A second viewing of _Black Widow_ only reinforces my admiration of
the visual elegance in the film's quiet Ohio moments. A brownish
dusk look dominates the palette, but instead of the David Fincher-
style ugly greenish brown, the interior settings of _Black Widow_
have a lovely, penetrating look, complementing the lush but late-Fall
outdoor color scheme to foreshadow the end of a rustic paradise.
When focusing on the characters though, cinematographer Gabriel
Beristain uses a very shallow focus lense that blurs the background
into a gauzy haze, as if to emphasize that the backstory of these
Russian implants are obscure even to themselves. When the film
moves to Norway, Morocco, and Budapest, the lighting is much
harsher, like a dose of reality. The broken down apartments
and decrepit soviet helicopters there give the film much of its
charm (and are what you'd expect of director Cate Shortland),
but the shallow focal length on the characters remains almost
until the end.

The globe trotting pace reminds us of James Bond movies, and indeed
_Moonraker_ is a touchstone; Natasha streams it in her trail in
Norway. Bond films used to alternate between glitzy and grimy,
each installment overcorrecting the last. _Black Widow_ is
more _For Your Eyes Only_ (with its Eastern European overtones)
than _Moonraker_, but perhaps Shortland is having an inside joke
and lampooning the _Moonraker_-like, over-the-top skystation
destruction at the end of the film? If so, is Olga Kurylenko's
robot-hybrid the answer to the Bond film's Jaw?

Rachel Weisz's calm, slow-eyed depiction of a scientist is such
a contrast with her spirited philosopher Hypatia in _Agora_. Both
are amazing though, and Weisz must have relished her moments as
a dressed-up assassin at the end of the film. I am sure she
has never taken on such physical, aggressive roles in her
storied career. Glad to see so many great actresses get to
become action heroes, like Jessica Chastain in _Ava_! Speaking
of which -- the newsreel elision/explication of large chunks
of back stories over opening credits seem to be a standard in
action films now, but is put too especially sombering use in
_Black Widow_.

I am sure it takes little training for Weisz to affect an
East European accent, given her Austro-Hungarian heritage.
The other members of her fake family wear their accents and
slow delivery well too. David Harbour's pot-bellied Alexei
is a good comic relief, and Florence Pugh seems to take five
seconds before each emotional response. They interact with
an intoxicating rhythm, miles from the smart-alecky tone found
in other comic book hero films. Pugh and Harbour really have
amazing chemistry. I suspect their characters share an aversion
to showering too! Weisz has a lovely line describing their
family reunion as clinging, needy, and overly emotional -- it
is so in-character.

That leaves Natasha as the outlier of this family. Granted
Johansson's character does not grow up in the East, and even
the young version (played as a blue-haired rebel by Ever
Anderson, Milla Jovovich's daughter who is already a better
actress than her mother) is a fireball not given to hesitation.
But Natasha just does not have the weight of character that her
fake-family share. She seems to change with the weather,
there is no core, no soul, to her existence. Maybe this is
unfair -- I haven't seen the other nine and a half Avenger
movies, maybe the fans can see in her something constant.
But good actors do research and fill in their characters'
backstories; props help them create distinctive personalities
too (like Russian accents in this case). In a way it is
Shortland's failure not to achieve this with Natasha,
although it may be hard to correct the lazy habit of
someone who is also the film's executive producer. But
this problem with Johansson is even more prominent in
the ridiculously overhyped _Under the Skin_. One moment
she is a stone-faced killer impervious to weather, the
next scene she is a little girl scared of the cold. That
is just bad movie-directing, but the actor surely can
do better too.

For all those faults, _Black Widow_ is clearly the best
of the superhero films I've seen, bar none. I hope it
wins its share of awards.