The movie opens with the death of T'Challa - the charismatic and charming Chadwick Boseman (Wikipedia) died before this movie started filming, and I'll give them credit for managing an appropriate tribute to him. But then Wakanda gets entangled in a battle with Namor and the people of Talokan (an undersea city - in the original comics, Namor was from Atlantis). And this ties them to Riri Williams (played by Dominique Thorne), an engineering student and "genius inventor" from MIT who's pulled into this mess because she invented a vibranium detector. (Marvel historians tell us Riri Williams will go on to be "Iron Heart," an Iron Man knock-off.)

There are significant parts of the movie (totalling about 20 minutes of the 160 minute run-time) that are so dark as to be unwatchable on DVD. I have a good, big screen. I even have a very dark room. I couldn't see shit. The directors and DP's see that the camera is successfully acquiring an image in extremely low light ... Maybe it works in theatres, but the logical leap to think this works for home viewing is incorrect. It SUCKS.

According to Wikipedia: "Angela Bassett received widespread acclaim for her performance as Queen Ramonda, and became the first actress to win a major individual acting award [a Golden Globe] for a Marvel film." Seriously? I thought her "acting" was the worst of the histrionics in this super-powered soap opera. Bassett is a capable actress - if nothing else, she was outstanding in "Strange Days." But her acting isn't the only problem with this mess. We have an abundance of characters from other movies that you're expected to know about (most notably Martin Freeman as CIA agent Everett K. Ross) - you've watched all 27(?) previous Marvel movies, right? And we're getting more and more into the "how can we make everybody fight everybody (because fans want to know who would win) but not kill off our Intellectual Property/Cash Cow?" They also went full Namor: pointy ears, wings on the ankles that allow him to fly, bulletproof skin - and neither the script nor Tenoch Huerta Mejía in the role made Namor either appealing or interesting.

This movie is enough of a mess that I'm starting to re-think my recent negative review of "Black Adam," which is at least better than this garbage. And it didn't try to test me to see if I had the superpower of seeing in the dark. A disappointment after the original "Black Panther."