Black Widow Improves Age of Ultron’s Worst Black Widow Moment

Warning: SPOILERS for Black Widow.

Black Widow improves one of the lowest points of Avengers: Age of Ultron: Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) telling Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) that she's unable to have children because the Red Room sterilized her. In Black Widow, Natasha reunites with her ersatz Russian 'family', Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), and Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) to stop the creator of the Red Room, General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), from using the Black Widow program to further his dreams of world domination.

Writer-director Joss Whedon's Age of Ultron was a controversial entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially following up his universally beloved original MCU film, The Avengers. One of the issues fans had was with Whedon's portrayal of Black Widow, who was in a doomed romantic relationship with Bruce Banner. Natasha was also placed in an uncomfortable damsel-in-distress situation when she was kidnapped by Ultron (James Spader) and need Banner/The Hulk to rescue her, but the most glaring cause for concern was how Natasha described the procedure forced upon her by the Red Room. At Clint Barton's (Jeremy Renner) farmhouse, Black Widow and Banner frankly discussed why their relationship was doomed to fail and that Banner can't be a father because of the Hulk. Nat then told him that she's sterile because of the Red Room's "graduation" ceremony of a forced hysterectomy. But the moment was ruined by Natasha's next line, "You still think you're the only monster on the team?" which wrongly equates not being able to have children with being a monster.

Black Widow didn't attempt to walk back Natasha's revelation about the abuse inflicted on her by the Red Room but instead, Nat and Yelena described the agony they went through in a different way. After they rescued Alexei from a Siberian gulag, Natasha and Yelena were incensed at the sexist way Alexei asked if it was "your time of the month?" Yelena and Natasha went on to describe the process of the Red Room's forced hysterectomy, and how "they go in and rip out all of your reproductive organs... They just go in there and they chop them all away. Everything out, so you can't have babies." It was an effective way to shame Alexei but it also placed the power back with Yelena and Natasha, who intended to gross out their dad with the frankly disturbing truth of what Dreykov and his sinister agenda did to them and the countless other girls turned into Widows.

Natasha and Yelena have had years to cope with the horrors they endured with the Red Room and they used black humor to describe it, but Black Widow's helicopter scene was still preferable to how Age of Ultron had Romanoff describe herself as "a monster" because she was the victim of government-sponsored abuse. Instead, Black Widow placed the blame squarely where it belongs: on General Dreykov and his repulsive misogyny that motivated him to kidnap, torture, brainwash, and murder countless girls to turn them into his living weapons. Dreykov even abused his own daughter, Antonia (Olga Kurylenko), and turned her into Taskmaster because she was no longer beautiful in his eyes after Natasha's bomb meant to kill Dreykov left Antonia disfigured.

Just as how later MCU movies like Thor: Ragnarok and the next two Avengers movies smoothed out some of Age of Ultron's rough edges, Black Widow didn't shy away from the harrowing truth about the Widows established by Whedon. Instead, Black Widow depicted the horrific way Dreykov treated the girls he turned into his personal assassins in the opening credits sequence set to a haunting cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Laudably, Black Widow re-empowered Natasha, Yelena, Melina, and even Alexei, who suffered his own form of betrayal and torture at Dreykov's hands. There's no way to set right the involuntary hysterectomies the Red Room inflicted on the Widows but Black Widow worked wonders to make Natasha, Yelena, and their 'sisters' the masters of their own stories and their destinies.

Next: Every James Bond Tribute In Black Widow