Black Widow

 For years, there was a question everyone had about the MCU: why the hell isn't there a Black Widow movie? Black Widow and Hawkeye were introduced in Iron Man 2 and Thor, respectively, giving us a first look at the two Avengers who would not get their own solo movies before the big team-up in 2012 (you could be forgiven for forgetting the the Edward Norton-starring Incredible Hulk movie is still MCU canon, even if they switched to the much better-cast Mark Ruffalo with the Avengers - Norton's a fine actor, don't get me wrong, but Ruffalo is perfect for Bruce Banner.)

While Hawkeye is very few people's favorite Avenger (though one of the better parts of the sub-par Age of Ultron is making Clint a more interesting character,) Johansson brings top-tier A-list movie stardom to her role. So we were all left wondering why the hell she didn't get a solo movie.

As it turns out, it's because the former head of Marvel Studios, Isaac Perlmutter, is kind of a racist, misogynistic piece of shit, who put the kibosh on superhero movies that didn't star white dudes. When Perlmutter was kicked upstairs and Kevin Feige was put in charge of the studio (Feige being a rarity in that he's sort of a producer-as-auteur) we started seeing things like Captain Marvel and Black Panther, which proved (Black Panther especially) that audiences will be very excited to see these big-budget movies that take other perspectives.

But it is a little weird that it took so long to get a Black Widow movie. And now, of course, there's also the controversy over how Disney screwed Johansson out of her cut by releasing the movie on Disney Plus along with theaters. While it's a perfectly natural and responsible decision to do the Disney Plus release (which, in fact, is how I saw the movie) in the midst of a pandemic that is sadly roaring back thanks to the Delta Variant (seriously, if you haven't gotten vaccinated yet, please just fucking do it,) but they should have given her an equivalent cut of the sales. (And if you want to argue that a movie star like Scarlett Johansson doesn't need the many millions of dollars this deal should be giving her, I'll point out that Disney needs it even less, and she's pretty clearly wronged party in this case - I hope they settle with her. And if Kevin Feige was willing to weigh in on her side of the argument, I think that probably means Disney knows it'll have to settle.)

But jeez, we haven't even gotten to the movie.

Spoilers ahead:

Given the events of Endgame (um, spoilers, though the movie came out two years ago) this movie is a kind of interquel, taking place after the events of Civil War. Natasha is on the run from General Ross, but doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat doing so. She's isolated, but seemingly not in danger.

The fact that this is likely to be the only MCU Black Widow movie means that there's only one really obvious plot to pursue - Black Widow has to set right her own past.

The movie opens with a flashback to 1995, when Natasha is a kid in... Ohio. She and her little sister Yelena live with their parents Alexei and Melina in some idyllic midwestern suburb. It's so idyllic that there are fireflies floating around their back yard. Of course, knowing what we know, it's not such a huge shock when Alexei comes home to tell Melina that he's finished their mission, and destroyed a lab, carrying out some stolen data on a floppy disk.

Just like that, Natasha and Yelena are dragged along on a daring escape as the Feds show up to arrest these Russian spies. Oh, and in the escape, we discover that Alexei is a super-soldier, flipping a dumpster in front of their stashed getaway plane and then clinging to the wing as 11-year-old Natasha has to help Melina pilot the plane after her "mother" is wounded by a bullet.

Natasha is old enough to know what this all is, even if she has still bonded with her fake sister Yelena. Yelena, on the other hand, came there young enough that she isn't really aware of the lie. (Florence Pugh, who plays Yelena, was actually not even born until a year after this sequence takes place.)

Cutting ahead to 2016, Yelena is an elite assassin working for the Red Room, but when she takes down a defecting "Widow," as the assassins are called, she gets a blast of some red substance in the face - and we quickly realize that this was some kind of antidote for a neurochemical mind control system that the Red Room has been using.

Yelena subtly has the remaining vials of the antidote sent to Natasha, which then get a target put on her back by the Taskmaster, an assassin who can emulate the fighting styles of other people they've seen. Taskmaster uses a vibranium shield like Captain America, claws like Black Panther, and many of Natasha's own moves against her.

When Natasha meets up with Yelena in Budapest (and as someone who's half Hungarian, it was nice to have Natasha correct her contact's pronunciation - Budapesht, as Hungarians pronounce an S on its own as "SH") and finds out that the Red Room still exists, despite her having thought she destroyed it. (In fact, the thing in Budapest she and Clint have mentioned was actually this mission - the one that she took part in as a condition of her defection to SHIELD.) This is devastating not only because she really thought that she had rid the world of a terrible evil, but also because to do so, she killed a young girl (a scene similar to the tense one in Stephen Spielberg's Munich, in which the team must delay their plan to blow up a target's apartment when they realize his young daughter is in there, plays out, only in this case, Black Widow makes the call to blow the place up anyway - which is a bit colder than one would expect for the act that allowed her to join the "good" guys.)

Natasha and Yelena want to find the Red Room to take it down, and the first person they look for is Alexei, who was rewarded for his loyalty at the end of the 3-year mission in American by being locked in a Siberian gulag for twenty years. Alexei, the "Red Guardian" meant to be be the Soviet Union's answer to Captain America, is pathetic - he's still very strong because of the serum, but he lies about fighting Steve Rogers (despite the fact that their careers never overlapped) and is just kind of pathetic.

David Harbor has some inherent likability though, and we get to realize that Alexei is just not a very smart guy, and has an obsessive, jingoistic attitude about Mother Russia and the glory of Communism. There's some funny cognitive dissonance, as at one point Alexei proclaims how proud he is of his fake daughters, so impressed at the massive number of people they've killed. He's a bit of a self-centered jerk, but you get the sense that he doesn't actually really know any better.

When it turns out that he doesn't know anything about where the Red Room is, they turn to Melina, who has been working on some very disturbing mind-control experiments involving pigs. As it turns out, she is still working for the Red Room, and calls them in when the family arrives.

But that twist is a double-twist, and it turns out that she and Natasha have used this as a ruse to get into the Red Room, which is now a flying hover-citadel, like an evil Helicarrier (but also not like the Hydra ones from Winter Soldier.)

It's in the Red Room that Dreikov, the man in charge of the Red Room, lurks. And we also find out that the Taskmaster is, in fact, his daughter - the girl that Natasha thought she killed back in Budapest, who he has now turned into his ultimate weapon through the same kind of nasty conditioning (and in this case cybernetics) he's done to Natasha and Yelena and all the other Widoes.

Dreikov is a weirdly pathetic villain. While he talks a big game of controlling the world through his army of sexy lady assassins, the lack of build-up to him as an individual, and the choice not to really give him much in the way of scenes leading up to the big confrontation in the end, makes him feel sort of empty. This guys doesn't seem like he has a Hydra-level of control over world events - he just controls his own little corner of it that happens to do really horrendous things to innocent girls.

I think that's intentional, though. It's something that I think serves a theme of the movie - that men who try to control women are pathetic - while perhaps undercutting the storytelling.

The movie ends with Natasha and her pseudo-family ending the Red Room, and rather than just slaughtering her mind-controlled fellow Widows, the mission is to save them - including Taskmaster.

After two years without a Marvel movie (though the Disney Plus shows, my favorite being Loki, have been good to have,) I'm perfectly happy to get a bunch of insane action (also, are we sure Natasha and the other Widows didn't get at least some super soldier serum? She hits things and falls on things and gets into enough insane vehicle crashes that it's a wonder her insides aren't just jelly by now,) though as is often the case with Marvel (and I think one of its strengths,) the best scenes are the ones in which the characters just get to talk with one another.

Natasha's isolation, and the discovery of family with the Avengers, is a nice arc throughout her movies in the MCU. This existence of a previous (if fake) family puts an odd wrinkle on that. I have to imagine that all three of her Russian family members must have been dusted by Thanos, because there's no way that she wouldn't be finding comfort with them at the beginning of Endgame. That said, it puts her sacrifice in Endgame into weirder territory.

Natasha sacrificing herself so that Clint wouldn't have to was always a bit weird to me. One thing that bothered me is that it might have been implying that because she didn't have a family, Clint deserved more to live. And while I certainly love my family members, I also think that a woman who doesn't have a family (whether by choice or not) still has just as much of a right to live as anyone else. And now, it seems, she actually did have a family, even if it was a very strange one cooked up by the Russian government (they kind of gloss over the fact that they were operating after the fall of the USSR, though Dreikov does read pretty effectively as someone who was probably a big cheese in the Soviet Union who didn't really lose much power after the Cold War ended.)

The movie has some weird pacing - it seems like Act Two is revelation after revelation that we don't ever really pause to deal with. The best parts of the movie are the awkward moments reconciling the old familial emotions with the adult knowledge that that was all cooked up for a spy mission.

Florence Pugh is a breakout as Yelena, and it's very clear this is not the last we're going to be seeing from her (especially given the post-credits scene.) I had honestly thought there might be some post-credits reveal that some weird Soul Stone shenanigans would allow Natasha to come back to life, though it's also very possible that Scarlett Johansson is just done with the role (she played it for over a decade, so that's fair.) Also, I don't know if this lawsuit is going to mean burned bridges with Disney (though again, with Feige's support, I also wouldn't be shocked if there's a settlement that includes a multi-picture deal to mend those fences. And I apologize for the mixed metaphors.)

I'm very glad this movie got made, but it would have been nice to see this as building her ongoing story arc instead of a kind of addendum.

Thematically, I don't know if this is really my lane as a dude, but I also want to see a woman-led superhero movie that isn't about dealing with breaking free of male control. I know that male dominance is a sadly nigh-universal theme that women deal with (and I also know that as a man, I will never know the enormous extent of how much patriarchal systems take a toll on women,) but I also feel like this is sort of the default "here's what we make the action movie about if there's a female lead" theme. Maybe I'm totally wrong, and that this theme is a bottomless well. But I think about how the movies starring the white dudes are not really about being white or being a dude (or maybe they are and as a white dude I'm just blind to that.) Could we see a movie starring a woman in the MCU that is about the responsibilities of power, or struggling to hold on to one's ideals in a world that fails to live up to them, or to accept who we are instead of who we think we should be? I guess we'll just need to make more movies with women protagonists!