For me this movie was the only decent Marvel product that they released after the Endgame. And I get all the problems with the villain and the script, and some of the nonsensical aspects of this story. It is not a great movie, it's just a decent movie that is watchable and enjoyable. Probably because the idea and the script were prepared before Disney stretched their dirty claws towards Marvel.

However, there is one central element in this story that western audiences that grew under democratic regimes will fail to understand and thus will not be able to appreciate. Something that they will not be able to identify with, simply because this element is so foreign to them. That despite their best imagination they will simply fail to truly understand it. And only the people that escaped tyrannical and murderous ideologies, like it was in Soviet block or like it is now in North Korea, will be able to see it and feel it deeply through their bones. This feeling is the realization of being deceived their entire life, being insidiously manipulated by evil and lying ideological machines and apparatuses. The deception so immense, so malicious, so cruel that the process of freeing from it takes years, it takes heavy psychological toll accompanied by incredible amounts of denial, anger, frustration and in many cases something similar to PTSD. In best case people will reach some sort of acceptance and will try to live their life as free people, not looking back. But some cases such people will develop incredible hate towards those who so banally abused them for years.

And it's not being understood by the western audiences because they never experienced anything even close to this, not on this scale and not so influential and not so absolute that it infected all aspects of life. ALL. Absolutely and totally everything from the moment they were born. It's not comprehendible for the western people to understand how it's possible to live through this and get free of it. For them this is just a silly movie. They understand the concept of ideological brainwashing and will understand the motivation of the characters, there have been a lot of movies about the "evil soviets, evil communists" that described what it was like. It may even be an understanding on a more deeper level, not just something superficial. But trust me, western audiences have no idea, no idea.

And I think Black Widow catches this element quite well, the script presents number of such main characters that lived under that evil, experienced it and were able to escape it. And these characters show the signs of people that understood what they lived through and are facing the realization, each in their own way and each at their on stage. Even the main villain Dreykov is a victim of this machine, but he was so deep he just can't escape, can't turn around, he just doesn't know how. He just continues by the initial inertia, even if the reality became so different he cannot see anything else but to continue doing the same. He is the one that afraid to feel the guilt of all the evil he did, the only way for him not to fully realize what a monster he is, is by continuing being a monster he was. And it makes his story even more tragic than all others.

Black Widow is still an entertainment movie so they cannot dive too much into this element only and not all actors are able to express this concept, because these are western actors that have no idea what it was like. But from the script and through these characters, this movie is a good example and representation of that feeling.