Black PantherSave

Oakland, California, 1992. A Wakandan prince named N'Jobu — sent into the diaspora as an undercover spy years earlier and gone radical — is in his apartment teaching his young son the constellations through a homemade telescope. He has just smuggled vibranium out of Wakanda with the help of South African arms dealer Ulysses Klaue. He hears a Bifrost-like rumble outside. King T'Chaka — N'Jobu's older brother — appears in his living room with Zuri, a fellow operative. They've discovered the smuggling. They confront him. N'Jobu pulls a gun. T'Chaka pulls panther claws. The fight ends with the king's claws through his brother's chest. T'Chaka orders Zuri to bury the body and leave the boy behind in Oakland. The camera lifts up into the sky over the apartment block at sunset and the boy is still inside, alone, looking through a telescope at a country he doesn't know exists.

Twenty-six years later. Prince T'Challa, days from his coronation, picks up Nakia in the back of a Nigerian truck convoy where she's running undercover ops against Boko Haram. She kills a half-dozen kidnappers with combat blades before T'Challa drops his cloaking and helps her finish. The two of them rescue twelve schoolgirls and walk out. Nakia is reluctant to leave the work — her view of Wakanda is that it should be helping out here, not hiding — but she comes back with him for the coronation. Okoye, head of the Dora Milaje royal guard, is in the truck driver's seat. The whole sequence is shot like an Afrobeats spy film and the entire Wakandan future-tech is dropped into the audience's lap in three minutes without a single line of exposition.

Wakanda. Bashenga's Mountain. The five tribes — Border, Mining, River, Merchant, and the mountain Jabari — gather at Warrior Falls for the coronation. T'Challa's mother Queen Ramonda crowns him. Then the Jabari challenge — M'Baku, a mountain bull of a man in a wooden gorilla mask, descends from the cliffs with his men and challenges T'Challa to ritual combat without the herb's enhancement. The two of them fight in the spring above the falls with bone spears, M'Baku roaring like the Hanuman his people worship. T'Challa wins on a chokehold and lets M'Baku live. "Yield. Your people need you." M'Baku yields. T'Challa, crowned, drinks the heart-shaped herb tea and enters the ancestral plane on a savanna at sunset. His father T'Chaka, alive, in the spirit world, holds him. "A man who has not prepared his children for his own death has failed as a father." T'Challa wakes up the new king.

London, present day. The British Museum, African artifacts wing. A tall American man in a hoodie and sneakers is on a guided tour with a coffee cup in his hand. He asks the British curator about a vibranium-edged axe in the case in front of him. She gives him a dismissive lecture. He smiles. "How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price?" He drinks his poisoned coffee. The curator falls. Klaue and a four-man team burst into the gallery, smash the cases, and walk out with the axe. The hoodie man — Erik Stevens, USMC ex-Black Ops, codename Killmonger — walks out behind them. He's been Klaue's quiet inside man for months. The vibranium artifact is bait.

T'Challa hears about the museum job. Klaue is the man who killed his grandfather and who has been the regional reason for thirty years of border violence. He, Okoye, and Nakia travel to Busan, South Korea, where Klaue is selling the axe to undercover CIA buyer Everett Ross for $6M USD. T'Challa walks into the casino in a gold-trim jacket and a panther shawl and the auction breaks into a four-way firefight — Wakandans against Klaue's crew against Ross's agents — that spills out of the casino into a car chase through Busan's neon streets. Okoye breaks off her wig, drives a spear through a windshield, and surfs the hood of a moving sedan. Klaue, captured in person by T'Challa, is shipped to a CIA holding cell where Ross interrogates him while Wakandan extradition is being argued upstairs.

The holding cell is breached in three minutes by a tactical team led by Killmonger. He guns through six agents, takes a bullet to the shoulder shrugging it off, walks up to Klaue's cell, and shoots him point-blank in the chest. Ross dives in front of T'Challa during the breach and takes a vibranium-laced bullet to the spine. Killmonger walks out with Klaue's body in a duffel bag. T'Challa — angry that his nemesis is dead at the hand of an outsider, scared because the bullet that hit Ross was made of Wakandan vibranium — flies Ross back to Wakanda to save his life. He's bringing a CIA officer into the sealed city for the first time in five thousand years. The Council loses its mind.

Killmonger arrives at the Border Tribe checkpoint hours later carrying Klaue's body. W'Kabi — Okoye's husband, leader of the Border Tribe, the man who has waited his whole life for someone to bring him Klaue's corpse — escorts him into the throne room. Killmonger flips a Wakandan war ring out of his pocket, the same ring N'Jobu wore in Oakland. He pulls down his hoodie and shows the throne room ninety-six raised scars on his chest, one per confirmed kill in his career. He's N'Jadaka, son of Prince N'Jobu, born in Oakland, US Navy SEAL trained in JSOC, masters in international relations from Annapolis, PhD coursework at MIT, deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and South Sudan, every name he's killed cut into his own skin. He invokes blood challenge for the throne.

Warrior Falls again. No herb-enhancement on either side this time. T'Challa is fighting an opponent who's been training for this combat since he was eight. Killmonger fights like a man who has nothing to lose and a list of grievances long enough to fill the river beneath them. He breaks T'Challa's spear. He throws him to the ground. He drives a blade through T'Challa's chest and over the edge of the falls. T'Chaka's son tumbles down through the spray into the river below and the camera holds on the empty stone as Killmonger raises the dripping blade to the watching tribes. The Border Tribe kneels. Killmonger is king. He drinks the heart-shaped herb. He visits N'Jobu in the ancestral plane — a small Oakland apartment, not a savanna — and his father weeps over what was lost. Killmonger does not. "Maybe your home is the one that's lost. That's why they can't find us." He orders the herb garden burned. No future king will have access to the herb without his blessing.

Nakia, Shuri, Ramonda, and Ross — who can't be brought to the conventional Wakandan hospital because of Killmonger's purge — flee on a hover-skiff to the Jabari mountains. M'Baku, on a snowy plateau, accepts them. He shows them T'Challa: alive, frozen in a cryo-pack of ice and snow, kept alive by Jabari herbalists since they fished him out of the river. Nakia gives him the last of the heart-shaped herb she stole on the way out. T'Challa wakes up in the ancestral plane and confronts his father one more time. This time he doesn't accept the answers. "You were wrong! All of you were wrong! To turn your backs on the rest of the world! We let the fear of our discovery stop us from doing what is right. No more!" He breaks the ancestral cycle. He wakes up with a different mission than the one he was crowned into.

The civil war is over by sundown. T'Challa flies in on his royal Talon ship and challenges Killmonger's claim. Border Tribe stays with Killmonger. Dora Milaje stays with T'Challa. Okoye looks her husband W'Kabi in the eye on the battlefield and refuses to stand down — "would you kill me, my love?" — and W'Kabi drops his weapon. The Jabari ride down from the mountains in an armored war column led by M'Baku and tip the balance. Ross, in a glass cockpit linked remotely to Shuri's lab, pilots a Wakandan fighter and shoots down two cargo planes full of vibranium weapons before they can leave the country to arm Killmonger's diaspora cells. Shuri leads the tech defense from her lab with her bracelet panther-cannons. T'Challa and Killmonger fight one last time inside the vibranium mining facility — a hand-to-hand brawl on a magnetic-suspension mineral-cart track sliding through a kilometer of underground rail. T'Challa drives a Panther claw through Killmonger's stomach and pins him to the wall.

The film ends in Oakland again. T'Challa and Shuri land a cloaked Wakandan ship in the same basketball court outside the apartment where N'Jobu died. The neighborhood kids spill out of the projects and stare. T'Challa announces that Wakanda is buying the apartment block, the surrounding lot, and a fifteen-block grid around it — building a Wakandan International Outreach Center on the site, the first of many. Shuri will run the science wing. Nakia will run the social wing. T'Challa walks up to a kid who looks the way Killmonger looked at the start of the movie and lets the boy touch the cloaked ship.

Mid-credits: the United Nations in Vienna. T'Challa is at the podium telling the assembly that Wakanda is no longer hidden. "For the first time in our history, we will be sharing our knowledge and resources with the outside world. Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows." A delegate at the back asks "with all due respect, King T'Challa, what can a nation of farmers offer the rest of the world?" T'Challa just smiles. Cut to credits. Post-credits: a wooden hut on a hillside in the Wakandan plains. Children walking with goats see a white man with shoulder-length hair come out of the hut. They run to him and say "White Wolf." Bucky Barnes, now de-brainwashed by Shuri off-screen after the events of Civil War (2016), smiles. He's grafting his new vibranium arm onto his shoulder. The kid asks how it feels. "It's healing."