Black Widow, Florence Pugh and Scarlett Johansson

Zarwash Gulrez

Black Widow is good enough, maybe, to merit the attention of even that last group. Working from a script by Eric Pearson (adapted from a story by Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson, based, obviously, on Marvel characters), director Cate Shortland has fashioned a picture that invites you to care about the characters, as opposed to just caring about the franchise. The actors seem to know they’re in the hands of someone who knows what she’s doing; even the action sequences, heavily embroidered with CGI, as almost all modern action scenes are, show some human warmth.

Black Widow Back story:

The movie opens with a backstory, a suburban childhood idyll that’s about to turn south very quickly: A young mother who has earlier explained, briefly, the science behind fireflies to her two young daughters gets dinner ready for her family. Her husband, the girls’ father, walks through the door, glumly. His bad day at work kicks off what will be framed as “an adventure” for the family, involving a long drive—the girls are rushed out of the house so suddenly, the younger one isn’t even wearing shoes—a hidden getaway plane that manages a takeoff even as police vehicles rush at it, and a bumpy landing in Cuba, where everyone suddenly knows how to speak Russian.


The older daughter has some idea of what’s going on; the younger one, who just hours earlier was bopping along unironically to her favorite song, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” in the backseat of the family car, hasn’t a clue. In the next few minutes, the girls will be wrenched away from their parents—who, it turns out, aren’t their parents at all. None of this seems destined to end well; the opening sequence is both tense and intense, riffing on old-school fears of parental loss or desertion. Twenty-one years later we meet these young girls again, now women: The older one, Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson), also known as Black Widow, has managed to join the Avengers, though she happens to be at loose ends right now.

The Story Shown in Avengers:

The story takes place during the period in which the infighting Avengers have broken up. But her younger sister, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), has for years been a highly trained killer, under the thumb of evil mastermind Dreykov (a gnomish, whiskery Ray Winstone). Yelena has recently been freed from Dreykov’s spell—there’s a special potent red dust that does the trick. But she resents everyone, especially Natasha, who tried but failed to protect her when the two were kids. The sisters’ reunion involves a bone-cracking episode of hand-to-hand combat that ends in a truce after the two have rolled themselves like burritos into a set of long white window curtains knocked down during the fight.

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