Marvel’s Black Widow has been a long time coming—and it was certainly worth the wait.
From left to right: Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) escaping from their enemies in Black Widow. CREDIT: Marvel Studios
This post for Black Widow is spoiler-free.
Marvel Studios has been promoting Black Widow (2021, directed by Cate Shortland) for over a year now with its first official teaser trailer being released in December 2019. The second female-led movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was delayed multiple times due to COVID-19, but it finally settled on a release date in July this year.
Black Widow, which stars Scarlett Johansson in her ninth—and probably final—Marvel movie as Natasha Romanoff, takes place post-Civil War and depicts Natasha revisiting her past that she has tried very hard to escape from. Also supporting the movie are MCU newcomers Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Rachel Weisz, who respectively star as Yelena Belova, Alexei Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff.
Among the three, Pugh was clearly the standout character in this movie. Yelena was incredibly funny and a great on-screen partner for Natasha. From having sisterly conversations about army surplus to reproduction, Natasha and Yelena had amazing chemistry and fight scenes together. As this is Pugh’s big welcome to the MCU, audiences will certainly see more of her in upcoming Marvel projects.
Harbour and Weisz were a nice addition to Black Widow, but it was clear that their characters were added to support the movie’s main plot. Alexei and Melina do have their own quirks, but they are just not as impressive as what Pugh brought to the table for Yelena. A renowned Marvel comic book character, Taskmaster, is also in this movie; though the character has a couple of impressive fight scenes, it is lacking in character development, so hopefully we will see more of Taskmaster in the future.
To me, Black Widow is probably the most female-centric movie in the MCU with many empowering on-screen moments featuring female characters. I don’t know when Marvel will ever make a big-screen movie like this again, but perhaps we will be seeing more girl power on the small screen with plentiful MCU television shows coming to Disney+ soon.
As Black Widow is Natasha’s final goodbye to the Avengers and MCU, and perhaps I’m just saying this as a Marvel fan, but it was an overall pleasant female superhero movie—way better than Captain Marvel in my opinion. However, the movie itself feels more like a side plot of the overall MCU. I only wished that Marvel had made Black Widow much earlier and not in 2020/2021. Marvel fans should catch this action-packed movie on the big IMAX screen, if possible.
Rating: 5/5
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