8. The Avengers
Thank god for Joss Whedon, undoing the sexist way Black Widow was treated in Iron Man 2. Due to the different directors of the two movies, there were very different ways of treating the character. Its quite a fascinating difference and it brilliantly shows the difference between a feminist and anti-feminist character. In Iron Man 2, Black Widow was more of an object. She spent most of the movie bending over various objects in revealing clothing. Natasha Romanov developed no character of her own, instead simply acting as something that Robert Downey Jr. and the audience finds sexy. By the time she actually gets to be useful and beat a whole bunch of people up, the damage is done and the fight scene itself seems more fetishized than empowering. The most confusing thing to me about Iron Man 2 is how much effort director Jon Favreau put into making Black Widow look sexy. Scarlett Johansson is a very beautiful woman, and whether or not she is objectified as heavily as she was in Iron Man 2, people will find her attractive. The effort that Favreau put into making the audience want her would have been better used in developing her character. The Avengers did none of this. Notice how even though Black Widow didnt spend the whole movie existing only to look sexy, people still found her to be so. The Avengers was a bit of a boys club but given the treatment of Scarlett Johansson, it qualifies as a feminist movie. Black Widow was a very useful character. She recruited Bruce Banner without the use of seduction techniques, she discovered Lokis plan and she deactivated the Tesseract. As a bonus, Black Widow doesnt even have the most revealing costume, an honour bestowed upon Hawkeye. If anything, Hawkeye ended up as more of the disappointing female character; his costume being more revealing, having less screen time and getting captured by the enemy. Thank god for Joss Whedon.