Alright, let’s waste absolutely no time getting into this. Spoiler alert right here.
SPOILER ALERT: This post will contain key plot details to Marvel’s Black Widow. Feel free to watch the movie then come back to this post.
Full disclosure: As a Natasha Romanov fan, the movie is totally enjoyable. It peels back the layers of her we’d always wanted to know about.
The Black Widow movie fills in those holes. It drops us in the timeline right after Civil War and explores her past, her “family,” that infamous Budapest adventure with Hawkeye, and even the moment she defected from the Red Room.
The movie also introduces us to a new villain. One that only exists as a direct result of a mistake a ruthless Romanov made on her infamous adventure with Hawkeye in Budapest.
As the final step in Natasha’s transition to SHIELD, she had to kill Dreykov who was the leader of the Red Room and the creator of the Black Widow Project. She decided to blow him up despite knowing his daughter, Antonia, was in the room. She did it anyway.
Turns out, all of these years later, they’d both somehow survived. Dreykov was relatively unscathed but Antonia was left with facial scarring.
Dreykov, being the diabolical villain he is, used that as an opportunity to turn his daughter into Taskmaster — an incredible fighter who can mimic any fighting style. And that’s where my only gripe with this movie comes in.