With Avengers: Infinity War ushering in the Age of Thanos and a whole universe of unprecedented mass chaos, it’s a good thing that Black Panther has introduced at least one incomparable secret weapon that just might save the day.
Black Panther revealed a whole world beyond what superhero movies had ever dared to dream of. The truth of its fictional African nation of Wakanda, which has been hidden under a layer of deceptively barren plains for generations, is that it’s a secret utopia overflowing with precious vibranium and technological marvels the likes of which not even the alien gods of Asgard could imagine.
The best part, though? The mastermind behind Wakanda’s most astonishing innovations is none other than a brilliant, cheeky-as-hell teen girl.
King T’Challa’s 16-year-old sister Shuri (the wonderful Letitia Wright) has an elastic, game-for-anything energy that’s almost as infectious as her luminous grin. Her playful teasing is the only thing that can crack her brother’s otherwise somber affect — mischievous little sisters are always good that way — but she’s also quickly revealed to be the wickedly smart force behind every mind-blowing Wakandan invention Black Panther throws at us. If T’Challa’s Blank Panther and his spy ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) are Wakanda’s James Bonds — and they are, per director Ryan Coogler — Shuri is their Q, steering them to success with her quick wit and quicker mind.
“I thought it’d be really interesting seeing a young African teenager who’s manipulated [vibranium] in ways that nobody else could,” Coogler told Slashfilm, “and who’s confident and able to have her own space.”
Even more notably, Shuri sees zero reason to be humble about her brilliance — and honestly, why should she? Her hyper-advanced home base makes Tony Stark’s lab of bombastic gadgets look like a box of dingy Legos.
That’s exactly why Shuri is more than just an awesome part of Black Panther, or the feisty Disney princess we need and deserve. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe introducing a new generation of superheroes in its third phase — which also includes the debuts of the Wasp and Doctor Strange, the reintroduction of Spider-Man into the fold, and the upcoming solo Captain Marvel film — and Black Panther officially revealing Wakanda to the world, there’s no reason a genius black girl with infinity tricks up her sleeve shouldn’t assume the role of its most brilliant ambassador.
Shuri’s ingenious inventions put Marvel’s older, more experienced experts to shame
The heart of Shuri’s brilliance is her ability to take vibranium — the precious, otherworldly metal lurking in Wakanda’s very foundation — and twist it into more and more exciting inventions that keep the country at the top of the pack, whether the world realizes it or not.
She engineered a remote piloting system that lets her join any mission, no matter where in the world it might be. She’s responsible for T’Challa’s sound-absorbing “sneakers” (get it?) and slick Blank Panther suit, which can spring onto his body from a necklace of spikes, seemingly out of nowhere. She harnessed vibranium’s energy to improve a public transit system so fast that the first time Black Panther showed it, I literally blinked and missed it.
But even though much of Black Panther’s Wakanda is a world where black women are a vital part of life and can ascend to any position, Shuri still gets her fair share of skepticism from the men around her. When mountain tribe leader M’Baku (Winston Duke) challenges T’Challa for the throne, for instance, one of his biggest gripes with the way things have been going is that Wakanda’s greatest assets have been entrusted to “a child.”
When CIA agent Everett (Martin Freeman) wakes up in Wakanda after taking a bullet in the spine, he can hardly believe he’s not dead. To be fair, by all rights and widely accepted medical knowledge, he really should be. But when he sputters to Shuri that his recovery has to be something like magic, she all but rolls her eyes.
“Not magic,” she says. “Technology.”
For Shuri, isolating Everett’s injury was a piece of cake. In fact, as she says, practically skipping with glee, when Everett is first wheeled into her lab, “fixing another white boy” is “gonna be fun.”
And yes, I said “another,” because as we see in Black Panther’s second bonus end-credits scene, Shuri has also worked her magic — sorry, science — on a figure that has stumped the greatest minds in the MCU for years. While Tony Stark patted himself on the back for getting his Iron Man suit to fly faster, Shuri was curing Bucky Barnes of his Cold War brainwashing in her spare time.
By the end of Black Panther, T’Challa — flanked by Shuri and the other remarkable women in his life — informs the United Nations that Wakanda is now willing to share some of its innovations in order to make the world a better, safer place. To literally put his money where his mouth is, he’s bought several blocks of real estate in Oakland, California, to operate as Wakanda’s first outpost, with Shuri’s technology leading the way.
The combination of Shuri taking on this role and curing Bucky when literally no one else could has positioned her to be one of the MCU’s greatest assets — especially given that Avengers: Infinity War has the potential to seriously shake up the status quo of its current superhero stable.
For years, we’ve watched Marvel’s geniuses lose control of their creations to catastrophic ends. Shuri could change that.
One of the few constants in the ballooning Marvel Cinematic Universe is that tech wiz Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) and tortured scientist Bruce Banner (a.k.a. the Hulk) are the two smartest people in the world and no one can hope to touch their ingenuity. When viewers met Tony back in 2008’s Iron Man, he had already built a billion-dollar empire on his smarts and was continuing to design and perfect weapons in order to protect what he considered to be the greater good.
Basically: If anyone in the MCU had a problem that needed fixing with technology, the default instinct was to consult Tony and/or Bruce. If they couldn’t fix it, the logic went, you’d be kinda screwed until your enemies (hopefully) messed up.
But if you’ve seen just about any Marvel movie in which Tony Stark makes an appearance, you might have already spotted the flaw in this idea: Tony may be brilliant, but he is also a mess.
Tony, head of Stark Industries, was taken by surprise when he realized his tech was being used to weaponize the world. Almost every new Iron Man suit he’s created has backfired on him, often literally. Tony and Bruce’s experimentation with artificial intelligence resulted in the accidental creation of Ultron, an all-powerful cyborg that took the assets the two scientists gave it for “peacekeeping” and tried to bring the entire world crashing down.
This offense-minded brand of genius, however well-intentioned, has been misused time and time again in the MCU. While Bruce has the self-awareness to be conflicted about the consequences of his actions, Tony especially tends to believe he simply knows better than everyone else, despite evidence to the contrary.
But Black Panther reveals a different, more promising characterization of superheroic genius. While the Avengers were scurrying about the globe trying to update their supersuits to outwit their ever-more-threatening enemies, teen genius Shuri was quietly leading Wakanda into the technological future — a future that pointedly sees a way forward through protection rather than destruction.
In fact, the most powerful weapon we see Shuri create is essentially a shield built into the Black Panther suit, which can absorb hits as kinetic energy to whip back in a foe’s unsuspecting face. Many of the vibranium-laced weapons we see are pointedly from times gone by, forged in fires far removed from Shuri’s lab. When she finally breaks out a pair of blaster gauntlets by the movie’s end (pictured above), they are a last resort.
As Erik Killmonger’s determination to stage a worldwide coup showed, Shuri’s creations could become powerful in all the wrong ways if they were to fall into the wrong hands. But when she tells her brother that her ethos is “just because something works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved,” she’s not talking about upgrading some blaster to strike fear into the heart of enemies. She’s talking about innovations that directly improve lives beyond her own — a lesson men like Tony Stark tend not to absorb until it literally blows up in their faces.
By the end of Black Panther, T’Challa has decided that Wakanda hoarding its knowledge isn’t the best way forward — and that it will take an equally sharp and compassionate mind like his sister’s to make sure they can use their resources responsibly on a global scale. If Marvel knows what’s good for it, it will do the same and recognize that Shuri is — like Black Panther itself — the kind of game changer its next evolution needs.
Updated to reflect Shuri’s role in Avengers: Infinity War, and that women may, in fact, be able to become the Black Panther. (Wakanda forever!)