Time and time again, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has failed to portray female superheroes with dignity. The studio has pushed the bare minimum of female empowerment into the hands of female fans, and because of its rarity, we cling to it. 

The 2019 film, Captain Marvel, the first Marvel movie with a solo female protagonist, was disappointing to many. The film and its branding pushed the age-old narrative of “girls can be just as good as boys.” However, all it did was remind us that women are not, and should not, be defined in accordance to men, and neither should our idea of “empowerment.” 

This is why Marvel’s Black Widow, a female-directed prequel released in early July, is so groundbreaking. 

Played by Scarlett Johansson, Black Widow is one of the most over-sexualized superheroes in the Marvel Universe, beginning from her first appearance in Iron Man 2, circa 2010. In that movie alone, she is referred to as “a very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit,” and is objectified by the main character of the film.

The Black Widow movie is well deserved, especially after 9 films have portrayed Black Widow as everything from a love interest to a literal object. She is now a standalone protagonist with a movie of her own, one that does a fair amount of justice to the issues that created her in the first place. 

To skim the surface of the Black Widow movie, it tackles a multitude of feminist issues, from the literal plotpoint of forced sterilization to the allegorical portrayal of misogyny and the patriarchy. 

The movie’s plot revolves around stopping the male creator of the “Red Room,” in which young girls are trained to kill, and are stripped of every form of autonomy. Florence Pugh’s character, Yelena, explains briefly the horrors of the Red Room, where both her and Johansson’s characters came of age, referring to the removal of the female inhabitants’ reproductive organs.  

As both Johansson and Pugh’s characters fight their way through a facility to stop the Red Room’s creator, they encounter other female fighters who know no better than to protect their male leader. This served, in my mind, to comment on the impact of the patriarchy, and how women have been conditioned by misogyny and the male gaze to fight and otherwise tear down other women. 

However, this isn’t to say that Black Widow fulfilled all of its potential to commentate on the patriarchy and the idea of stripping away female autonomy, both issues that plague the real world, not just the MCU. While one could argue that Marvel movies have not proclaimed to serve as groundbreaking theory, it feels as if Marvel movies dip a toe into the pool of political commentary before promptly pulling it out. Conversations about forced sterilization are short in this movie, and a fair amount of the innately feminist scenes can mostly be described as ‘subtle.’ 

Perhaps that in itself is evidence of Marvel’s inability to entirely escape from the ‘acceptable’ female protagonist. Black Widow needed to be a hero that was equal parts empowering and marketable, and in that, prevents her from being entirely revolutionary. 

The movie itself even comments on this, with Pugh’s character commenting, “I’m not the trained killer that little girls call their hero.”