyfus to chew on for a while. Bassett is great, Wright is great, Huerta is great, newcomer Dominique Thorne is wonderful and I can’t wait to see her interact with the rest of the Young Avengers we’ve seen develop throughout phase 4. 

But uh. Jeez! Sort of a mixed bag! I liked the movie? But damn if this universe’s politics aren’t fucking whack. 

There ya go. Winston Duke remains my favorite. End review.