Why the timing of Marvel’s latest movie is so frustrating, even as its story gives Natasha a satisfying MCU send-off.
Marvel has spent a decade telling Natasha Romanoff’s story, but it’s mostly been mumbled and embedded in movies about the men flanking her. Audiences have had to trace the Black Widow’s web through the entertainment juggernaut’s big team-up Avengers films and the stories of Iron Man 2 (2010), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), and Captain America: Civil War (2016), connecting the one-off lines and monologues scattered within. While US government experiments transformed Steve Rogers into Captain America and spurred Hank Pym to invent magic shrinking juice that would eventually create Ant-Man, those events didn’t happen in a vacuum. Natasha, as played by Scarlett Johansson, was collateral damage on the more brutal end of the same effort, as Russia tried to keep up in the superhuman arms race. A Secret KGB program, designed with a hefty dose of eugenics, found her as a child and trained her to become one of the coveted Black Widows — a highly trained assassin and spy. To ensure loyalty, the program leads experimented on and sterilized her against her will. Against all odds, Nat managed to break free from the program and link up with Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. She was able to put her skills to good use, helping to recruit new Avengers and ultimately to save the world (and half the lives across the universe) by sacrificing her own life in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. All this backstory happened without Nat getting a movie of her own. And though Marvel’s bigger team-up movies treated her like a central figure, it wasn’t until her final appearance in Endgame that the studio crystalized her worldview and showcased her humanity. As Endgame opens, Natasha’s surviving coworkers have moved on after half the population has been snapped away. Steve Rogers is talking about seeing whales in the Hudson and attending survivor support groups. Tony Stark has moved to the mountains and had a kid. But Nat isn’t ready to give up. She’s still commandeering what remains of the Avengers’ control center, the only member of the team who is still committed to the possibility of saving her friends and everyone else Thanos obliterated. Having a shot at restoring their lives is what ultimately compels her to sacrifice her own. She doesn’t even live to see what comes of her efforts, So in the present-day MCU, Nat is as dead as any Avenger can ever be. Enter the maddeningly late but satisfying send-off Black Widow, in which we finally get to see Natasha Romanoff’s story in full. Nat’s solo venture, directed by Cate Shortland, doesn’t undo the events of Endgame but instead clarifies the character’s decision to die in order to give her teammates and humanity a shot at defeating Thanos. Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, set in the pocket of time between Civil War, when the Avengers temporarily dissolved and many of them landed in jail, and Infinity War, when the team met Thanos for the first time. Nat is on the run from the government, trying to live on her own. That’s when the past she’s been gabbing about for the last decade finally shows up, on-screen and in the flesh. Unlike typical Marvel movies, Black Widow doesn’t present an apocalypse to avoid or a world breaker to defeat. If Nat decided to ignore the threat that confronts her in Black Widow and keep to herself, the world would keep spinning along — just slightly more nefariously. It turns out one of her pre-Avengers associates has discovered that the program that turned Nat into a super-assassin has also sharpened millions of other girls into Widows like her. Their training was conducted against the girls’ will, just like what happened to Nat. Almost instantly, you can see what’s she’s about to do. Nat’s inability to separate work from life and coworkers from family doesn’t make her the best cold-blooded assassin. But it does make Nat a pretty good Avenger. Even if Black Widow is years late and can feel retroactive in parts, Nat’s own (very good) movie asserts the character’s legacy in the MCU and what she meant to the franchise as a whole. Black Widow assembles the shreds of Natasha’s backstory into a fully realized character portrait Every Marvel movie released since 2008’s Iron Man raises a question that none of the films can ever be cleaved from: Do you need to see the previous Marvel movies to know what’s going on? Black Widow is no exception. The most important film to keep in mind with regard to Black Widow is 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.
