I’ll cop to it. I was never the biggest Black Widow fan.
In the whole MCU, she was one of the characters that did the least for me. How much of that was due to her character’s perpetual bouncing around in the stories of other MCU characters, while never having her own story explored is certainly up for debate.
The only Avenger who did less for me in the MCU is Hawkeye, so you can imagine my complete stone faced, lack of give-a-shit when the two of them wrestled over who would make the self sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame.
It was a moment that would have meant a lot more if Marvel fans would have seen their history in Budapest, which was only obliquely referenced in The Avengers and only slightly more so here in Black Widow. Neither character really got enough agency within the overarching MCU to really step into the spotlight as anything more than a supporting player.
After having seen the long (long….looooooong….) awaited solo Black Widow movie (long awaited for reasons I’ll get to in a minute) I can say that much of my antipathy toward Natasha Romanoff had been due to her lack of focused storytelling. As a solo effort, I can’t help but a conflicted mix of pleasently surprised, while also feeling that this would have meant a lot more if it had come along while Nat had been alive within the MCU.
No matter how good Black Widow might have been, making us care about a character after you killed them off (in a very “Girl In The Fridge” way I might add) will always seem ass backwards. I can’t help but think this movie would have played better if it had come out in the chronological timeline it takes place: after Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War.
So let’s talk about why that didn’t happen.
Don’t Be Like Ike
In order to figure out why Black Widow took such a long road to make it to the screen, I need to introduce you to a man named Ike.
Issac “Ike” Perlmutter is a name you have likely never heard of, unless you follow the inside baseball machinations of the entertainment industry (like a total weirdo…or like me).
For the first 10 or so years of the MCU he was the CEO of Marvel Entertainment. The guy from Marvel you may have heard of: Kevin Feige, worked under Ike Perlmutter even after the Disney buyout of Marvel.
Ike had…ideas about entertainment. I’ll be 100% honest and say that in most stories he comes of badly. He comes off pretty racist, misogynist and just generally a out of touch old crank in most stories.
In 2015, something big happened behind the scenes at Disney. Something big, and yet nearly imperceptible because very few job titles actually changed. All of the various film properties Disney had acquired were reshuffled under Walt Disney Studios head Alan Horn.
While at a long glance, this seems to be a typical corporate restructuring that any professional organization goes through. Behind the scenes this had one major effect: it got Kevin Feige out from under Ike. Kevin Feige was the goose laying golden eggs, and the shuffle that brought Marvel Studios under the umbrella of Walt Disney Studios was the elegant solution that kept the golden goose happy.
Feige hated working with Ike Permutter. Ike had two major issues that became non-issues after 2015. Firstly, he was known to not like spending money. It’s not a coincidence that Marvel opened the purse strings after the 2015 shake up, including making a deal with Sony to bring Spider-Man into the MCU, as well as spending to keep their bigger stars signing on for additional movies.
More importantly, Ike’s ideas about minorities and women (and the drawing power of these groups at the box office) held back the MCU in ways we wouldn’t see the true scope of for years. It’s no coincidence that MCU’s first female headlined superhero film Captain Marvel and first MCU film with a primarily Black cast in Black Panther were announced after this reshuffling. Ike didn’t want to do those movies.
It was also no coincidence that Inhumans, a property nobody at Marvel seemed excited about besides Perlmutter, promptly was removed from the Marvel film schedule and ended up as a TV series nobody watched.
What does all of this tell us? It tells us why Black Widow took 11 years to get a solo film. It also tells us why it came as a prequel after the characters death in Endgame.
While the competition between the MCU and the DCEU on the big screen has been a bit one sided for the past decade as the grimdark Snyderverse stumbled with 3 underperforming attempts to replicate Marvel’s success, one area where DC had been eating Marvel’s lunch was in female representation.
For all the faults of the DCEU, two of the unblemished bright spots have so far been in areas where Marvel was falling short. Wonder Woman beat Captain Marvel to the screen, and the success of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn managed to survive the hot mess that was Suicide Squad, to become a headlining character with her own female centric spinoff series Birds of Prey.
Note: The Birds of Prey film was originally titled Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, until the marketing people realized that title was confusing and the film was quietly retitled “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey” in theaters because people went to see the Harley Quinn movie and didn’t know what Birds of Prey was.
So let’s talk about the actual movie…
Black Widow is an MCU entry that feels firmly at home alongside Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a solid spy thriller set against the backdrop of an amped up superhero story. With some notable rough spots that I’ll get to, it manages to pull off a pretty fun espionage story with a familial theme at the center until the Marvel of it all kicks in and stuff starts going boom.
One of the ways I think Marvel formula sometimes gets in the way, is in how the spectacle often kicks in even in stories that don’t need it. The first two thirds of Black Widow present a really solid, action thriller more in line with the Mission: Impossible series. Hand to hand fights, vehicle chase scenes, scenes of rooftop foot chases and parkour goodness. The final third is the aforementioned stuff going boom section where the stuntwork takes a backseat to CGI explosions and destruction.
The spectacle stuff is fun, don’t get me wrong, but I felt like Black Widow‘s strengths were in the more intimate spy action realm and it didn’t need the big boom crash.
I guess with those vague thoughts out of the way, I’ll bring out the horn and start digging into spoilers territory.
At it’s heart, Black Widow is a film centering around the theme of complicated families. In the opening scenes we are introduced to young Natasha and her little sister Yelena, living in Ohio. Their idyllic childhoods are uprooted when they along with their mother Melina and father Alexei are forced to go on the run because the 4 of them are Russian spies and have been living under deep cover as a normal American family for 3 years.
During the escape we find out 2 things about Alexei. He burned down a top secret lab after stealing SHIELD secrets, and that he’s got some serious super strength going on.
While the family escapes via commuter plane, Melina is shot and Nat is forced to fly the craft with Alexei hanging on the wing apparently for the entire flight to Cuba.
Upon meeting the main antagonist Dreykov (Ray Winstone, MCU veteran last seen getting killed off in Thor Ragnarok), Natasha doesn’t want to go back to being a spy and valiantly tries to protect 6 year old Yelena from being sent back into The Red Room. Thanks to some paternal intervention from Alexei, Nat’s defiance ends with a tranquilizer and that leads us into a title sequence where we get glimpses of the training program that turns young girls into deadly mind controlled assassins called Black Widows.
The title credits are very well done, showing the dehumanizing training process the girls go through in the so called Red Room. It’s set to a haunting cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Think Up Anger feat Malia J.
I know it’s a weird thing to say, but the opening credit sequence is a serious highlight of this film, and for those who were looking for the origin story of a pre-SHIELD Natasha, this seems to be the closest we are likely to get (barring any further elaboration in the upcoming Hawkeye Disney+ series, which now seems like a possibility).
Hurt People Hurt People
One of the key themes that Black Widow tries to grapple with is the idea of Natasha trying to reconcile her Avengers, heroic persona with the reality of her old life as a trained killer. “Dreykov’s daughter” was namedropped in The Avengers during a scene where Loki taunts Nat about the “red in her ledger”. We see that scene depicted here and find out that killing Dreykov in Budapest was the last act that sealed Nat’s defection to Shield and that Dreykov’s daughter (carrying a red satchel – sometimes called a ledger – on her back…nice touch) was needed to lead them to him.
Nat mentions Dreykov’s daughter was collateral damage and her death was necessary, but we’re given enough glimpses of doubt that show that Nat may not be certain of the truth of that. Was it necessary, or was it just easier? “I needed out” is how Nat justifies the act in order to shut down that area of conversation, which is pretty close neighbors to “just get it done”.
Natasha’s dueling identities as espionage killer and superhero are constantly under scrutiny in the film. Yelena pointedly comments on how little girls dress up as Black Widow for Halloween, and how messed up that would be if they found out the awful things Natasha Romanoff has done (such as killing little girls). I know it’s a Marvel film in a genre where we just kind of ignore things like collateral damage and civilian casualties amidst all the super powered punching going on, and that collateral damage never really comes up unless it’s going to be relevant to the plot (that’s called foreshadowing kids). That acknowledgement out of the way, I kind of liked the idea that Black Widow was willing to at least address the elephant in the room that Natasha was a professional killer and the Halloween costume line serves as an acknowledgement that we (the audience by proxy) would probably like her less if we knew more of her history. We jumped on during the Good Nat years.
That’s why the title sequence is likely as close as we’ll ever get to seeing that origin story depicted, because it’s not pretty when you think about it. A montage glossing past the bloody parts gets muddy when you linger too long on any of the specifics. It’s one thing to say that a character is an assassin in a kind of hand waving, vague sort of way as a character description, but it’s another thing to grapple with the moral implications of that profession. The brainwashing and mind control aspects of Black Widows provides a bit of moral cover, but it’s still not fun to think about.
While we’re talking about grappling, let’s talk about Yelena…because the first time Natasha is in the same room with her estranged adoptive sister in decades of course ends up with them fighting each other because it’s a superhero movie and that’s just kinda how they say “hello”.
Yelena is played by Florence Pugh who also starred in Fighting With My Family which could have easily been the subtitle of this movie too. She is one of two scene stealers in the film (I’ll get to the other) and I guess we’ll see if her Russian accent is in it for the long haul or gets the ol’ Wanda Maximoff treatment and gradually just gets phased out.
Yelena is introduced in the film, under some form of chemically induced mind control, which she later points out to Nat, is a whole different kettle of fish to the psychological conditioning older Widows like Nat went through.
Yelena’s defection from the Widows, forces Dreykov to activate the “Taskmaster Protocol” which is the que for our secondary antagonist, Taskmaster to leap into action. This character represents probably one of the biggest departures from the comics since the Mandarin fake out in Iron Man III (which I still love). Taskmaster in the comics is an expert fighter who can learn to mimic the moves of anyone he studies. The same gimmick is kept here, but the identity under the mask is revealed to be…Antonia Dreykov who is decidedly NOT dead.
Note: Sometimes I wish I could turn my brain off because the moment I saw Olga Kurylenko in the credits, but she appeared in none of the promotional stuff, I figured it out about a half hour before the reveal.
In scanning responses to this rug pull, some of the criticisms I can understand and some I can’t (no, I don’t care that they gender swapped the character…die mad about it toxic nerds). The critique I’ve seen that is worth more of a look is that Black Widow essentially introduces a moral complication (Dreykov’s daughter) only to immediately absolve Natasha of responsibility by revealing that Antonia wasn’t dead.
While I can see the validity of such a criticism, I don’t think it takes away from the story being told. Black Widow is ultimately a story of patterns of abuse and breaking those patterns. Natasha’s guilt over Antonia’s death contributed to her becoming a better person. What this film does very well, is connect the dots between how the mercenary character we’ve known as Black Widow for a decade, a character who was known for changing allegiances in Civil War, could be the same person who made the self sacrifice play in Endgame.
We are shown a couple of occasions in this movie where Natasha is given the opportunity to take the easier path of hurting people for her own gain and chooses to do the harder thing. While being chased across the rooftops in Budapest by another Widow, Natasha ends up dangling precariously over an alley and yet Nat still reaches out and grabs the Widow who was chasing and trying to kill her. A woman who continues trying to kill her until she falls.
I’m jumping around a lot here, but Nat is presented a very similar choice later in the film. Taskmaster/Antonia gets locked in a cell on a floating space platform that is about to crash. Nat chooses to do the harder thing of letting this person who clearly wants to kill her out of the cell, because Black Widow is about breaking a cycle of abuse and not allowing one’s own hurt to contribute to the harm of others.
I don’t feel like Antonia’s survival undermines the story or “absolves” Nat of responsibility because for decades she clearly carried that guilt with her and this film shows how the “death” of Antonia changed Nat and made her a superhero. The moment Antonia was revealed to be alive and being used as a mind controlled weapon by her father Dreykov, Nat makes the decision to try to free her. Even if it makes Natasha’s life more difficult, she doesn’t take the easy way.
As far as other criticisms of Taskmaster, I don’t have enough knowledge to make that judgement. Apparently, he was more Deadpool jokey in the comics, but I don’t have an issue with not having that here as I don’t think a wisecracking villain would have fit the tone in this more grounded spy thriller.
We Are Family! I’ve Got All My Secret Spy Sisters and Me!
I’ve mentioned Florence Pugh and I wanted to circle back to Natasha’s Russian spy family because the core four actors involved here are really worth diving into.
Yelena provides a fun bit of contrast to the often dry and deadpan Natasha, by bringing the snark and the cynicism. It’s clear that Yelena is being positioned as the Black Widow carrying on the legacy going forward and this film immediately sets her up as a fun character. A great moment involves Yelena making fun of Nat’s Black Widow pose and hair flip move and it brings just the right amount of bratty sibling snark.
Beyond her jokey nature contrasting well with Nat’s stoicism, Yelena provides the emotional core of the film, not only setting the plot in motion, but being the one to bring the family unit together. While Nat, Alexei and Melina all have varying reasons for rejecting the notion that the four of them were a real family, it was real to Yelena. Yelena was only 3 when she went “undercover” in Ohio which wasn’t really undercover at that age.
Then we have the parents, Alexei and Melina played by David Harbour and Rachael Weisz respectively.
Alexei is revealed to have been the Russian answer to Captain America and the super soldier program as the Red Guardian. At some point, Red Guardian fell out of favour with Dreykov and was locked away in prison. Of course, when we meet him in the “modern” day of the film he’s out of shape, stuck in prison and tells stories about battling Captain America in 1983 that the other prisoners point out cannot be true because Cap was still in the ice.
David Harbour is a lot of fun in this movie. They get some joke mileage out of Alexei having let himself go since his superhero(?) days. Frankly, it’s a joke right out of the Incredibles, but I’m always happy to see some representation from a chubby fella squeezing into a super suit. (At least I have some cosplay options.) Alexei is a boorish dolt played for laughs, but Harbour manages to draw on enough of that Jim Hopper doting dad energy from Stranger Things that there is some real warmth there.
Alexei re-connecting with Yelena by singing Don McClean’s “American Pie” (which played on the tape deck during the family’s escape from Ohio) ends up being one of the more charming scenes in the film. While Natasha’s time in the MCU may have drawn to a close, Black Widow does a good job of setting up relationships for the future.
Unfortunately, Melina’s turn feels less complete, but I think that might be by design.
Melina is much harder to pin down than Alexei. I was never really sure whether there was any maternal affection there. Her character remains largely an enigma in the film and Rachael Weisz plays her as a woman who alternatingly seems to see her super pseudo family’s reappearance as an inconvenience and/or an opportunity. Her cold and aloof nature make her tough to get a read on and her ultimate plan (to smuggle the rest of the family into Dreykov’s space platform under the guise of turning them in) has enough suspect pieces to not feel completely on the level.
Normally, I’d chalk it up to writing inconsistencies or plot contrivances, but I’m 100% on the train of thought that Melina was a secret villain who got away with it. We find out that she was a Black Widow and later a scientist who developed the chemical mind control agent used to control the Black Widows, and (unlike Nat and Yelena) apparently isn’t that bothered about her participation and kind of still seems to revere Dreykov.
Melina also appears to be a stone cold psychopath, as we find out in a very disturbing scene at the dinner table when she demonstrates how her mind control tech can make one of her pet pigs (which she named Alexei) stop breathing on command. As the poor piggy gasps for breath and falls over (after the protests of her daughters), Melina finally lets him breathe with the same eyerolling condescension a teenager would use when being asked to take their feet off the coffee table and she shows a similar lack of concern for the human victims of her research.
At the end of the movie, all evidence of her crimes has been covered up and she now has an army of Black Widows (and Taskmaster) under her leadership. What can possibly go wrong? I’m sure there’s no way the woman who was proud of figuring out a way to stop people from breathing on command will ever turn out to be a villain.
It feels like I’m giving Harbour and Weisz short shrift here. They both great actors who get the most out of what ends up being limited screen time compared to Nat and Yelena who form the core relationship in the film.
Still, I really hope we haven’t seen the last of the two of them (and I’m guessing we have not).
Final Thoughts
Overall, I found Black Widow to be a delightful surprise, and that’s coming from someone who has always been a bit lukewarm on the character of Natasha Romanoff. I still can’t help but feel like it’s too little too late to do right by the character, but I’m glad she at least got a send off suitable for a character who has been around for a decade, even if the film can’t shake the long shadow of what’s to come.
After a year long break from the MCU, it was nice to have a smaller, more personal film to ease us back in before things get wacky and cosmic in the next few movies.
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