REVIEW: Black Widow

There's a humorous irony to a quote offered by Scarlett Johansson's "Natasha Romanoff" early in the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Forlornly, she declares "I'm better off alone." In-universe, this character is on the run from the government and separated from the only people who have ever seen her as a good guy, and her confession speaks to a deep-rooted sense of aimlessness. For the audience that has been watching the film's trailers for the last year and a half, this line takes on a different meaning. After all, Natasha Romanoff has been a backup singer for many a superhero since her first appearance in the MCU in 2010, only stepping into center stage now. Is Black Widow better off alone, helming her own superhero movie than she is with her contemporaries?

One could make a case for better, the film admittedly has some competition, but either way Natasha Romanoff's first solo pic provides a worthwhile glimpse into the soul of a character whose psyche has revealed itself gradually over the last ten years.

Natasha's solo adventure finds her drifting after the division of the Avengers following the events of Captain America: Civil War. Maybe the family she found as a superhero was too good to last. She is called into action when her adoptive sister from another life sends a distress beacon. Turns out the regiment that made her into such a heartless creature is still active, still feeding on innocent girls that it retools into killing drones. Putting down old monsters has Natasha confront not only her own checkered past, but also healing old wounds.

The plot hinges on a system of literal mind-control, a system that is admittedly out of place here in a way it wouldn't be in the more fantasy-oriented chapters of the MCU. Just so, it does bring a specific focus in this film: Here it isn't just the faceless masses Natasha is fighting to save, but the other Black Widows who are kept subdued under the iron grip of the sadistic Dreykov. Natasha has tasted the hellish existence of a forced mercenary, and when she realizes that other girls are still victim to her prison, she takes it on herself to rescue them.

Again, this story takes place when her superhero team is scattered, and there's something genuinely unnerving the first time Natasha collides with evil and you realize that her Avenger allies won't be there to back her up. In lieu of Thor and Spiderman, the film offers us an original array of players to join Black Widow on her mission: Natasha's adoptive family from before she was inducted into the assassin army.

There's Natasha's sister, Florence Pugh's Yelena, whose sarcasm and cynicism recalls a 2010 portrait of Black Widow but who was perhaps even more invested in their makeshift family than Natasha was. There's Rachel Weisz's Malina, the family matriarch who will prepare her daughters for the real world at any cost, even their emotional well-being. The kingpin of this set is David Harbour's Alexei, "The Red Guardian," a sort of fusion between Mr. Incredible and your drunk uncle. Any one of these characters would be welcome faces in future MCU projects, and all of them are brought to life so vividly by their performers. Harbour's Alexei in particular gives off sparks that don't come as naturally to his more famous role, the somewhat curmudgeonly (but no less endearing) Chief Jim Hopper.

The heart of the film is the map of emotional scars that divide this family. After all, it was this same family that surrendered Natasha as a child to the maw of ruthless assassin life. Given how upstanding and righteous her superhero colleagues are, it's perhaps understandable that Natasha is so disappointed with this family.

The healing required by both the plot and Natasha herself comes from a sensitive performance by Scarlett Johansson. There's something like dignity in the swan song appearance of Johansson's superhero.

Natasha Romanoff has come a long way from the stonewall warrior who only feigns vulnerability to dupe Loki for information. Her strength is no longer in hoodwinking her enemy with clever displays of manufactured emotion. (This in and of itself is an interesting comment on how differently we've come to define female strength since Black Widow's first MCU appearance.) Her battle scars become lifelines right before our eyes. Her moral compass and compassion have become her most powerful weapons.

--The Professor

Comments

Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape. It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar. The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out ...

REVIEW: ZOOTOPIA 2

Any follow-up to the 2016 masterpiece, Zootopia , is going to be disadvantaged. Cinema was still a year ahead of Jordan Peele's "Get Out" when Disney released one of the most articulate explanations of race, allyship, and accountability ever put to film. Now that everyone knows how good, even "timely," a Disney pic can be, how do you surprise everyone a second time? The insights in this sequel won't spur any new chapters in your sociology 101 textbook. Though honestly, neither was the deflection of white saviourship that novel back in 2016. We more or less knew how racial profiling and biases played out in the landscape. What surprised many of us (and validated the rest of us) was the idea that these ideas could be articulated so eloquently in a children's film. It seems that the studio tried the same thing here with Zootopia 2 that it did with Frozen II six years ago. I think a lot of people wanted that m...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Five Lessons Hollywood Ought to Learn from the Success of WICKED

That which has teased studios since the freak success of La La Land and The Greatest Showman has finally come to pass: Hollywood has finally launched a successful musical. Or rather, they've launched two. The musical is sort of like the golden idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark . It's valuable beyond imagination--but only if you know just how to retrieve it. There have been specific periods where the musical has yielded tremendous rewards for Hollywood, but for the greater part of the lifespan of feature-filmmaking, studios have been punished for reaching beyond their means. Yet after ages of dormancy, t he years leading up to the Wicked movies were lined with musicals, more than we'd seen in the previous decade. A few of them were quite well crafted. Others were ... learning experiences. None really became what we'd call "mainstream." But Wicked and Wicked: For Good have both seen rare success. I'm publishing ...

REVIEW: AVATAR - Fire and Ash

The "Avatar" chapters have generally renewed their interest to the masses based on which exciting new locale and each new culture whichever film opts to explore. Following that dance, "Fire and Ash" introduces yet another Na'Vi clan, this one hailing from the scorched plains under the shadow of an erupted volcano. But their biome is decidedly less spectacular than the lush jungles of the Omaticaya or the rich coral reefs where the Metkayina dive. Between the ashen grounds of the volcano clan and the metallic fortress of the humans, this is comfortably the most monochromatic of the three Avatar films. And yet, Avatar: Fire and Ash is no less gripping for it. And this is where the internet really starts to reckon with what us fans of the franchise have always kind of known: that the many screensavers offered by the Avatar world ... they have been nice . But these films would have never made the impact they have if the...

Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show

The YA scene in the late 2000s and early 2010s was stuffed full of failed book-to-movie adaptations, desperate attempts to ride the Harry Potter train. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was not the first book to receive this treatment. Yet it somehow became the most infamous. We can speculate as to why it is that Percy Jackson never really exited the discourse the way properties like Eragon or Inkheart did. Perhaps it's because Rick Riordan continued to add to the lore with two follow-up sagas set in the same universe. (As of this writing, Riordan is preparing a whole additional Percy Jackson trilogy.) Perhaps it's because, while those other movie adaptations merely tried to replicate the Harry Potter effect , Percy Jackson admittedly borrowed generously from the Harry Potter story template. Whatever the reason, young millennials have never really been allowed to forget the crimes committed by FOX back in 2010 ...

Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

Loyal readers may remember last month when I talked about Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue and how I casually alluded to the larger framework of disability within film and promised to talk about it one day. Well, this isn’t like with my Disney Princess series where I teased the project for years before finally getting to it. I’m making good on that promise here today. You’re welcome. Now, when I say “disability within film,” that’s a really large slice of the pie. The discussion of disability in Hollywood is a vast and complex field of study. There’s obviously overlap across the broader discussion, but people of different disabilities experience ableism differently, similar to how members of different ethnic identities experience racism differently, and it’s a machine that has to be dismantled on multiple fronts. But with this piece, I’m not so interested in airing all the ways the industry has let down members of these communities. Today, I’d ...

The Notebook Has No Excuses

The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore. So a fa...

REVIEW: Wake Up Dead Man

Last week when I reviewed WICKED: For Good , I mentioned that I couldn't help but analyze the film specifically from the lens of a lifelong fan of the Broadway phenomenon. I find myself in a similar position here examining the new "Knives Out" movie and its meditation on faith and religion. I can't help but view the film through my own experiences as a practicing believer. But first, some notes on the filmmaking itself. The third installment in the Knives Out saga sees Benoit Blanc investigating the murder of a tyrannical priest, Monsignor Wicks, presiding over a smalltown flock. The prime suspect is none other than the young, idealistic Father Jud, the new priest who found Wicks' approach to spirituality repulsive and completely counter to Christ's teachings. Thus, this mystery is a contest between two representations of Christianity, each desperate to define the function of religion in the mod...

REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul , dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends. Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he ca...

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

Welcome back, one and all, to my latest attempt to justify being enslaved to a million different streaming services. My efforts to watch one new movie a day all year haven't worn me out yet, but we're not even past the first quarter yet. My first film of the month brought me to Baz Lurhmann's Australia , and it reminded me what a beautifully mysterious animal the feature film is. My writer's brain identified a small handful of technical issues with the film's plotting, but the emotional current of the film took me to a place that was epic, even spiritual. I don't know. When a film cuts straight to the core of your psyche, do setup and payoff even matter anymore? I think this film is fated for repeated viewings over the years as I untangle my response to this film. One of my favorite films of all time is Billy Wilder's The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. You'd think, then, that learning that the t...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog