Was the Marvel stand-alone instalment a fitting send-off for Natasha Romanoff? And what about the much-vaunted return of Iron Man?
What an unusual yet beguilingly brilliant Marvel movie Black Widow is. The Disney-owned saga’s USP is that everything is interlinked: each episode powers up the next, like nodes lighting up on a superhero circuit board. Cate Shortland’s film, however, exists almost entirely outside this continuum.
The prequel is set after the events of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and acts as a stand-alone adventure for Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff. This is probably a good thing, as Black Widow has a narrow window of opportunity for adventures left before she suffers a tragic demise in the events of Avengers: Endgame. But it does mean we’re into entirely new territory for the Marvel Cinematic Universe: an episode that goes nowhere, yet in dazzling, femme, power-fuelled fashion.
