The hype for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever seems to have reached an all-time high. With only two days until the Phase Four swansong makes its bow, all while sporting a healthy critic score of 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, fans will no doubt be lining up in droves for what could very well be the greatest Marvel project of the year.
The film boasts a cast to die for, including Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Michaela Coel, and Tenoch Huerta, and the ensemble nature of Wakanda Forever‘s players weave in a sort of complexity that arguably hasn’t been tapped into before.
Much of this complexity seems to be owed to Huerta, who portrays the film’s antagonist Namor, the leader of the Talokan people who see Wakanda as their adversary. Marvel Studios, of course, is no stranger to bringing complex villains into the fold, much less so with any film that has “Black Panther” in the title, but Namor nevertheless looks primed to set that particular bar higher than ever before.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Alex Livinalli, who portrays the elite Talokan warrior Attuma, explained how Namor doesn’t lead his warriors out of greed or a quest for dominance or anything of the sort. He’s simply trying to protect his people from the rest of the world, much like how Wakanda once did via secrecy.
I think there’s so many similarities to Wakanda, how they are away from the world in order to preserve their way of life, their resources, [and their ability] to be themselves. Now in this particular moment, we see how the Wakandans deal with the conflict, and then how we deal with the conflict. But I think at the end of the day, everyone’s just trying to do right by their people with no ill intent of, ‘We’re going to do this to you because we’re just bad.’
It’s only natural that a character as legendary as Namor, who first appeared in Marvel Comics back in the 1930s and who holds the distinction of being the first ever mutant in the Marvel canon, is crafted appropriately for his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, and we can’t wait to see what Huerta does with the role when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever releases in theaters on Nov. 11.
