**MINOR SPOILERS FOR BLACK WIDOW, PLUS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU FILMS - ESPECIALLY CIVIL WAR, INFINITY WAR, AND ENDGAME - ABOUND WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.**
It's been a minute.
After most of 2020 saw the movie theaters closed for months at a time (depending on where you live, of course, but I still lived in California at the time so maaaaaaaybe one or two months open was the best we got, and I didn't even go back there then, not even for Tenet like I'd really been hoping), 2021 is looking to be the year when, with the help of various hybrid theatrical/streaming releases and most people (assuming you can trust their Insta and/or dating app profiles anyway) taking their Covid vaccines, the box office starts finally coming back to life.
And so far, the biggest boon in this year's cultural story has been, naturally, the swan song of the great Scarlett Johansson's performance as Natasha Romanoff, going back to before her untimely death in Endgame to a period between Civil War and Infinity War when she was still on the run for violating the Sokovia Accords (and especially for assaulting the King of Wakanda, according to Secretary Ross in an early scene as he tries to apprehend her.) While it's no longer technically the start to Phase Four of the MCU like nature intended - that honor goes to WandaVision now, and all its bonkers sitcom pastiches, deep explorations of the persistence of grief, and gleeful pokes in the eye to all the fans and their theories (to the point where it almost feels like the writers deliberately made...adjustments...to torpedo the theories with extreme prejudice, as impossible as it would've been given the known production timelines and logistical difficulties posed in the world of Covid.)
But for Black Widow, director Cate Shortland and a spot-on cast - particularly the supporting cast, many of whom do a great job acting circles around ScarJo and making promising cases for their own movies and TV shows further down the line - serve up a damn fine thriller in the vein of Mission: Impossible - a little more grounded than most Marvel productions, but still, never losing sight of where to spend all the money Disney racked up in the last few years.
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| Where one family leaves, another awaits. |
