Zack Snyder is the epitome of a “vibes” director, his works all flair, no substance, at least insofar as his unique aesthetic qualifies as stylish. From 300 to Justice League, you know what to expect: unfettered maximalism, a gratuitous over reliance on slow-mo in fight scenes, lens flare aplenty and anything else that one might chuck in the frame for unrelenting stimuli. Some love it, some hate it. This isn’t the sort of visual language you’d typically associate with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, whose movies are typically expansive, but never in lieu of clever script work: style is dictated by content, not vice versa.
Enter sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Coogler’s most stylistically unrestrained film, and one which suffers for it. Not all’s bad: as with its predecessor, director of photography Rachel Morrison contributes some gorgeous compositions. Take the landscape shots of Wakanda, similarly luscious to James Cameron’s idyllic vision of the Avatar home planet Pandora, an ecological gemstone with glistening waterfalls and abundant jungles. But this is also a movie where much of the action takes place at night, as tends to be the want of the special effects reliant superhero genre, or in CG-heavy underwater vistas that seem shot through a layer of vaseline.
Then comes one of Coogler’s more incogruous stylistic choices, mostly constrained to the fight scenes: there’s a lot of slow-mo going on here, from the big ensemble battles pocked throughout Wakanda Forever‘s second half, to the final duel between our hero and anti-imperialist big bad Namor (Tenoch Huerta). The effect isn’t bad in and of itself, offering a little extra heft to punches and blows, but it’s the sort of thing you implement sparingly, like salt in a cake; here, one wonders if the lid wasn’t screwed on right. Once we get to the third act, and blue not-Atlantians start scrapping with super-warriors on the deck of a giant ship at however many frames per second, it all verges on self-parodic campiness.