Black Widow (Taskmaster's HUD display)

Brief description

Dreykov has trained hundreds of young girls to be assassins (known as "widows"), and he controls them completely with a drug. His lead assassin, the Taskmaster, is his own daughter Antonia, who he equipped with a suit and a controller chip at the back of her neck after she was disfigured by an explosion caused by Natasha Romanoff, an Avenger who is also known as the Black Widow. Under Dreykov's control, the Taskmaster hunts Natasha. As they fight, the point of view sometimes cuts to a view of Natasha with green graphics and text overlaid the image, as though we are seeing with the Taskmaster, through the HUD in the Taskmaster's helmet.

The first view of the HUD shows that the AI has identified the opponent as Natasha Romanoff, and has the words "Evaluating defensive measures". There are some icons that have no clear meaning, and some generic graphics like a compass direction (SW). The text PREDICT % is followed by the number 97.8, presumably suggesting that the AI has high confidence in its predictive abilities, and there is a THREAT % that reads 85.53. The dominant colour is light green or a light blue except the word THREAT, which is red. Green lines with red connecting nodes are overlaid the centre of the image. A second shot has fewer words and is dominated by uneven red lines or smears, with the words VIALS ACQUIRED in green at the bottom right. The colour red is used vividly throughout the movie for the antidote to the mind control drug, so this image foreshadows later images in the movie - but the HUD views are extremely brief, so the viewer does not have much time to study them.

An interesting shift from the comics to the movie is the shift from the Taskmaster's ability to mimic the fighting style of any opponent being an innate power in the comics to its being technology-driven in the movies, somehow supported or controlled by computation and made visible through the HUD.

Work that the situation appears in

Title Publication Type Year Creator
Black Widow Narrative, Movie Marvel

Authored by

UUID
8126b1c2-407c-4f53-81b2-eefa568cc9c6