Genre: Superhero
Premise: While the Avengers are on a break, Black Widow receives a message from her long lost sister that a Russian villain is planning something gnarly, requiring her to re-join her family to take care of the problem.
About: Black Widow’s 80 million dollar weekend haul proves that the only thing that Covid can’t beat… is Marvel. Eric Pearson wrote the script. And while that normally wouldn’t be a story, IMDB Pro has added a new classification – SCRIPT DOCTOR – to its credit vocabulary, and it appears that Pearson has script doctored almost every Marvel movie since 2015’s Ant-Man. What “script doctoring” means here is anyone’s guess! Black Widow was directed by Cate Shortland, who was heavily recruited by Scarlett Johansson. Johansson was big on Shortland after seeing her 2012 film, “Lore,” about five children forced on a journey during the last days of World War 2. Johansson called the film, “About as perfect of a movie as there is.” Rotten Tomatoes seems to agree with her, giving the movie a 94%. Although average moviegoers weren’t as excited, assigning the film a 76%.
Writer: Eric Pearson (story be Jac Shaeffer and Ned Benson)
Details: 133 min
I have a serious question.
Is Black Widow a superhero?
At one point, her sister says, ‘I called you because you’re the only superhero I know.’ I was like, “Sweetheart, can you do a cartwheel? Then you’re just as much of a superhero as Black Widow is.”
To this day, I still don’t know what Black Widow brings to the Avengers besides her flippy leg-chokehold bodyslam move. Can’t Tony Stark build her a suit to give her super strength or something? He basically turned the spidey-suit into a mini-Iron Man suit.
According to the latest Avengers movie, Black Widow is dead. Which means this Marvel incarnation takes place in the past, between Avengers assignments. Black Widow (aka Natasha) receives some red serum in the mail from her long lost sister, who implores her to use Tony Stark to find out what the serum is.
Instead, Natasha heads to Budapest to ask her sister, Yelena, why she sent it to her. The two haven’t seen each other since they were Russian children in a fake US family on assignment in Ohio. They don’t seem to like each other. I gathered that since, instead of hugging, Yelena tries to decapitate Natasha with a steak knife. The serum, as it turns out, allows people to be controlled by a mysterious man, who is using it to build an army of living drone soldiers.
The two realize they won’t be able to take this guy down alone so they go break their “father,” Alexei, out of prison and recover their “mother” as well. Before the family can take down the big baddie, they’ll first have to defeat Taskmaster, some metallic dude who has a Captain America shield. Will this pretend family be able to pull themselves together in time to get the job done? Or will they do what they always do – implode?
The funniest thing about Black Widow is that they’ve been campaigning to get Scarlett Johansson her own movie for almost a decade now and when they finally do it, she’s not even the star! Her sister, Yelena, is the star. She’s the one who has the problem. Natasha’s just along for the ride. As proof of how pedestrian a character Black Widow’s been, Yelena outshines her in every scene they’re in.
There’s a positive spin to this, though. A smart person who worked at Marvel said, “If we make a movie with just Black Widow, we’re f#$%d.” They knew she was too boring (and not superhero’ish enough) to carry a movie. So they built this team around her. And thank God they did because doing so turned Black Widow into a pretty darned good movie.
I actually learned something really valuable while watching this film.
When in comes to action movies, so many writers focus on the premise and the plot and set pieces and cool scenes. And all of those things are, of course, important. But let’s be real. If you’ve seen any big-budget movie in the last five years, you’ve seen this movie. You’re not going to come up with a set piece we haven’t seen before. You’re not going to come up with a car chase we haven’t seen before. You’re not going to come up with a fight scene that’s going to blow us away.
No matter how insane your imagination is, it’s unlikely you will ever come up with something that we haven’t seen before in other movies.
Which leads us to an obvious follow-up question: “Then what’s the point?”
Why even try?
If all we’re doing is copying things we’ve already seen, then why create yet another bloated CGI summer movie?
This movie reminded me why.
Because the truth about ANY movie is that if we connect with the characters, all of those moments – the car chases, the fight scenes, the set-pieces – we care about them. Even though we know they’re fake. Even though we’ve seen them before. When you connect with the characters, you enter into a quasi state of belief where the fictional world becomes reality.
Therefore, when you’re writing these movies, your core focus should be on creating a) believable characters and b) believable relationships. If you can tap into that rare thing where the character actions and interactions feel authentic – feel like they could exist in the real world – we will connect with and care about those people.
This script did a tremendous job of exploring a dysfunctional family. This was basically Little Miss Sunshine, the superhero version. This family has deep DEEP SET issues, deeper than any superhero movie I’ve ever seen. First off, the four family members? They’re not even a real family. They were a fake Russian family that was cobbled together to look like an American family for a covert operation in Ohio. So they grew up like a family, but they were all strangers to each other. That alone makes for a really interesting setup.
When you’re a pretend family, how much are you supposed to care about the others? When the mission of “Pretend Family” is over, how much responsibility do you have to talk to these people again? That conflict of not technically being a family yet still feeling the same guilt and frustrations associated with being a family made for some extremely emotional moments. I teared up more in this movie than any Marvel movie.
One of my worries going into this was, “How are they going to explain that Black Widow ghosted her family for twenty years?” But once you watch the movie, you get it. They’re not really a family. They don’t owe each other anything. And that makes Natasha and Yelena’s and Alexei’s interactions all the more fascinating since they’re all skirting the line of “I don’t have to care about you but I also want to care about you.”
I always find dialogue interesting when the motivations behind it are complex. And the motivation behind every dialogue scene in this movie is complex. Seconds after Yelena and Natasha rescue Alexei from prison, Alexei wants to talk about what his next mission is going to be while the girls are dealing with the fact that the only father figure they’ve ever had hasn’t even acknowledged that he’s happy to see them.
When he’s confronted with this, he makes an inquiry into how they’re doing, which quickly devolves into Yelena chastising him for placing her in a Russian spy training program where her uterus was ripped out to ensure that she would never have children. You got the sense that any conversation between this family could devolve quickly into that territory, which created that “walking on eggshells” undertone that makes dialogue so much more lively.
Black Widow works because the family works. Too many amateur screenwriters approach their big action movies the opposite way. They cook up a concept. They craft a plot. And then they try and cram their character storylines into that plot. I’m not saying that’s never worked before. But if you want to write an action movie where the viewer is actually engaged, Black Widow is the way to do it. Get the character right. Get the family dynamic right. And everything else in the story should follow.
Marvel continues to be the benchmark for high-budget franchise filmmaking. And, right now, the competition isn’t close.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Normally, I encourage screenwriters to avoid bringing their hero’s past into the movie. Movies work best in the present. Especially action movies, which are all about the here and the now. However, when it comes to any movie dealing with family, IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE PAST. It would be weird if you made a family movie that DIDN’T bring up the past. Black Widow is all about the past. It’s about the fake lives they grew up leading, the terrible torture their father sent them into as children, the choices by Yelena and Natasha to avoid each other as adults. Everything in this movie is about overcoming the past. And, with movies about family, that’s how it should be.
Updated Marvel Universe Rankings
1) Thor Ragnorak
2) Captain America: Winter Soldier
3) Avengers: Infinity War
4) Captain America: Civil War
5) Spiderman: Homecoming
6) Guardians of the Galaxy
7) Ant-Man
8) Iron Man
9) Black Widow
10) Black Panther
11) Avengers: Endgame
12) Doctor Strange
13) Spiderman: Far From Home
14) Captain Marvel
15) Captan America
16) Thor
17) Guardians of the Galaxy 2
18) Iron Man 2
19) Iron Man 3
20) Loki
21) The Incredible Hulk
22) Avengers: Age of Ultron
23) Falcon and Winter Soldier
24) Wandavision
25) Thor: The Dark World
26) Ant-Man and the Wasp
