This article contains spoilers for Black Widow.
Let’s get something out of the way, Black Widow is as much a spy movie as it is another small part of the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not like the film tries to hide its spy genre influences by any means, as Marvel Studios heads into Phase Four growing increasingly comfortable with tying its production to a specific niche within traditional cinema.
Black Widow herself is defined by the movie as a James Bond fan, with Moonraker being the perfect 007 film to reference ahead of the plot taking Natasha and her family aboard the flying Red Room for its third act. However, throughout the entire course of its story, Black Widow wants fans of the Bourne saga to feel right at home as much as it tries to do the same for Marvel enthusiasts.
RELATED: Every Easter Egg In The Black Widow Movie
At its heart, this makes perfect sense because Natasha Romanoff herself is a byproduct of the cold war era and that’s an essential element both to her long-running comic book origin story and the kind of picture the MCU has been trying to paint ever since she first appeared in Iron Man 2. To further expand on this idea, Black Widow’s opening scene takes a very Bond-like approach showing Natasha and Yelena’s parents on the family’s genesis mission right before launching into an opening credits sequence that’s perfectly complemented with a great cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
By framing the movie’s bad guy into contemporary history, General Dreykov is infused with a touch of realness that would make him perfectly slot in a modern James Bond movie, up until Black Widow’s pheromones trick turn him into a sillier villain echoing the eccentricity of Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro, and -of course- Moonraker’s Hugo Drax. At the same time, Taskmaster’s much-debated role in Black Widow turns her into the sort of henchman that usually beats up Bond before he gets to the real villain.
That’s not where the similarities end as Black Widow also sees Natasha go off the radar for her official government job, just like Bond turns his back on MI6 in A License to Kill, or more recently Skyfall and Spectre. Funnily enough, Natasha has her own Q to fulfill her housing, transport, and weaponry needs as her dialogue with the film’s Rick Mason sees her go back and forth like they’ve known each other forever, much like Q and James Bond have been working together for almost 60 years.
Clearly, No Time to Die is still building up to its fall premiere, but fans looking for some globetrotting action still get their fair share of varied landscapes with places like the suburban USA, Norway, Morocco, and Budapest. Granted Yelena and Natasha’s stop getting new stamps on their passports halfway through the movie, but what’s shown goes a long way towards establishing the general feel for Black Widow.
Overall, there are enough elements to Natasha’s character and story that would make her slot in as the perfect soviet spy in an old James Bond movie, which is packed with beautiful red-haired Bond girls that have tricked 007 (think of Thunderball’s Volpe for example). Nevertheless, Black Widow is still much more than a simple Bond homage, and its two female heroes do a fantastic job at making the Red Guardian look like the Soviet relic he is because they’re more like superhero versions of what No Time to Die seems to be wanting to do with its own female 00.
Despite Black Widow lacking a specific comic book storyline from which to pull its core story and very obviously borrowing so many elements from the spy genre, the film still has plenty of dues to pay to the MCU and Disney, something that definitely ends up hurting its credentials when applying for a license to kill.
Throughout the whole movie, audiences are told Natasha has spent so many years being eaten away by the famed Budapest story where she apparently killed an innocent child; Yelena and Melina speak of the horrors women are put through in the Red Room where few really make it, yet the audience is only told all of this that is never shown to them, which is one of Black Widow's biggest flaws.
Naturally, the MCU is burdened by its family-friendly tag so that Black Widow could never expose Natasha’s trauma like Bond movies do, let alone Jason Bourne’s, but the way it has to ultimately link back to the Infinity Saga and beyond is too much of a constraint to pay off those aspects even if age ratings weren't an issue. Perhaps that's the reason why director Cate Shortland and screenwriter Eric Pearson veered Black Widow into the more fictitious Bond universe rather than Bourne's.
When Natasha successfully escapes from the Thaddeus Ross led government effort to capture her, when she's on the run in Norway, and the brief moment when she and Yelena manage to escape before heading to break out their flawed surrogate Red Guardian father, these are all instances where the close-up filming style seems much more Bourne-inspired. It's truly fantastic to see the MCU have grown so much that it's starting to reach into other genres with WandaVision and Loki, it might not be something that has been perfected just yet but it'll surely get better as the Multiverse keeps on expanding.