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Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Black Widow Movie Plot Summary

I saw this the other day. It has a lot of good things going for it, but it does kind of have a bit of a problem. So here's a quick summary. Obviously it's all spoilers.


Black Widow's family was fake, and her fake father let her be taken away when she was young by an evil man to be used as a tool.

A man with a military rank and a bunch of men with guns are trying to catch Black Widow. But she's so thoroughly outsmarted them that she's already in another country.

She then visits her simp who gives her everything that she wants, but who's a little annoying in that he seems to think they have a relationship when she's clearling hinted that they don't really.

She then gets attacked by a very dangerous and competant masked woman who is trying to steal the Mcguffin, but Black Widow manages to escape with it.

Black Widow then visits her sister, a strong intelligent woman who can match Widow move for move.

Her sister tells her that she, along with a lot of other powerful women, were being mind-controlled by the evil man, and the Mcguffin can break the mind control.

But the evil man is a coward who is really good at hiding, so they decide to rescue an informant who can tell them where the evil man is hiding.

The two women go back to the simp for the supplies they need, but the stuff he gives them isn't top-tier so they make fun of him and then set out anyway.

They give the informant instructions on how to escape, but the man messes it up so the two women have to take down an army of armed men and then grab the man and escape with him.

But the man they rescued - their fake father - doesn't know where the evil man is, so instead they find a woman who can tell them where the evil man is.

The woman - their fake mother - does know where the evil man is, and helps them go right to him.

The three women then take down the evil man and everything he's built, freeing the other women he's enslaved. The fake father loses a fight to the masked woman but one of the good women saves him.

The sister kills the evil man and all his evil hench-men while Natasha frees the masked woman from the mind control, because the masked woman was a good person too.

All the freed women escape safely and go to create new lives. The fake family make up and are happy now that the father has learned to keep his mouth shut. Natasha manipulates the stupid military man to clean up the mess. The simp finally gets her some top-tier gear, so he's OK and she's finally nice to him.


OK, so obviously I'm framing this all in a specific way, but everything I described actually happened in the movie. Every single female protrayed in the entire movie is a good person. The bad guys are all men, and most of them are shown as being physically inferior to the women and mentally inferior to Natasha at least, having established control over the women when the women were helpless children. There are two good men: the friendly arms dealer who is a helpfull support character who basically does what he's told by the female protagonist, and the father who is portrayed as being rather pathetic for comedic purposes and who does almost nothing useful in the movie, and who by the end basically learns he should just shut up. I figured that as "the muscle" he would at least get to defeat Taskmaster in battle, but no: he was losing and one of the others had to save him. The main antagonist is physically unimposing and of course gets outsmarted by Black Widow. He does have male henchmen, but they're apparently not important enough for us to even find out if they are being mind-controlled or not, and they are all just casually killed off. General Ross kind of serves as a secondary antagonist: not a real bad guy but a stupid misguided government official / representative of the patriarchy, who does not contribute to the plot in any real way and is really just there to be casually outsmarted by Black Widow to show her capabilities.

But the action is pretty good, and I really liked the human element of the fake broken family somehow pulling together into a real family. So yeah, it's not a bad movie, it just makes the classic mistake of confusing female empowerment with male depowerment. I mean, it's understandable when you're trying to right a balance to end up swinging too far, and I can accept that is what happened here. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a flaw.