Black Widow - Cheap Thoughts

Natasha Romanoff had a slow start to being a character, didn’t she? No one would argue there was much there in her initial appearance in Iron Man 2 and The Avengers still treated her as someone separate from the other teammates, her only real connection being to Hawkeye who was physically away from the team for the majority of the movie. It wasn’t until Captain America: The Winter Soldier where efforts were made to establish a legitimate personality and relationships with her fellow Avengers and would progress from there. Yet there’s a moment in Avengers: Endgame that never sat right, that being her claim of The Avengers being like her family, a moment that doesn’t sit right because the only evidence of that being the case is because this film series never established any life for her outside of this team, but that doesn’t default to her having them as a family.

Now we have her solo film which offers up more context to her character as a whole. A midquel taking place after Captain America: Civil War but prior to Avengers: Infinity War (If you don’t keep up with the continuity of this series this must all sound like terrible gibberish). The story follows the fraudulent found family of Natasha’s past from her history of working for the red room, a Russian black ops organisation that trains assassins from birth. Working with what would be her final thematic conclusion from her final appearance in Endgame, expanding on this idea of family is absolutely the best direction they could have taken this, in order to give more weight to the idea and thus improving her appearances in other films by giving greater context, the exact purpose of any prequel film to fulfil.

Beyond that there is the return of the red room as we the audience are given further information on the organisation in an attempt to tie up further loose ends in her story. The inclusion of Florence Pugh as Yelana the newly established younger sister to Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff truly works as the centre of the film. The youngest of this fraudulent family, she is the last to let go of the lie they lived, being so young and indoctrinated since birth it was her only reality, to quickly have it torn away from her before maturing enough to understand the fiction was living. Johansson herself isn’t given much of a challenge to work with, though that doesn’t seem the purpose of the piece, this from her perspective is the epilogue, to give her a final victory lap and shine in the spotlight. Tie up whatever remaining loose ends exist for her character with the standard story beats & tone with conveyor belt action sequences that leave little to be desired. The promise that comes from a stylised opening credits goes unfulfilled as everything else in the film’s production offers up the usual Marvel dish, which is certainly filling, and many won’t mind it and even still enjoy it after having it served up for the 24^th time in a row.

At the end of the day, for all fans of Black Widow the character this is sure to be a delight, for all fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe this is another solid entry in the franchise, and for those who are done and dusted with this franchise—well, you stopped reading a long time ago because of course you don’t care about Black Widow.

-Danny