Before too long, however, she finds herself drawn into a plan to take down the Red Room - the sinister secret Russian operation to turn young girls into super-assassins like herself. It proves a valiant effort, as the film devotes a handful of dutiful minutes to establishing Natasha as someone who can exist on her own. 'Here,' it strives desperately to say, 'is all the inner life we've denied this character for the past decade, because to us she existed chiefly as a potential romantic partner for Clint Barton or Bruce Banner or Steve Rogers, and hey, that's on us.' It's impossible not to view the film as the studio's attempt at a kind of post-mortem mea culpa, a mulligan, a do-over, or, as we nerds know it, a retcon. Given the events of Endgame, the film is set earlier in the cinematic timeline (just after Captain America: Civil War, to be precise). The producers behind the MCU seem to have (finally) sensed this, so the latest Marvel blockbuster Black Widow centers her character. Pop Culture Happy Hour Mourning Has Broken Them: 'Avengers: Endgame' And in the character's final, gallingly tone-deaf moments onscreen, in 2018's Avengers: Endgame, she sacrificed herself when things came down to a choice between a man with a family (Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye) and a woman without one (herself). In 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, she described herself as a monster because she could not have children, among other reasons, and was used by the film chiefly to calm down Mark Ruffalo's Hulk with her feminine wiles. but only up to a point.Ĭertainly, her Iron Man 2 screen incarnation was treated solely as a sexual object who could be depended upon to kick copious amounts of butt. In a recent interview with Collider, actor Scarlett Johansson, who has sported the character's tight black jumpsuit in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2010's Iron Man 2, touted her character's evolution, over the years. But her nomme-de- héros couldn't help but carry patriarchal connotations of loss and loneliness - of something missing. She was lethal, yes, that was part of it. Since her debut in the pages of Tales of Suspense #52 (April 1964), Natasha Romanova/Romanoff's superhero codename, intended to radiate badass arachnid swagger, implicitly defined the character in the context of a relationship to a man.

This review mentions events depicted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date if you are not caught up, you may wish to become so before reading. Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena (Florence Pugh) survey the damage in Marvel's Black Widow.

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