Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young, beautiful Russian woman enters a brutal, demanding training program where she’s put through the ringer and transformed, mentally and physically, into a deadly, near-superhuman spy. Yet, somehow, Jennifer Lawrence’s new movie, Red Sparrow, isn’t the Black Widow origin story that fans have been asking for.
Red Sparrow is based on former CIA operative Jason Matthews’s 2013 book and not any Marvel comics, but you hardly need to do more than watch the trailer to see similarities between Red Sparrow and Black Widow. The plot follows Dominika Egorova (Lawrence),, a woman who gets recruited (not entierly by choice, from the looks of it) into the “Sparrow” program by the Russian government. The training is intense, designed to break trainees and turn them into efficient spying, seducing, and killing machines, and Dominika ends up being very good at it. a woman who gets recruited (not entierly by choice, from the looks of it) into the “Sparrow” program by the Russian government. The training is intense, designed to break trainees and turn them into efficient spying, seducing, and killing machines, and Dominika ends up being very good at it.
But, will she break from her country? You know, kinda like Natasha Romanov did, a few years after her training in Marvel’s Red Room?
ScarJo has played Black Widow in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, The Winter Soldier, Age of Ultron, and Civil War. She’s also going to be in the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4. She has not been in her own movie, and Marvel doesn’t seem like it’s going to add one to the calendar anytime soon. Chris Evans wants one and there’s chatter of a Lady Liberators-style movie with all the MCU’s superheroines, though nothing even close to official has happened on that front. Still, no Black Widow solo movie.
Enjoy Red Sparrow then. It’s not part of a franchise, which can be a breath of fresh air at the box office these days, and it supposedly has a hard R-rating. That’s something we haven’t seen in the MCU, and might not see anytime soon, so perhaps view Red Sparrow as a Black Widow movie that can include more explicit violence, swear words, and nudity.
Red Sparrow comes out on March 2.
