Black Widow filmmakers used military consultants to ensure the flying Red Room base would feel real. The Marvel Cinematic Universe movie was the first solo-project for Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, who, despite being a founding Avenger, had only appeared in a supporting role. Black Widow was directed by Cate Shortland and released in July 2021 after experiencing pandemic-related delays.
Set between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, the film sees Natasha forced to reckon with her past as a Black Widow assassin when she receives a package of mind-control antidote from Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), her “sister” from a childhood undercover operation. The Marvel hero discovers that, contrary to her assumption following her defection to SHIELD, the Red Room training facility is still active, and she teams up with Belova to find and destroy the Black Widow program for good. The notoriously hidden Red Room turned out to be a flying base, and the film’s final battle involves a lengthy descent as the facility plummets to the ground.
Though comic book audiences are comfortable suspending their disbelief in such situations, Black Widow’s VFX supervisor, Geoffrey Bauman, reveals that the filmmakers were still concerned with grounding the Red Room in reality. In an interview with ComicBook.com, Bauman shares that Marvel Studios projects often use military consultants when considering the feasibility of elements such as an aerial base. In this case, he says, they were most concerned with what height the Red Room needed to be at for the lengthy skydive-battle to be believable:
I think one thing that we did kind of chat about is, okay, ‘How high could it [the Red Room] be, in order to sustain a two-minute free fall?’ I think it was 20,000 feet or just below that, where you could buy the fact somebody could still be breathing, they don’t need any oxygen. It’d be very cold and it would give us enough scream [sic] time to possibly buy the dissent. So that’s a simple example, as far as you know, that something like that goes. […] We do use consultants. I mean, we reach out to military consultants with any specific need or specialty I should say, we do bring in consultants to make sure that we’re staying as true to the real world is possible.
As a film centered on one of the non-superpowered Avengers, it makes sense that the filmmakers were so concerned with grounding the story in reality where possible. The effort clearly paid off, as reactions to Black Widow were overall positive, with critics giving specific praise to the action choreography. Though the special effects received some ribbing online for how they appeared on Disney+, including during the fight as the Red Room fell, such details didn’t end up distracting from what was an engaging solo-story that had been a long time coming.
However much the science-fiction elements were grounded in reality, though, Black Widow was considered most successful when it remained fully within the scope of believability. Outside of the performances of Johansson and Pugh, the latter of whom looks to figure heavily in the MCU’s future, the most praised aspect was the homing-in on the character dynamics among Natasha’s faux-family. The filmmakers were unlikely to have needed consultants to achieve these moments, but the overall focus on keeping one foot in reality is indicative of what made these more human scenes as compelling as they were for fans.
