Black Widow (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, filmed 2020, released 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, for the first time since well before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I went to an actual mainstream movie theatre to see a film with a group from the Bears San Diego. The theatre was the UltraStar Cinemas in Hazard Center, Mission Valley, and in order to woo customers back they’re charging a flat ticket price of $10 no matter what you’re seeing or when during the day. Reflecting the tastes of the two people most active in the Bears leadership, Jeff Breeze and his partner Don, the film was the latest from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Widow – which I’d seen a couple of promos for on late-night TV talk shows featuring the film’s star, Scarlett Johannson. In one show she joked about having to correct another character on the pronunciation of the name of the Hungarian capital, Budapest – the last syllable should be pronounced “pesht,” not “pest” – and in another they showed an action clip in which she and the actress playing her foster sister (Florence Pugh, whose performance was just as strong as Johannson’s in a character just as crucial to the film’s plot and development) grab a huge cylindrical tower and somehow manage to escape the bad guys by literally pulling the tower down and using it to lower themselves safely to the ground. Most, if not all, of the other people in the group had seen the previous movies featuring Marvel’s all-star superhero lineup, The Avengers,, and even the imdb.com synopsis for Black Widow explains that it is “a film about Natasha Romanoff in her quests between the films Civil War and Infinity War.”

Not having seen either Captain America: Civil War or Avengers: Infinity War, the two films this is an “interquel” to, I was literally at a loss for quite a while as to who all these people were and why they were trying to kill each other. I remember thinking that if Black Panther was a cinematic masterpiece that transcended its origins in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the way Citizen Kane transcended all the other movies classic Hollywood was making about newspapers, Black Widow seemed very stuck in its “MCU” origins and you would need at least an undergraduate degree in the Marvel Cinematic University to comprehend it. Later I got a ride home from one of the other Bears members and he explained some of the lacunae to me, including the otherwise unseen character in the post-credits sequence at the very end (I noticed that a number of people walked out of the theatre as the closing credits started to roll, either not knowing or not caring that it’s become standard for Marvel movies to include a post-credits sequence giving away an important clue as to where the story is going to go in the next film in the Universe.)

Black Widow begins in Ohio in 1995 with what appears to be a normal suburban family sitting down to a normal suburban dinner when somehow “dad” gets word that a goon squad from Russia is about to come there and either kidnap or kill them all. The other three get into a small plane and get it in the air, but dad has to grab onto the wing and it’s not at all clear how he manages to make his escape. Then there’s a Lifetime-style subtitle saying “21 Years Later” (which would put the main part of the story as taking place in 2016, though I was more interested in trying to follow the action than doing air math), and 21 years later it’s revealed that all these people were Russian spies trying to infiltrate America for what nefarious purpose it’s not altogether clear, though a lot of Americans were unpleasantly surprised that Russia continued its campaign of espionage against the U.S. well past the fall of the Soviet Union and at least the supposed end of the Cold War. It’s also revealed that none of the family were actually biological relatives, though the lead character, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlet Johannson) – a glitch in the name department because Russian is such a gendered language that a female member of the Romanoff family would be “Romanova” – still refers to her foster sister, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) as “sister” and their former foster mom, Melina (Rachel Weisz), as “mother.” Natasha actually defected to the West and became one of the Avengers, Black Widow, while Yelena stayed on her side of the frayed but still extant Iron Curtain but somehow managed to maintain a sense of integrity.

The two meet up again in Budapest and find that quite a number of people still want to kill them, and even someone as far back of scratch in the intricacies of the MCU and all the backstory I should have got from watching the previous films in the cycle eventually figured out that Natasha and Yelena were two of the so-called “widows,” young women of various nationalities and ethnicities recruited by Russian General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and put through a conditioning process to make them totally subject to his will. Dreykov’s plan is to recruit 200 or more of these trained assassins and flood the world with him so he can ultimately become absolute dictator of all Earth and use his “widows” to bring down anyone who stands in his way (there’s even a whole montage of stock shots of disasters and nuclear explosions just to show what his “widows” can do). Natasha thought she killed Dreykov in a past episode and also thought she killed Dreykov’s daughter to get to him – but Dreykov is still very much alive and he managed to revivify the daughter by implanting a chip in the back of her head and turning her into a black-clad supervillain of uncertain gender (it’s a legitimate shock to the audience – or this member of it, anyway – when she takes off the hood of her costume and it’s revealed she’s a woman), while the “dad” in their fake family back in Ohio is revealed as the Red Guardian, a sort of Soviet-era Russian equivalent of Captain America with a similar costume, shield and biologically enhanced body – only as the political currents changed the Russians imprisoned him and he became a sot, regaling his fellow prisoners with tiresome tales of his former exploits and coming off a lot like Woody Harrelson’s character in The Hunger Games. Just what Our Heroines think they need him for is something of a mystery, but in one of the movie’s set-piece action sequences they break him out of jail – and then there’s an amusing little scene in which it turns out he’s gained so much weight he can’t quite fit into his old Red Guardian suit.

“Dad” and his two “daughters” go on a quest for their former “mom,” Melina, because they think she knows the whereabouts of the “Red Room,” the huge installation in which Draykov trains the “widows” and puts them through a combination of brain surgery and mental conditioning to ensure their unquestioned loyalty to him. Natasha and Yelena have multicolored vials of some substance or other that’s supposed to be at least a partial antidote to this process, but like a lot of the other MacGuffins this film’s writers, Jac Schaeffer, Ned Benson and Eric Pearson, have overloaded their script with, this gets forgotten for long periods of time. It turns out that the reason Natasha, Yelena and Melina – who at first appears to be double-crossing her former foster daughters and turning them in to Draykov, but then changes sides again and helps them – have had such a hard time finding the “Red Room” is that it isn’t in one fixed location. It’s a giant battleship-sized hovercraft that moves around anywhere in the world Draykov wants to send it, and in the film’s climactic action set-piece Our Heroines manage to infiltrate it and destroy it from within, though not without yet another twist from the overly inventive minds of the writing committee: it seems that Draykov has programmed Natasha so the scent of his pheromones paralyzes her and renders her incapable of doing any sort of violence to him or even responding in kind when he punches her out, which he does quite a lot of just to prove he can. The only way she can overcome this conditioning and give the super-villain the just deserts we expect from a superhero movie is by doing something called “snapping the nerve,” which sounds excruciatingly painful – only she does it and at the end Draykov, whom you’ll remember Natasha originally thought she’d already killed, “dies” the sort of unseen death that’s common in a superhero movie. He’s shown leaping out of his giant hovercraft as Our Heroines’ machinations and the reinforcements they’ve been able to call up from the other Avengers (who carefully remain unseen) blow it up – the sort of serial or comic-book “death” that allows future writers, directors and producers either to keep him dead or revive him for a sequel if they want.

In the end the four “family” members are reunited and the scene reverts to the fireflies around their house in Ohio, which Natasha recalls Melina explaining to her how they could glow in the dark. Of course, this being a Marvel movie, there’s a post-credits sequence (though a number of people at our screening got up and left the theatre, obviously neither knowing nor particularly caring about the Marvel tradition of post-credits sequences) which totally baffled me: it showed a tombstone for Natasha (which had me wondering, “Hey! I thought she was still alive at the end!”) and a blonde woman leaving flowers at her grave, then turning to the guy who wandered into the sequence and whom I didn’t recognize at all and chewing him out for having caused Natasha’s death. Later one of the Bears, who agreed to give me a ride home from the screening, explained that in the previous Avengers movies – ones made before this one but set later – the man, a character called Hawkeye, had got Natasha to do some sort of soul-transference to save the other Avengers but at the cost of her own soul – so she expired but there was no body to bury, so the grave remained empty. Without all the background information I would have had if I’d seen the previous films in the cycle, I sat through most of Black Widow impressed with the dedication and sheer thrills with which the action scenes were staged but with little reason to care about the exposition that was supposedly setting them up – and also wondering why the surround-sound effects were so ill-used. I can still remember the thrill of seeing the 1989 Batman in a theatre and having the sense that the Batmobile was actually driving through the auditorium; this time the effects seemed little more than pointless virtuosity – “We’re doing this to your ears because we can.” Like the two Wonder Woman movies, this one is directed by a woman (Cate Shortland), but the superhero conventions are so set in stone that makes surprisingly little difference (albeit Black Panther gained immeasurably from its director being a Black man and creating a film in which the Black characters had power, integrity, independence and agency instead of just being there to redeem the white characters they way they were in Green Book, the film which beat it for the Academy Award for Best Picture).