New Red Sparrow Trailer Sheds Light on Who Jennifer Lawrence’s Embattled Soviet Spy Really Is

We’ve already written about how Red Sparrow basically seems like the Black Widow movie Marvel should have given us long ago, but still hasn’t. However, with this recent trailer focusing on Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Dominika Egorova, let’s see if this is something we’re interested in beyond the obvious similarity to our favorite Marvel spy.

Here’s the official synopsis for Red Sparrow:

Dominika Egorova is many things. A devoted daughter determined to protect her mother at all costs. A prima ballerina whose ferocity has pushed her body and mind to the absolute limit. A master of seductive and manipulative combat. When she suffers a career-ending injury, Dominika and her mother are facing a bleak and uncertain future. That is why she finds herself manipulated into becoming the newest recruit for Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people like her to use their bodies and minds as weapons. After enduring the perverse and sadistic training process, she emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow the program has ever produced. Dominika must now reconcile the person she was with the power she now commands, with her own life and everyone she cares about at risk, including an American CIA agent who tries to convince her he is the only person she can trust.

What I find interesting in this trailer is that, while it certainly contains all the old tropes of a female spy using, as Kaila wrote in her piece about the previous trailer, “sexy sex so that she can lure men away and murder them,” it also shows the sparrow program training male spies to be free with undressing to balance things out, I guess.

Also interesting is that it seems like Dominika is very much all about her own goals.

While she’s working for the Soviet government, and seems to be working with the American CIA agent who’s supposed to be her mark, a couple of lines stuck out at me from the trailer. In an American accent: “We can’t trust a word that comes out of her mouth,” and “There’s something else we’re not seeing.” And a Russian saying, “If she is compromised, she will be eliminated.”

This all leads up to Joel Edgerton’s CIA agent telling her, “You belong to them. they will never let you go.” Her response: “I’ll find a way.”

I like that this seems to be a story of a woman with her own agenda, rather than loyalty to a cause, or country. She only ends up becoming a “sparrow” because she loves her mother, and I imagine it’s her “soul,” which Jeremy Irons’ General Vladimir Andreievich Korchnoi calls her weakness, that will allow her to win her own freedom from anything that would imprison her.

I just hope that she’s allowed to show more emotion than Charlize Theron did in Atomic Blonde.

What do you think of this film, or of the new trailer?

(via /Film, image: screencap)

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