Spoilers are marked with [SPOILER] throughout this article, and they’ve been kept to a minimum. You’ve been warned, anyway.
How do I watch Black Widow in India? This question has no definitive answer at the time of writing (July 2021), but a good VPN, and a US friend’s Disney+ account are the most legitimate way to pay for the movie and watch it.
There are parts of Black Widow that make it evident that it wasn't conceived as an OTT movie- every fight sequence here would have had ten times the impact on the big screen. In many ways, the story of delays surrounding the making and releasing of this movie are reflective of the story of Scarlett Johansson’s role in MCU itself- the first female superhero had to wait a decade to get her own movie even as Captain Marvel, a decidedly weak link in MCU storytelling, debuted much earlier, serving the sole purpose of explaining to us why Nick Fury had a damn pager in 2016.
At risk of coming across as a Marvel fanatic, however, I’m going to go ahead and say it- Black Widow is the movie we need for these times.
It is no accident that the movie opens with a pensive rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Nothing about this movie is happy, or hopeful. The jokes, few and far-between, provide just a couple of seconds’ relief from what is essentially a very serious movie.
In many ways, I’m grateful this movie came out so late in the franchise. Because without context, it would be just another superhero movie and stunt fest.
But in coming after Endgame, maybe even after we’ve shared in Wanda’s grief and Loki’s painful growth, this movie makes a case for the superhero who never was ‘super’.
There are some superheroes who are very human, who need painkillers after being in a fight. Natasha is one among them- the accidental superhero wanting to be more than just a hired assassin.
And that, I think, is the whole point of this movie. To give us closure.
[SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME]When Natasha sacrifices herself to give the Avengers a chance at acquiring the Soul Stone, we feel bad for a life gone too soon.
We feel anger and angst, and in many ways, that anger makes us root for Thanos’ eventual downfall almost with a vengeance. Because to bring him down was to kill Natasha, all of thirty odd years, a life with so much potential and promise, taken too soon.
In Black Widow, though, we see that Natasha was effectively going down as a hero, by choice. [SPOILER] Because in her past are dead children, an all-consuming vengeance that makes her blind to everyone else’s pain and suffering, much as the world had been to her’s all those years ago. When you’re born unwanted and sent to a training camp to give up free will, what else is there to do?
Natasha Romanoff is a reminder that no one, not even a superhero, is perfect. That behind what was eventually selfless sacrifice is a human being, subjected to happiness and sadness, and all of those things that make up life in general.
The real villain in this story isn’t Dreykov or Taskmaster, as the trailers tend to suggest. The villain in Black Widow is the past, and regret for a circumstance that is too far behind to fix, but too present to forget.
Black Widow is not a perfect movie-far from it- but it is a very real story of loss. With the exit of Natasha Romanoff, daughter, sister, Avenger, we’re truly drawing the curtain on an era in movies. And it seems only fitting that we watch it in a world that has been changed so irrevocably.
