Black Widow is fan-fiction written by someone who has issues with what happened to the himbos and dimepieces in Moonraker. Let me explain.
My favorite scene in Black Widow comes about twenty-five minutes into the film. Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), the “Black Widow,” is on the run from…authorities…personified by Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt). It’s not really explained who he is and what authority he has. If you’re watching this, you probably saw Captain America: Civil War and already know the answer. If you haven’t seen that movie, go watch it instead because it’s (a) it’s a better movie and (b) this one assumes familiarity with the other Captain America movies to the point that it ought to be titled Captain America: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Budapest.
Anyway, my favorite scene comes about twenty-five minutes into the film. Natasha’s holed up in a safe house (trailer) somewhere in Norway. She’s made dinner, she’s dying her hair, and she’s watching Moonraker. It’s towards the end of the movie; they’re still on Earth, James Bond has just defeated Hugo Drax’s python at the Amazon base, and Drax is remonstrating with him. Bond quips that the python “had a crush on [him].” Natasha’s speaking the words as the movie plays–this is far from the first time she’s watched Moonraker. Let me offer a reading of how this scene explains the whole purpose of the movie.
On average, the MCU hasn’t treated its female characters well. First of all, it’s simply killed many of them: Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Queen Frigga, Maria Hill, Victoria Hand, Jane Foster. There was the whole Black Widow-is-barren subplot in Age of Ultron that left folks queasy. Sharon Carter started strong in Winter Soldier, falls for Steve for no reason in Civil War, and has become a crimelord by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The fact that this movie was delayed for years, despite the obvious fan interest in the character. Of the original group of Avengers, the only other one without a solo movie is Hawkeye. Yep. Arguably Iron Man 2 is a Black Widow origin movie, but she’s seen from Stark’s point of view. Eyes up, Tony.
A second criticism of the MCU is that it didn’t embrace the concept of the Avengers as found family. The Avengers spent a lot of time developing the idea of a disparate group of people who could work as a team. Winter Soldier developed the relationship between Steve and Natasha and is still the best depiction of both characters. Age of Ultron didn’t drive the idea forward, and by Civil War we’re driving them apart. I know for many fans, and certainly many fanfic writers, the the found family aspect of the MCU is important and a source of endless speculation. Keep the fanfic writers in mind, we’ll come back to that.
Moonraker has an uneven reputation. Roger Moore had made three James Bond movies at that point, and finally struck critical and commercial success with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. 1977’s biggest film was Star Wars, so EON did perhaps the inevitable thing and sent James Bond to space in 1979’s Moonraker. It remained the highest-grossing Bond film for decades. It’s also ludicrous. The plot drew heavily on its predecessor, but the final battle sequence, in which US Space Marines fight it out with Hugo Drax’s minions outside Drax’s space station (yes, really), is straight out of Thunderball. I enjoy Moonraker for what it is and it goes down easily, but it’s a good thing that the next entry, 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, had more in common with John le Carré than George Lucas.
The supervillian of Moonraker is Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), an industrialist who plans to kill all human life on Earth and then repopulate the planet with his handpicked “perfect” humans. Bond calls this Drax’s “orbiting stud farm”; the “Kill James Bond” podcast delightfully dubs them the “himbos and dimepieces.” They have no interiority. I think the only time we hear one speak is during a tour of a glass museum in Venice. Her affect is a little odd, which depending on your mode of explanation is either down to a novice actress (Doylist) or mental conditioning (Watsonian).
Black Widow covers this ground differently. We meet two found families, thrown together by circumstances. The first is Black Widow’s “family”, actually a husband-and-wife deep cover spy team operating in Ohio in the mid-1990s. There’s Alexei (David Harbour), the Russian answer to Captain America and Melina (Rachel Weisz), a scientist working on mind control. Assigned to them are two children who are not their natural daughters, Natasha and Elena (Florence Pugh). As MCU veterans know, Natasha got out. We learn here that Elena didn’t, and that Natasha didn’t go back for her. Everyone is nursing resentments toward each other; Alexei is at first alone in his belief that he was a positive figure in his “daughters’” lives.
The second family is the Black Widows themselves. The Big Bad in Black Widow is Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Loki mentions him in The Avengers when he enumerates Natasha’s atrocities (“Dreykov’s daughter”). Dreykov’s"Red Room" made Natasha and Elena, and he’s developed mind control that keeps his army of young female assassins in line. Evidently finding Earth too hot to hold him, his base of operations is now a literal flying fortress, held up by gigantic turbines. He bellows about ruling the world, though unlike Drax he has no immediate plans to destroy it. In the climax of the movie, the Black Widows are released from their mind control and rescue our heroes. Natasha goes off to face the music; she’s not dead in this continuity, not yet anyway.
It’s not all that interesting as an action movie, and it’s certainly not a character piece. Still, there were people in it who were interesting, and the inclusion of Moonraker is a fascinating choice. Someone involved in Black Widow asked the question on everyone’s minds: what if the stock of Drax’s orbiting stud farm in Moonraker were liberated? What if they could have been found family for Jaws and Dolly? 42 years later, we have our answer. Whether this needed an entry in the MCU to resolve is another matter, but as transcoastal airplane movies go I wasn’t bored. Said the same thing about Dial of Destiny, so take this with two tons of salt.