beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have been thinking on the Black Widow movie, which I watched at the weekend, and trying to think why it was not the fun I was looking for.

... the backstory is very upsetting, I expected that, but I was expecting different things once Nat was an adult.

Black Widow is a movie we wanted made... but possibly not exactly like this?
She was fun to watch because she could plough through whole crowds of opponents, mostly guys much bigger than her, she could manipulate anyone, mostly guys much more powerful than her, and she... basically knew what she was doing? Better than anyone?

She freed herself from the worst circumstances. Having been raised by people full of hate, she made a choice, and became her own person.

I feel like the movie didn't give us any of that.

spoilers under the cut


Simplest things, she spent the whole movie fighting women, and letting herself get hit by that one guy who was not made for combat. Possibly if you didnt know spoilers and had read the comics then Taskmaster would fake you out and seem like a vs a guy? But mostly she's fighting the exact people she wants to save.

That wasn't as much fun as it could be.

She did a very minimal amount of manipulation. "Thank you for your cooperation", sure, but... we didnt know she was doing that so we didnt get the fun of it?

And she did not give the impression she knew what she was doing. She found out she made some huge mistakes and never noticed a bunch of things. Which is consistent with her Winter Soldier characterisation but, not fun.

I'm basically saying it didnt make her a power fantasy, or give the audience a fun time being the powerful ones in this story.

Her strongest self willed move involved hurting herself.

Not fun.



So then there's the other stuff, the character stuff, about free will and self determination.

I read a thing about female action heroes that says men fight for a variety of reasons but women fight to get a chance to be themselves. Make choices, define themselves. "My name is" moments.

Nat won that fight before we met her, right?

But this whole movie is... That but far worse. Nobody else gets the chance to save themselves. Nobody else gets a choice.

They made Nat special by making literally everyone else a puppet, which is... not a story about raising women up, even though it thinks it is.

I mean sure, very SF, here's a mind control chemical with an absolute 100% effecriveness rate, here's an instant antidote, now what happens?

Well nothing happens. Ever. Ever again.
Tick tock people.

Until acted on from outside.



We didn't see *anyone* make a choice. We didn't even *see* Yelena choose to get involved. And we saw the effects of Melina's choices before we saw the choices, which... again, feels like it pulled the fun out of it.


So it's just, nobody chose their bad things, they were just following orders. Nobody chose their good things, they were just drugged to instant wellness. How is that a story? How does it have characters in it? That's...

It just didn't give me any of the fun stuff I thought it could.


There's a story to be made about a whole school of Black Widows, raised and trained to believe wrong things, and how the one who left first can help the others get out.

It would require writers to make some decisions about what that wrong stuff was, and what the right things were, and be persuasive in both directions, with the good stuff winning.

Thesis, antithesis, fight!

... this was a whole set of fights without a thesis, I feel.

It wasn't even about fighting for freedom ina way that maps to the real world.

It was just... empty.

So I did not like Black Widow in the way I liked the stories Black Widow could have been.



And then of course the tag scene is there to just... draw a hard cut off on the whole thing we just watched, and remind me why I hated that other movie.



So the overall experience is like... being sold advertising.


I did not quite enjoy it.