There's a certain similarity between Royal Kill () and Marvel Studio's Black Widow in the openings featuring planted foreign emissaries on US soil. But, while RK follows the obsessive illusions of a role player battling 'evil' forces, Widow is all about the reality of good and evil.
This is where the heart-to-hearts work well, interspliced between typical action sequences. However, it's not so much the reality of good and evil as the dimensions of unreality on which the action transpires that leads to a flawed work.
The most fun scene is the improbable high speed chase through the canyons of Budapest, much of the rest being held in a neutral zone of indeterminate space (see the neutral zone of sex, SR3).
On the one hand the film is a dimensionless illusion taking place in a digital universe; on the other it is full of human desire and the appealingly red-headed Johansson as Natasha.
There are appealing scenes, such as the young Natasha (then black-haired) threatening to kill anyone who touches her kid sister, following the furtive family's escape to Cuba. The film is a creature of two elements, one of which is acrobatics and articulate litheness, the other of which is a machine-universe of animation.
One shouldn't necessarily care, except that the 3 dimensions of space are the fecund reality we inhabit on Earth. The Widow takes us out of that to the extent we are approaching the universe of the expressive algorithm and motion-capture (3D animation, see prev.)
The one thing that prevents this happening is the effectiveness of the actors. That makes actors pretty priceless, whereas in the old adventure serials it's the school of formulaic performances.
But, in the old-school dramas, the fecund reality of the jungle depicted does exist (even if it's in the studio!), the bluffs, crags and vegetation, down to the undersea horses (in-joke.) In the Widow and other blockbusters, the fecund reality is reality only to the actors, not to the scenes staged.
So, there's a sort of contradiction there. A fecund reality is seen typically in role-playing lore in the type of old charts and maps, such as these of Hyboria.
Typically, palm trees or brush or mountain ranges or islands are delineated to suggest the undulations of landscape/seascape. This is the articulate world of rhythm. Geology is really the rhythms of rocks over time that Man has managed to categorize into sedimentary, igneous, the residues of past epochs.
Without the higher level rhythms, there can be no cycles of decay and revival that are basically a staple of the fecund universe (of opposing motions.)
The psyche reacts to the fecund reality, and there is a rapport with the articulate body. This is the fundamental, physical reality where rebellious people can fend for themselves, establishing free societies (homesteads, trees, livestock, fences.)
In terms of comics book dimensions, Ditko's Dr Strange has this as he portrays organic, branching, tree-like vegetable masses. Roger Stern and others have written wonderful yarns on the rebellious natives of the Dark Dimension, Clea the pretender, daughter of Umar etc. (when dynastic rulers had power and not empty ritual.)
By contrast the film version of Dr Strange tends to go for the indeterminate look. The idea of indeterminacy comes up in Gilbert Hernandez' BEM (from L&R book 1, 1985), where Castle Radium is battling an endlessly mutating foe (prev.)
The films tend to take this to the extreme so that the background against which heroes fight villains is dimensionless and decidedly not organic or fecund.
That neutralising trend could be said to represent the neutral zone in sex, the compulsive and hygienic (number, algorithm - see Grace Slick quote HB62/1). This sort of mirrors a future where sex and race are neutralised by omnivorous news of the digital/electrical universe of machines.
