So it's been a long time since we last saw a Marvel Studios film in the theatre, but
that wait is finally over.
Black Widow has now released and after watching the film early
in the UK, there is a lot to break down.
I'm going to be explaining the plot, the ending and the post-credit scene for Black Widow,
giving you a rundown of what happened in the MCU's latest action blockbuster.
This analysis will also contain spoilers, so if you do happen to be someone who hasn't
seen the film yet, then I would recommend watching
this video after you've seen it.
But if you want to keep up to date on any of my future content on Marvel's latest films
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But without further ado, let's dive into Black Widow explained.
So Black Widow begins in Ohio in the 1990s.
We are introduced to a young Natasha, a brave but serious girl who already has a hardened
look in her eyes.
She looks after her younger sister, Yelena, and suspiciously follows the lead of her parents,
Melina, played by Rachel Weisz and Alexei, played by David Harbour, who are actually
spies posing as a married couple.
A prologue shows the family escaping to Cuba under enemy fire, where they risk their lives
only to be greeted on the tarmac by Ray Winstone in a shell-suit
and faltering Russian accent.
As the criminal mastermind Dreykov, he takes one look at a young Natasha and spots her
potential.
Natasha, who has already started training at the Red Room, a secret Soviet boot camp
turning young women into deadly agents, is split from Yelena, and the girls are taught
to kill.
The main action of the film skips ahead to the time immediately following Captain America:
Civil War, when Scarlett Johansson's Natasha is a fugitive separated from the rest of the
Avengers.
If jumping back a few films in the franchise sounds confusing, Black Widow, along with
the current Disney+ series Loki, serves as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most recent
attempt at retroactively building character narratives and backstories by doubling back
on its own colossal, ever-expanding timeline.
And so Natasha finds out that not only is the Red Room still in business and its leader,
Dreykov, still alive, but that the other widow operatives are being chemically manipulated
so they become mindless assassins without free will.
To bring down Dreykov and his Red Room, Natasha reluctantly joins forces with her fake family,
including an older Yelena, played Florence Pugh, who has found an antidote to mind control.
But before this foundation can form there is a lot of plot points to discuss and break
down surrounding this mainly contained storyline in the MCU.
To begin with, after being press-ganged into Dreykov's platoon of young assassins, the
sisters’ paths diverge, only for them to meet up again years later as adults.
Before this happens, however, we follow Nat as she enters a caravan home with Rick Mason
there to greet her, where he gives her passports and drivers licenses with other names, along
with some mail from Budapest.
It's soon after that Natasha is in a van which has an explosive arrow shot at it by Taskmaster,
resulting in a brief fight in which the villain dominates and Natasha eventually escapes from.
But before she leaves, she finds vials that Yelena had sent her and a photo of both the
sisters.
Meaning now, that Natasha has to travel to Budapest and find
her sister.
In Budapest, after some introductory hand-to-hand combat, the women call a truce.
At this point, they are panting on the floor, surrounded by broken crockery, and with a
net curtain wound around both their necks, an oddly beautiful image that suggests a glamour
as well as the violent trauma which will bind them forever.
They essentially have some catching up to do.
While talking, Yelena wants to know what the deal is with Natasha’s trademark fighting
stance which works as a kid-sister tease, though
it also shows Marvel’s tendency to have it both ways, ridiculing its own conventions
before indulging them all over again once the next action scene rolls around.
Black Widow is of course set immediately after the events of Civil War, which means the Avengers
have recently broken up.
Natasha recollects saying, “It’s fine, I’m actually better
on my own,”.
So we get a sense of where the character is at and how she feels about her position as
the Black Widow.
But Yelena has more important news, as she informs Nat that she recently escaped from
Dreykov’s brainwashed assassin squad after being sprayed with one of the vial tubes from
one of her targets.
The film follows the women’s attempts to liberate the rest of Dreykov’s trafficked
female killers from his nerve centre.
It’s called the Red Room, reflecting the practices that go on there, in which the girls
are forced to have hysterectomies, as Yelena explains in grisly detail in response to an
offhand joke about her “time of the month”.
Finding the Red Room necessitates a family reunion of sorts.
But Yelena reveals to Nat in this scene that the vials manipulate the mind and free the
widows.
Nat said her and Clint killed Dreykov in Budapest, the man who ran the Widow program, but Yelena
states here that he didn’t die.
After this long conversation to get the audience on
board with what's actually going on, the action is soon about to follow.
Their conversation is interrupted as a few soldiers and Widows, being Dreykov’s goons,
attack the home.
During the hectic chase scene that follows Nat eventually comes face to face with one
of Dreykov's Widow and learns up close and personal that the widow doesn’t want to
attack but Dreykov is making her do so.
A charge goes off and kills the widow leaving Nat shocked and wanting to get to the bottom
of this even more.
Yelena and Nat do manage to escape this situation, but they had to do it by avoiding yet another
attack by Taskmaster, who uses another explosive arrow on the car they are using.
Taskmaster, as quite literally implied, works for Dreykov and quite frankly, they aren't
the strongest villain the MCU has put to screen.
Up until the final act, we really only get to see Taskmaster
as an action prop that just isn't explored very much.
It's like taking the Winter Soldier but giving him no reasoning early on, making some of
the action scenes feel weightless.
This does change in the third act but having something a bit earlier may have been more
beneficial in regards to the threat of the villain.
But following this, we do get a pretty important flashback that links to this particular reveal
at the end of the film and it involves a scene that shows us the Budapest mission, where
Nat blows up a building with Dreykov’s daughter in it when she was a young girl.
It's around this time that Yelena and Nat also discuss the origin of the vials being
from an old widow, alongside talking about where their real parents are, as Alexei and
Melina weren’t their real ones.
It's some of the most important details that get
to the heart of both of their characters and the reveals yet to come in the plot.
But planning to kill Dreykov together, the two meet back up with Rick and get a small
helicopter to carry out their mission, one that begins with trying to capture Alexei.
We come back to David Harbour's Alexei, who is in prison and doing arm wrestles, showing
us that he always wins because he is a super-soldier.
After showing off in some pretty hilarious scenes he goes to see if he's got
any fan-mail and in the head of a Red Guardian action figure, he finds an earpiece.
Nat tells him through the device to get out of the prison, resulting in the guards attempting
to detain him, but failing to do so.
After Nat goes down to help, Yelena fires a rocket at a structure on the mountain top
surrounding the prison, culminating with an avalanche and a quick exit by Nat and Alexei
in the helicopter.
It's like something out of a James Bond film and funnily enough,
Natasha does watch a scene from a Bond film earlier on in the movie while she's at the
caravan home with Rick.
So you get a sense of genres that they are trying to mix into a
pretty standing superhero solo outing.
But while on the helicopter, Nat and Yelena demand Alexei tells them the location of the
red room, with him claiming he doesn't know.
He tells them that Melina works for the red room and that she didn’t die in the opening
prologue, meaning that this is their next destination.
So yes, we are getting a full family reunion.
But after they land and make their way to Melina's place, we get a cool easter egg with
Alexei saying that he and Captain America were rivals and he asks
Natasha whether he’s ever mentioned him.
Comically their wasnt and it speaks to the position and appearance that Alexei currently
has, only building on the humourous persona that he brings to the film.
But after some travelling, the three of them find Melina who takes them to her home and
Alexei get's to put on his Red Guardian outfit.
Melina shows off that Dreykov developed technology to control living things and demonstrates
by shutting down a pig’s respiratory system, before turning it back on.
They get in an argument where Nat says they were never family and that their whole dynamic
was never real, ending with Yelena leaving because she says it was real to her.
Melina tells Nat in this sequence she won’t survive fighting Dreykov alone and when Nat
asks about her real mum, Melina says Dreykov had her killed.
It's the final piece of motivation that is needed to take down Dreykov and it leads us
into a set of final action scenes and reveals.
Dreykov's soldiers soon come down on the house and use arrows to knock out Yelena, Red Guardian
and Nat.
It's in this scene that temporarily, Melina was revealed to have brought the soldiers
there.
Taskmaster leaves with Melina and Red Guardian and the girls wake up on a plane,
with the soldiers, Melina and Taskmaster all around them.
The plane ascends and takes them to the notorious Red Room, which is based high above in the
clouds.
Soon after landing, Melina meets with Dreykov, while Yelena is held down on a stretcher and
is having her brain taken out.
Alexei and Nat have also been placed in prison cells at the base while all of this is going
on.
After a few words, Dreykov notices something is wrong and takes off Melina’s face, revealing
that it was actually Nat under the mask, similar to what she did in Captain America: The Winter
Soldier.
While this happens, the prison cells open and the Nat in the cell is revealed to be
Melina.
She says she designed them and didn’t betray them and that her and Nat had a plan to kill
Dreykov, with it all being in action now.
We cut to flashbacks from the house before, where Nat and Melina built this plan and it
was a pretty good one.
Melina is on comms with Yelena and tells her how to get away, but Dreykov reveals to Nat
that she can’t kill him, making their plan seem a bit stuck.
When she tries to, she can’t because he installed a pheromone lock on all the widows,
so his pheromones make it impossible for them to harm him.
Nat demands to know her mother's name but Dreykov says it’s unknown
with Taskmaster also being revealed to be Dreykov’s daughter, who Natasha thought
she had previously killed.
Taskmaster is sent away and goes down to stop the Red Guardian and
Melina because Dreykov believes at this point that Nat is no threat as she cannot attack
him.
Dreykov resultingly attacks Nat while showing her all the Widows under his control and says
world leaders work for him and his widows can make a third of the world starve if he
wanted to.
But at the last minute, Nat reveals that she knows how to bypass the pheromonal lock, and
she does so by severing her nerve.
She now attacks Dreykov but Widows enter office and he escapes as they attack her.
Yelena finds a way to destroy the base sending it crashing down and while Natasha is struggling,
she comes back to help with the vials.
This frees the widows and gives them all some time to get out of the falling base.
Yelena enters the room.
In the meantime, Alexei and Melina get in a plane while looking for
the girls, but they have to eventually leave.
As the red room base is sent crashing and plummeting towards the ground, Natasha weaves
the wreckage in mid-air, fighting Taskmaster all the way down.
While she does so, Yelena jumps down onto a plane, blows up an engine and we learn that
Dreykov and everyone in it dies.
This results in Yelena falling, but Natasha catches her on the way down towards the ground,
deploying Yelena’s parachute in the process.
After some more fighting between Natasha and Taskmaster on the ground, Nat eventually uses
a vial on her, freeing the character from the mind control.
Soon after, Nat finds Yelena and confesses she did think the family
felt real and that she thinks of Yelena as a sister.
It's a nice full-circle moment and it closes the themes that the film
opened with and developed throughout.
Alexei and Melina, injured, walk over to them in joy and Ross and his goons start driving
towards them.
Yelena gives Nat her best as the freed Widows land in a plane and Yelena, Alexei, Melina
and even Taskmaster go with them.
They leave as the goons come for Nat and the film cuts away to a 2 weeks later
timeline.
Nat has her Infinity War hair and outfit, with the vest being Yelena’s, and in the
scene, Rick shows her the Quinjet which turns out to be the plane Team Cap has in
Infinity War.
It isn't really explained how he got the plain but it's cool to see it pop up to set up the
events in the timeline.
It all ends with Natasha saying that she plans to break Team Cap out of prison and of course,
the rest is history.
But while Black Widow might go back into the MCU's past, its post-credit scene is very
much a nod to the future of Phase 4 and potentially beyond.
And unlike the rest of Black Widow, the credits scene cuts to some
unspecified time in the MCU's present-day.
We see Yelena at Natasha's grave where she's joined by Val, played by Julia
Louis-Dreyfus, who made her MCU debut in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, she recruited John Walker and gave him his comics
name of US Agent, and it seems Val didn't stop with
John.
Yelena tells Val in the Black Widow credits scene that she's on holiday, so she's clearly
recruited her at some point too.
We don't yet know if Yelena was Snapped and has just come back or if she's been working
with Val for a while, but maybe that'll be explored in a future MCU outing.
What we do know is that Val has a new target for Yelena, the person she says is responsible
for Natasha's death, and that is Hawkeye.
We already knew that Florence Pugh would reprise her role as Yelena in the Hawkeye TV show,
but this new information suggests that she's going to be hunting him down.
What the scene also appears to set up is the future appearance of the Thunderbolts in the
MCU, a team of villains who pretended to be heroes, before eventually undergoing a change
of heart and fighting the good fight.
While the character that Val is based on in the comics didn't set up the Thunderbolts,
it wouldn't be a surprise if the MCU version of the team changed things slightly.
After all, John Walker wasn't a part of the line-up and
even fought against them as part of the Jury, a vigilante group.
In the comics, Baron Zemo formed the Thunderbolts as a new incarnation of the Masters of Evil,
before they rejected him and Hawkeye took over.
It wouldn't be a surprise for the Hawkeye show to further set up the Thunderbolts now
that Yelena is confirmed to be working for Val.
There's also the chance that with Yelena, US Agent and Zemo working together, the MCU's
Thunderbolts could be true to the team's villainous origins as an anti-Avengers in Phase 4 and
beyond.
We'll have to see but it does give us something else to chew on as we progress into this next
phase of the MCU.
But that was my video explaining the plot and ending for Black Widow.
I hope this did help some of you guys understand the events a bit better and I'm looking forward
to hearing what else you picked out in the film, so don't forget to let me know down
below in the comments section.
I will most likely be doing a review video for Black Widow later this week too, so keep
a lookout for whenever I post.
For more breakdown videos on all upcoming films and shows in the MCU, then subscribe
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But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.