Month: July 2021

I don’t remember much about the introduction of Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanoff, into to the MCU during Iron Man 2. Frankly, I don’t remember much of Iron Man 2, as it was a forgettable movie, much like Iron Man and Iron Man 3. The best Iron Man movies were ones with ensemble casts, where each (somewhat) equally powerful characters played off one another.

Black Widow in the MCU has appeared in multiple movies, including a couple of Captain America movies and all the Avenger movies. Played by a somewhat robotic Scarlett Johansson, she’s a tough ex-Russian spy who defected and joined SHIELD. Her background seemed ripe for a solo movie, but it took years to bring such a feature to fruition. The much delayed solo film finally debuted in America on July 8th, quite some time after her demise in Avengers: Endgame.

A major flaw with super-hero movies these days is the origin story. Even in re-boots, we still sit through the origin story of the character, which takes up a good third to half the movie. Most of the viewers already know the background, but Hollywood keeps pushing different version of their beginning, most egregiously in the Spider-Man movies, or at least the first two versions. The Tom Holland version at least skips this part, and puts us in the middle of the aftermath of his spider incident and the death of his uncle. Captain Marvel, a character maybe not as familiar to movie-goers as someone like Spider-Man, went the origin route, as did Captain America, Iron-Man, and Ant-Man. As for Thor, well, he’s been around a few hundred years when we meet him in his first movie. The ironically named rag-tag band of losers known as the Guardians of the Galaxy, the least interesting of the lot, get introduced to us in their first movie as well. Thankfully, the movie Black Widow skips this part, aside from a few flashbacks, but then, we’ve already seen her in eight movies so far, so we know who she is, and a little bit of her origin. Though it’s not a knock against Johansson, she’s in her mid-thirties now, and going through her origin in the Red Room and her escape from this is better off told in brief flashback, anyway.

In terms of timeline, Black Widow takes place immediately after the events at the Berlin airport in Captain America: Civil War. In that scene, Natasha Romanoff switched sides. She helps Rogers and Barnes escape, which puts her in violation of the Sokovia Accords, and a target of General Ross, who seems to like being an all-around jerk blindly chasing super-heroes. The movie begins with a flashback to 1995, when Romanoff was a young girl, living in Ohio with a fake Russian family — sister, mother, father. They act like a normal family, until the “dad” arrives from work and tell them their cover is blown. They make their escape to Cuba, where all are separated, and Romanoff and her younger sister sent off to the Red Room, a training ground for assassins.

The scene then switches to General Ross and his soldiers supposedly having Romanoff surrounded in a building. They chat on the phone. His team moves in, only to find the phone connected to a remote device, and Romanoff stepping out of the bathroom in a ferry in far-away Norway. As a (former) Norwegian I recognized western Norway right away. I was almost surprised she didn’t head down to the cafe in the ferry and buy a coffee or hot dog. Instead, she buys supplies as a local grocery store and finds an old mobile house in some desolate location. Here she intended to hunker down and stay under the radar, but it doesn’t take long before she’s thrust back into action.

The impetus to that action is one of a few things that annoyed me in this movie. Her contact, who set her up with the mobile home in Norway, drops off mail from a former safe house in Bulgaria. This brings her into conflict with Taskmaster, someone trying to secure items in a box from that mail. I could understand somewhat how Taskmaster appeared: maybe the box had a tracking device. Still, when Romanoff heads to Bulgaria, who does she run into but her former sister, Yelena. How did Yelena end up in the same safe house, and how do the other Russian assassins and the villain Taskmaster immediately track them down to the same exact location? Maybe there are deleted scenes that explain this, but this just made no sense. The suspension of disbelief in action scenes are one things, but the logic here is jarring.

Natasha and Yelena make their escape, break out their former father from prison, and find their former mother, in order to once and for all destroy the Red Room; we learn in this movie, that the Budapest reference from the original Avengers movie is tied to Romanoff and Hawkeye trying to destroy the Red Room and thinking they had succeeded.

There are several great action scenes in the movie, which make it seem shorter than the two-hour run time. We see a more mature Black Widow, one who has experienced many battles, faced humans, gods, and aliens, and one who still has a couple more battles left to fight, and then a tragic end. The post-credit scene seems to set up Yelena as an important character in the MCU, but whether she’s good or evil remains to be seen. Marvel does make small changes to characters that differ from the various comic appearances of those characters.

It’s disappointing that it took so long to get a solo Black Widow movie. There are strong female characters of note in the MCU — Captain Marvel, Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlett Witch, and Black Widow, Hope Van Dyne aka the Wasp, Nebula and Gamora from Guardians, Valkyrie from Thor: Ragnarok to mention a few. Still, it’s great to finally see Natasha in her own movie, even though she seems at times like a supporting character and not a leading one.

It is somewhat bittersweet to watch Black Widow, knowing the fate of her character in Avengers: Endgame. The movie fills in some gaps, gives us more of that particular universe, and aside from my noted annoyances is a superb movie. The reviews that I’ve read have all praised Florence Pugh, who plays Yelena, and deservedly so, as she’s a tough fighter and ready with quips at the drop of a hat. David Harbour as the Red Guardian is the comic relief, something I wish movies would leave out completely. Rachel Weisz has a restrained and almost dour presence, and could have been written better. A question for the future: Does Yelena become the next Black Widow, or Red Widow? Does she join the new Avengers, who take over after the events of Endgame? The continuing story does seem to call for younger actors. I wonder how she plays off against Peter Parker, Dr. Strange, Ant-man and the Wasp, or even Thor or the Hulk. Not that I expect the latter two to show up again in any new Avenger movies. Thor likely is done after his next solo movie, and the Hulk? If the events of the Avengers are anything to go by, he’s settled into his strange hybrid character, aka Professor Hulk.

As the above demonstrates, I am a fan of the MCU movies. I haven’t read any of the comics in decades, as from my experience the comics do weird things that break all story-lines. But the movies follow a stronger, less random path. Still, now that the major 20-movie arc from the first Iron Man to Endgame is over, the question is: where do they go from here? There are at least eight or nine announced movies in the MCU, with two of those appearing this year (Shang-Chi and the 3rd Spider-Man installment). With the exception of The Eternals, I’ll likely watch them as they appear, as I’m by now somewhat vested in the characters.

By chance I recently watched the first episode of Alice in Borderland, a strangely titled show on Netflix. The opening seemed somewhat boring; three loser friends run around Tokyo goofing off, hiding in a toilet when they think the police are after them for some silly act. When they emerge from the toilet, however, the resulting scene actually made me sit up and take notice. It was almost on par with the scene of Neo waking up in his pod in The Matrix. For, instead of a bustling downtown Tokyo, the friends emerge to an empty city. This made me think of the Twilight Zone episode, where a man wakes up and finds himself alone in a small city. Did they cross into another reality, I wondered. Is it a game, a dream, or simulation?

Walking around the empty city, the three friends, Arisu, Chota, and Karube, come across one other person, who cryptically says something about an expired visa before a red laser shoots from the sky and through the man’s brain. It’s a shocking moment, for neither the characters nor the audience expected this to happen. The next thing they see is a sign pointing to a “game.” They follow the sign, entering a building where they encounter two young women. A voice instructs them to each pick up a mobile phone, which shows a playing card, and begins a countdown. They must find their way out of the building, from room to room, before the room catches on fire. It’s a harrowing experience, and their introduction to life in this new world, where to keep living you earn visas by playing games. Each visa lets you live a few days. The games are deadly, but not playing them, just as deadly.

With Chota injured by the flames in the first game, Arisu and Karube enter another game to try to figure out more about this strange new world. They join a large group in a game of tag, pursued through an apartment building by a machine-gun wielding man wearing a horses’s head. Arisu, the show’s protagonist, learns the meaning of the cards: Spades correlate to games of strength, Clubs are team battles, Diamonds are a battle of wits, and Hearts correlate to games of betrayal. Their first game was clubs, and this is a game of spades. They’re joined by new characters: the agile climber Usagi; the brooding ex-soldier Aguni; and the aloof and mysterious Chishiya. Of all the characters, Arisu seems the one most capable of surviving in this strange gaming-based situation. He figured out how to beat the first game, and how to beat the second one. However, as they need to extend the visas for Chota and a young woman who survived the first game with them, not every game is winnable.

Their third game is a hearts game, which as Arisu learned means betrayal. The quartet don strange headsets in a botanical garden. To their horror they learn that they’ve strapped bombs to their heads, and the game is set up so that only one of the four will survive. It’s a tragic situation, and as Arisu emerges as the sole survivor, he is wracked by guilt. He lays down in the street to die, having given up, as by living he caused the death of his friends. He’s saved by Usagi, the climber from the game of tag. She has learned to survive, hunting for food in the deserted city, foraging for materials to build a small sanctuary. As Arisu slowly returns to life and finds the will to live, they team up, hoping to live through the games and find a way home.

Eventually, they find their way to “the Beach,” a community of survivors who live in a resort, teaming up to solve games and extend their visas. They meet Hatter, the enigmatic leader of the Beach, as well as his executive committee and a violent group of gun-toting maniacs. Arisu protects Usagi from the rapacious Aguni, the leader of the militants, and earns their enmity. He gains the trust of Hatter and the other leaders, but when Hatter is brought back dead from a game, the world turns upside down again. The militants take over. A new game takes place inside the Beach, and the militants go on a killing spree, intent on murdering every inhabitant in the Beach.

As the season ends, Arisu and Usagi find their way to the location of the gamemasters, the people who have been orchestrating all the games. As they wander around the room they see that all the gamemasters are dead. They run into two other survivors, and as they wonder what’s next, a person appears on the screens, announcing a new level of games to challenge them all, laughing with excitement.

It’s a breathtaking series, a nail-biter of a show. I didn’t know what to expect, and the writers threw in twists and turns in nearly every episode. Few people are safe. After I finished the show, some research informed me that Arisu is Alice, based on how this is pronounced in Japanese. Usagi is the White Rabbit. Hatter, of course, the Mad Hatter. There are other analogies to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. The always smiling Chishiya is the Cheshire Cat. The woman who appears at the end might be the Red Queen. Kuina, a trans person who partnered with Chishiya, is the blue caterpillar (she always wear blue and goes through a transformation like caterpillars). Not every character in the show has a matching source in Carroll’s books, and the plot, aside from falling down the rabbit hole into a strange and mad world, is vastly different.

A sequel is in the works. It will be interesting to see where it goes, and what this world means. How could Tokyo be turned into a deadly video game on such a grand scale? Are all the deaths real, or imagined? What’s Chishiya’s backstory? Will any characters survive and if they make it back to the real world, what happens to them? The easy way out would be for the loser Arisu suddenly to realize that he’s wasted his life, and now he has a chance to take control and make a difference.