Itâd be an understatement to call Marvelâs latest offering a success. The second Black Panther installation had global box office sales pass $400M in less than a week, along with an 84% criticsâ score and a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. But despite these rare and impressive achievements, I couldnât help leaving the theater with a bad taste in my mouth. While the film did a great job of centering Black womenâs perspectives, it struggled throughout with its portrayal of Mayan people, history and culture, resulting in a product thatâs disappointing at best, and regressive at worst. Sadly, the most notable instance of Indigenous Latinx representation in the MCU feeds into a ton of negative stereotypes, which ultimately highlights the shortcomings of representation and identity politics.
The inhabitants of Talokan, an underwater Mayan civilization led by Namor, have always been blue-skinnedâbut itâs worth noting that they havenât always been Mayan. In the comics, Atlantis was their domain; but to have stayed faithful to that wouldâve put this film in direct conflict with Marvelâs Aquaman, so they created Talokan for the sake of IP consistency. Itâs pretty clear this wasnât thought through in a careful manner, because keeping these characters blue creates a sense of otherness that permeates Talokan, similar to Cameronâs Avatar (2009), resulting in a dehumanized portrayal of indigenous people, highlighting just how much of themselves has been lost via trauma. In fact, the Mayans in this film are portrayed in a way thatâd have viewers think they were shaped exclusively by their past sufferings.
Viewers donât really get to see Talokanos, or Namor, beyond their pain (even Namorâs name comes from the Spanish âsin amor,â which translates to âwithout loveâ). It was Spanish colonialism that drove these Mayans into the sea, and itâs a fear of future exploitation that makes them threaten to attack if Wakanda alerts Western powers of Talokanâs existence. Colonization is thereby positioned as a central element to these characters. Even their architecture reflects an inability to develop outside the pastâs shadow, with set design modeling the submerged metropolis after sites like TenochtitlĂĄn. In this way and so many others, Talokan is shown as being frozen in time.
But surely a country with vibranium, an alien metal useful for technology, would have developed and changed after 500 yearsâas all cultures do. Failing to take this into account is an erasure of living indigenous communities in Latin America, and results in the film really mishandling Latinx futurity. Itâs shockingly offensive to essentialize Latinosâ trauma and say theyâre molded merely by what has been done to them. Even Namorâs plan (to attack any threat to his people) is framed within this matrix of paranoia and misery when itâs misrepresented by Wakandaâs Princess Shuri continuously saying he wants to âdestroy the [entire] surface world,â then collaborating with the CIA to stop him from doing so. Such issues of agency are present throughout the film.
While Wakanda chose to hide from the world, Talokan was driven into hiding. The inability of the filmâs indigenous characters to control their sociopolitical environment is even reflected in the final scene. Many say Wakanda Forever ends on a note of solidarity, but Iâd push back on this. Only when Shuri uses the Black Pantherâs power to threaten Namorâs life does he choose to relent. While âcomply or dieâ is often the stance of many countriesâ diplomacy when it comes to Latin America, one would be hard pressed to call this solidarity, or even a choice. Because of this, the film fails to break the colonial framework of conquest. Namorâs change of heart is so sudden it feels more like a moment where the ânoble savagesâ are shown the error of their ways than anything else. Maybe this has to do with the lack of dialogue given to Talokanos.
In the almost three-hour duration of Wakanda Forever, Iâd be shocked if Namorâs people got more than 2 minutes of onscreen dialogue. When they do speak, itâs almost exclusively about war or battle, which carries a ton of historical baggage considering the stereotypes around pre-Hispanic indigenous communities being âwarlikeâ or âhyper-aggressive,â a generalization thatâs tangentially tied to the way colonial gazes fetishize contemporary Latin Americans as being âintensely passionate.â This is a really big downfall of the film because, without their voices centered within its bloated runtime, all we see is a bunch of blue people with spears speaking Mayan. If youâre going to break with the canon and invent a fictitious Mayan civilization, then you should obviously adjust the story as needed so that those perspectives are handled with care. The saddest part is, it didnât have to be this way.
More interesting questions of US and French imperialism are abandoned within the first ten minutes. Instead, Wakanda Forever chose to focus on two non-colonized superpowers fighting one another while a good-guy CIA agent works against his vaguely-bad government. Because of how trauma is essentialized for Talokanâs inhabitants, theyâre never developed. We never really hear from them. This speaks to larger questions of representation and identity politics, and whether either is enough within the context of todayâs movie-making industry, which is by-and-large controlled by mega-corporations who often consult the military at some level of the production process. Wakanda Forever is just one of many examples where water is carried for these institutions while being masked as progressive. Thereâs no doubting its cultural impact, but I think itâs a fair critique to say opportunities were missed, and perhaps not all choices in it were the best.