When Avengers was released in 2012, it contained most of the original founding Avengers from 1963: Thor, the Hulk, and Iron Man. Missing, however, were Ant-Man and the Wasp, who were part of that original team, but had been conspicuously absent from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
This gap was finally addressed in a movie that didn’t come out until after the second Avengers movie.
Henry Pym first appeared in a standalone science fiction story in Tales to Astonish #27 in 1962, “The Man in the Ant Hill” by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. The story was about a scientist (Pym) who created a formula that shrunk him down to insect size, at which point he was menaced by ants. The issue was very popular, and sold very well, so he was brought back in issue #35, this time as the superhero Ant-Man. It was later established that he had a wife named Maria Trovaya, a Hungarian dissident who was killed by Communist agents.
Ant-Man continued to be a regular feature in Tales to Astonish thenceforth. In issue #44, by Lee, H.E. Huntley, and Kirby, Janet van Dyne was introduced, and became Pym’s partner, the Wasp. The pair continued in Tales to Astonish, and then joined the Avengers. While their feature in TTA was eventually discontinued, with the Hulk pretty much taking over that title, they remained mainstays in the team book.
Pym, though, went through dozens of different identities. He became Giant-Man, reversing his shrinking to make him a super-strong giant, later changing his name and costume to Goliath. After suffering a psychotic break, he took on the Yellowjacket identity, and married van Dyne, eventually coming back to his proper self. However, his psychological issues continued to be a problem. He created Ultron, a robot that became the Avengers’ deadliest foe, and there was the aforementioned psychotic break, and then he hit van Dyne in a fit of rage when he was trying to prove his worth to the Avengers.
That ended the marriage, and also Pym’s career as an Avenger, at least temporarily. He gave up being a costumed hero for a while, eventually becoming a scientific adventurer called “Dr. Pym,” using his shrinking formula to carry a huge array of gizmos to use in crime-fighting. (He even wore a hat and scarf like another scientific Doctor….) After the “Heroes Reborn” event, he went back to being Giant-Man, then took on the mantle of the Wasp when his ex-wife was believed killed. Later, he was fused with his creation, and became merged with Ultron.
In Avengers #181 in 1979, David Michelinie and John Byrne introduced the character of Scott Lang, an employee of Stark International, who they then featured in Marvel Premiere #47, where he was established as an ex-con trying to go straight. He’s also divorced, sharing custody of his daughter Cassie. He’s put in a position where he has to rescue a doctor who might be able to save Cassie’s life, and steals the Ant-Man gear to do so. He winds up keeping the suit with Pym’s blessing, and has a low-key career as a second-tier hero, including a lengthy stint as one of the Fantastic Four when Reed Richards was believed dead.
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In 2000, Artisan Entertainment acquired the rights to an Ant-Man film, and Edgar Wright, a longtime fan of the character, wrote a treatment with writing partner Joe Cornish. Artisan’s film never went anywhere, and Wright and Cornish sent the film to Kevin Feige, who green-lit it as part of the nascent Marvel Studios in 2006.
The film went through multiple drafts, numerous delays, and finally Marvel wanted someone else to take a shot at the screenplay. Wright, not comfortable with directing a film he didn’t entirely write, and also having spent eight years trying to get this movie made, finally quit, replaced by Peyton Reed. Adam McKay took over the scripting duties, aided by the movie’s star, Paul Rudd.
Wright had always envisioned Ant-Man as an Elmore Leonard-style heist movie, and so the title character was always going to be the Lang version. However, Pym and van Dyne are part of it, established as being heroes who worked with S.H.I.E.L.D. back in the 1980s, before van Dyne was lost in the quantum realm. In a melding of two different notions from the comics—the alternate future of MC2 in which Pym and van Dyne had a daughter named Hope, and the mainline comics that established that Pym and Trovaya had a daughter, Nadia, who later took on the mantle of the Wasp—we also have Hope van Dyne in this movie (and the next), Pym’s daughter, who wishes to take on a superheroic identity, which she finally will in the sequel. (Also part of the alternate future of MC2, by the by, is a grown-up Cassie Lang as the hero Stinger.)
Besides Rudd, we also have Michael Douglas as Pym, Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, Hayley Lovitt as Janet van Dyne, Corey Stoll as Darren Cross (based on the first foe the Lang Ant-Man faced in Marvel Premiere #47), Judy Greer as Lang’s ex-wife Maggie, Abby Ryder Fortson as Cassie, Bobby Cannavale as Paxton (Maggie’s new boyfriend), Wood Harris as Gale, Martin Donovan as Mitchell Carson, and Michael Peña, Tip “T.I.” Harris, and David Dastmalchian as Lang’s crew of thieves.
Back from Avengers: Age of Ultron are Anthony Mackie as the Falcon, Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter (by way of the first season of Agent Carter), and Chris Evans as Captain America. Back from Iron Man 2 is John Slattery as Howard Stark (the character last seen on Agent Carter played by Dominic Cooper). Back from Captain America: The Winter Soldier is Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes.
Rudd, Evans, Mackie, Slattery, and Stan will next appear in Captain America: Civil War. Atwell will next appear in Agent Carter season two. Douglas, Lilly, Greer, Cannavale, Fortson, Peña, Tip Harris, Dastmalchian, and the character of Janet van Dyne (to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer) will all next appear in Ant-Man & The Wasp.
“And he’s like, I’m lookin’ for a guy who shrinks”
Ant-Man
Written by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd
Directed by Peyton Reed
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: July 17, 2015
In 1989, S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist Henry Pym confronts the leaders of the organization—Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and Mitchell Carson—because he’s learned that they’ve tried to replicate the Pym particle he invented. Pym refuses to share the technology with S.H.I.E.L.D., and resigns rather than continue to argue about it. (He also slams Carson’s head into the desk when he mentions the death of his wife.) Stark lets him go, despite Carson’s concerns, as he doesn’t believe Pym’s a security risk.
Fast forward to the present. Scott Lang gets out of prison after serving time for breaking-and-entering and burglary. An electrical engineer for VistaCorp, he discovered that the company was stealing money, so he broke in, transferred the money back to workers, and released the company’s information on the Internet. Unfortunately, finding employment is more difficult—he can’t even keep a job at Baskin Robbins once the manager learns he’s an ex-con.
He’s living with his former cellmate, Luis, along with two other ex-cons, Dave and Kurt. Luis says he has a job for them to do, but Lang insists that he’s reformed. He tries to see his daughter Cassie on her birthday, but his ex-wife Maggie and her new fiancé, a San Francisco Police Department detective named Paxton, kick him out, citing his non-payment of child support. Maggie says they’ll only reconsider visitation once he catches up on child support. So he decides to ask about Luis’s job, which he found out from a friend of a friend of a friend, but it’s totally legit.
It turns out to be breaking into Pym’s house. After quitting S.H.I.E.L.D., Pym founded his own company. He took an eager young scientist, Darren Cross, under his wing, and later Cross and Pym’s estranged daughter Hope van Dyne orchestrated the removal of Pym from his own company, and he was “retired.” Cross invites him back to Pym Tech for the unveiling of new technology that will enable objects and eventually people to change size. Cross also shows footage he dug up from the 1970s and 1980s of a super-powered agent called Ant-Man. Pym never confirmed that he was Ant-Man, and Cross doesn’t know why he wouldn’t share his technology with the world, but Cross is sure he’s re-created it, and will use it on a suit of his own called Yellowjacket. Yellowjacket will revolutionize warfare.
One of the people at the meeting is Carson, who privately tells Cross he and his people are interested in buying the Yellowjacket armor.
In private to Pym, van Dyne says she’s ready to take Cross down, but Pym refuses, saying, “I know a guy.” It turns out that she’s been working clandestinely, pretending to still hate her father (though it’s not a difficult deception, as she’s still pretty pissed at him), while working with him to stop Cross from selling this technology.
Pym got word through channels to Luis about how his own house was ripe for robbing, that he was a fat cat who got rich off screwing the little guy. As Luis says, it’s a tailor-made Scott Lang mark. Once inside, Lang has to improvise his way past a fingerprint lock and then has to improvise again to get into the very old, titanium safe, which he does by freezing the metal, causing it to expand.
But all there is in the vault is the Ant-Man suit. Lang thinks it’s motorcycle leathers and a helmet. He takes it anyhow, but this is not going to help him catch up on child support.
At home, he tries the outfit on, and eventually activates the shrinking. As soon as he does, Pym broadcasts his voice into the helmet, being very cryptic and giving him advice on how to survive being an inch tall. After a very difficult ordeal going through a bathtub, through cracks in the floor, a dance club, the streets, the rooftops, and more, Lang manages to get himself back to full size. He removes the outfit and breaks back into Pym’s house to return the gear, never wanting to see it again.
And as soon as he leaves the house, he’s arrested.
Paxton lectures him while sitting in the cell. Then Paxton’s partner, Gale, arrives to say Lang’s lawyer is here to see him. It’s actually Pym, who says he has a job for Lang, and that this was a test. Later, Pym has some ants smuggle in the Ant-Man suit, shrunk down, which is then enlarged. Lang puts it on and escapes. He flies on an ant, but the ant goes really high and Lang passes out from stress and vertigo.
Lang awakens in Pym’s house. He is formally introduced to Pym and van Dyne. The latter is not happy about Lang being there, as she can handle the suit. She’s been training most of her life for it. But Pym refuses to let her. Even as they train Lang in how to use the suit, how to communicate with the ants, and how to fight (and also giving him two weapons—small discs, one of which grows what it’s thrown at, the other of which shrinks what it’s thrown at), van Dyne bitches and moans about him—with good reason. Finally, Pym reveals the truth he’s kept from van Dyne all these years: how her mother died.
Ant-Man had a partner: Janet van Dyne, a.k.a. the Wasp. They worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. together, and one day in 1987 they had to defuse a missile that had been fired by Russian dissidents at the U.S. The Wasp turned off her regulator so she would shrink so small as to be subatomic, as it was the only way to get inside the missile. But doing so meant she kept shrinking after she sabotaged the missile and wound up lost in the quantum realm. Van Dyne is furious that he kept this from her for so long—she was seven when Janet was lost, and all he told her was that she died in a plane crash—but also grateful to know that her mom died a hero.
Lang understands his place in all this: he’s wearing the suit because he’s expendable. Pym can’t bear the notion of seeing someone else he loves wearing the suit and maybe dying.
Meanwhile, Cross has figured out how to shrink organic matter without killing the subject. One member of the board of directors who was iffy on the project has already been shrunk and killed by Cross, as have a large number of sheep. But he finally gets it right, as a sheep is shrunk. Cross also shows up at Pym’s house to invite him to the unveiling of the Yellowjacket program.
There’s one item Pym, van Dyne, and Lang need for their plan to steal the Yellowjacket suit to be successful, a device that’s currently housed in one of Howard Stark’s old warehouses in upstate New York. It isn’t until Lang arrives to break into the place that they realize that Howard’s son Tony converted that warehouse into the Avengers’ new headquarters at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Oops. Falcon is the only Avenger home, and Lang decides to chance it by going for the item anyhow, holding his own against the Falcon in the process.
Cross tells van Dyne that he’s upping security for the presentation. Lang—who’s very high on his surviving a fight with an Avenger—says that they need a crew. Pym and van Dyne will both be at the presentation itself, and so Lang—over Pym’s very loud objections—brings in Luis, Kurt, and Dave to help. Luis is emplaced as a security guard, with help from van Dyne, and his job will be to reduce the water pressure in the water main so Lang and the ants can get in through there. Then he’ll place C4 charges with the Pym particles, erase all the data on the shrinking process on Cross’s servers, and steal the Yellowjacket prototype, once Kurt hacks into the system and turns off the laser grid.
Lang’s part of the plan goes well, up to a point. Paxton and Gale stop Pym before he can go into Pym Tech to talk to him about Lang’s escape. Kurt steals the cops’ car to distract them so Pym can get in.
Inside, Carson is present along with representatives of what’s left of Hydra. (Of course Carson was one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel who was an embedded Hydra mole. And while Hydra was badly damaged in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it was established in both Age of Ultron and on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that there were plenty of Hydra splinter groups left.) They want the Yellowjacket suit to get themselves back to glory.
Just as Lang’s about to grab the Yellowjacket suit, Cross pulls it out and traps Lang in the case. Turns out he knew about Lang and van Dyne’s being a double agent all along. He’s also becoming more and more unstable, presumably from using the suit without a regulator.
Cross is about to kill Pym when van Dyne attacks the guards, and Lang uses a growing disc to blast through the case and fisticuffs ensue. Carson makes off with a vial of the Cross formula, while Cross himself flies off in a helicopter. Lang chases after him, and Cross insanely starts shooting a weapon inside a flying helicopter.
Pym and van Dyne get out of the building, which has already been evacuated, using a tank that Pym keeps shrunk on a keychain for emergencies.
Cross puts the Yellowjacket suit on and fights Lang. Yellowjacket is temporarily trapped in a bug-zapper, and then Paxton and Gale arrest Lang. But Yellowjacket gets out of the bug-zapper and is sighted committing a home invasion at Paxton’s house. Both Paxton and Lang realize that Cassie is in danger and Paxton heads there, even though Lang is handcuffed in the back seat. Lang is able to get into the Ant-Man helmet and then shrink out of the handcuffs to save Cassie. He fights Yellowjacket in Cassie’s room—including a lengthy fight atop her model train—but eventually Lang is able to get inside the Yellowjacket suit the same way the Wasp did in 1987: shrinking to sub-atomic levels. He sabotages the suit, destroying it and killing Cross, but Lang is then trapped in the quantum realm. He manages to regrow himself by attaching the growing disc to the regulator.
Paxton, grateful to Ant-Man for saving Cassie, fixes things with Lang so he’s no longer under arrest for breaking into the Pym house. Lang is also welcome in Maggie and Paxton’s house and joins them and Cassie for dinner. Pym also now has hope that Janet might still be able to be rescued from the quantum realm. (Gee, that sounds like a good plot for a sequel…)
Then Luis tells Lang that a friend of a friend of a friend (one of whom is a bartender who looks just like Stan Lee) told him that the Falcon is apparently looking for him, which makes Lang nervous.
Pym reveals to van Dyne that he and Janet were working on a new suit for her when she was lost in the quantum realm. He presents it to his daughter, who speaks for the entire audience when she says, “About damn time.”
In a garage, Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are hiding out with the Winter Soldier. Rogers and Wilson are concerned about contacting Stark and “the Accords.” Rogers says they’re on their own, but Wilson says maybe not. “I know a guy.”
“And I’m like, daaaaaaamn, I got all nervous, ’cause I keep mad secrets for you, bro”
To this day, I don’t understand why this movie was made.
Look, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of Marvel characters that Marvel Studios has access to, even taking into account that, at this stage of the game, Fox still had the X-Men and Fantastic Four and Sony had Spider-Man.
Of this very lengthy list of characters, Ant-Man is about the 92nd most interesting.
Ant-Man was such a huge hit that Henry Pym stopped being Ant-Man after Tales to Astonish #48 and Avengers #1 and very rarely looked back. He’s spent less time as Ant-Man than any of his various identities (with the possible exception of Dr. Pym, Scientific Adventurer). Scott Lang was a bit more lasting, but even he at best has been a fourth-stringer in the Marvel Universe. He’s best remembered as the guy who filled in for Reed Richards during one of the least interesting runs on Fantastic Four.
Meanwhile, we have the Wasp, who has a lengthy and impressive tenure as an Avenger, including several times being the team leader. She once took on the X-Men by herself, was the only woman among the founding Avengers (and just generally is one of Marvel’s longest-standing female heroes), and has been a critical part of dozens of important Avengers tales over the decades.
But Edgar Wright had a hard-on for Ant-Man, writing a treatment for Artisan and then shoving it under Kevin Feige’s nose when Marvel Studios was just a pipe dream with stuff in development but nothing solid.
So we have a movie that forces Ant-Man down our throats, at the expense of the Wasp. Not only that, the movie itself cops to the fact that the Wasp would be better suited to this, but she’s sidelined because Pym’s grief over his wife’s death is so great. Emmet Asher-Perrin put it best on this very site when the movie came out: “Essentially, Janet van Dyne was fridged to give Hank Pym enough pain to prevent Hope van Dyne from being the main character.” In order to justify having this be an Ant-Man movie, they have to kill the Wasp in a flashback (reducing her to a character with no lines cast with an extra, though that she’s in her helmet the whole time means that anyone can be cast in the role down the line, as indeed Michelle Pfeiffer will be—but that’s the next movie, and our issue here is with this one) and sideline the actual capable character.
I don’t even buy the reasoning—not that it’s rational at all, it’s a father’s irrational love, but still—because Hope is in danger every second of the movie anyhow. She’s pretending to be friends with a psychopath and putting herself in the same line of fire as everyone else. But Pym doesn’t want her to get hurt, so he keeps her out of the Ant-Man suit. Yes, much better that she be in a room filled with people holding guns and not have the super-suit that would allow her to shrink and grow at will, and also fly. Brilliant.
This movie wants desperately to be the Elmore Leonard-style caper movie that Wright originally wanted to do, but the tension between Wright’s zaniness and the needs of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film ruins everything. There are moments where that zaniness comes through, like every single time Michael Peña’s Luis is on screen. Luis is a delight, and I seriously considered trying to write the summary of this movie the way Luis would have told it, but it doesn’t work without Peña’s delivery and without the actors mouthing his imagined dialogue.
It doesn’t help that the movie is pretty much Iron Man all over again, only instead of Jeff Bridges being amazing, we have Corey Stoll being awful. Stoll is actually a good actor—I had the privilege of seeing him play Iago in Othello in the Delacorte Theatre last summer—but you’d never know it from his un-nuanced Cross. The script does nothing to support his psychopathy, or the tragedy of his relationship with Pym. His isn’t the only wasted talent: I’m not even sure why they bothered to cast actors as great as Judy Greer and Wood Harris only to give them nowhere parts, as neither The Ex-Wife nor The Partner have any personality beyond that.
Ant-Man has tons of great set pieces, and some excellent acting. The actual heists are well done, the Ant-Man/Falcon fight is a delight (Anthony Mackie remains magnificent), Lang’s crew are all hilarious, and it’s wonderful to see John Slattery and Hayley Atwell (albeit frustrating for it to be for only a few minutes).
Paul Rudd makes an excellent Lang. He gives the character a lived-in feel that is very honest. You believe in his love for Cassie and his desire to do right by her above all else. Evangeline Lilly has come a long way from her days on Lost where she was regularly out-acted by everyone around her—maybe standing next to the likes of Jorge Garcia and Naveen Andrews and Daniel Dae Kim and Sunjin Kim had an impact, because she kills it as van Dyne. (She’ll be even better in the sequel when she finally gets the spotlight she should’ve had all along.) I also must give props to Bobby Cannavale, in part because it’s rare to see an Italian-American actor playing a character who isn’t a mobster or comic relief (or both), and also Cannavale is perfect as Paxton, a workaday cop trying to do his best, and dealing with all the curves thrown at him. (“And also a tank,” may be the funniest line in an already hilarious movie, mostly due to Cannavale’s delivery while looking up at the tank flying through the wall of Pym Tech.)
And Michael Douglas really does nail it as Pym. His scratchy sarcasm suits the character beautifully. What I actually like about this movie is that it gives us a sense of the history of the MCU, doing what Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter laid the foundation for, showing that Nick Fury wasn’t kidding when he implied there was a bigger universe that Stark didn’t know about in the post-credits scene in Iron Man. And it ties nicely into the greater tapestry, from Carson turning out to be a Hydra mole, to Pym’s snotty comment about the Avengers being too busy dropping cities to help them.
But this movie feels like it’s trying too hard to not be a movie about the Marvel character it would’ve been better off being about.
Next week, we take a look at the second attempt at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie series, with the 2014 movie starring the heroes on the half-shell.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Farpoint 26 this weekend at the Hunt Valley Inn in Cockeysville, Maryland, just north of Baltimore. He’ll be doing panels, readings, autographings, and workshops, and also performing with the Boogie Knights. Other guests include actor/playwright Wallace Shawn, voiceover actors Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen, and a whole mess of author, science, and artist guests. Keith’s full schedule can be found here.
It might not be a good movie, but it’s enjoyable enough and I stil rewatch sometimes.
I disagree with the central premise of your dislike of the movie. Yes, Hope is the more competent of the two and yes, she is in danger throughout the film. The kind of danger she’s not put in? The itty-bitty kind that got her mother apparently killed. For that part of things, Pym picks an expendable nobody. No, it’s not totally rational, but there’s a logic there that’s at least easily understood.
Also, this is a heist movie and not the traditional superheroics that the Wasp traditionally has engaged in. The Scott Lang character is a burglar – and numerous plots have referenced that in the comics.
I agree with a lot of people that it shouldn’t have taken Marvel nearly as long as it has to center a film around a female hero. That said, I don’t think that the original Wasp was in any way “fridged ” for this film.
I loved this film. It’s a top 5 superhero film for me. It’s funny, exciting, has eye popping visuals and a few twists. The character drama feels grounded and the fact that the stakes are relatively small feels downright refreshing compared to the disaster porn a lot of these films engage in.
“Lang understands his place in all this: he’s wearing the suit because he’s expandable.”
Possibly true, but probably not what you intended to type :)
Ba-dum-ch!
Accidental puns aside, I thought this one was entertaining (mostly because of Peña, but Rudd holds his own), but not that interesting.
I agree with most of the review, except for Douglas’s take on Pym. I’m not that fond of the character, and my impression of him is of a much more brittle, insecure guy who tended to cause more problems than he solved. In a way, I guess he was to the silver age Avengers what Tony is to the MCU. I don’t really recognize the character Douglas plays as Pym at all.
I was all ready to argue that while there are characters more worthy of a movie than Ant-Man, the talking raccoon and the tree are probably well below Ant-Man on the list. Except you followed up with “…it should really be the Wasp,” and yeah, I can’t argue with that. The only possible justification I can come up with is that “Ant-Man and the Wasp” were Hank and Janet, and the movie decided not to go with them. So instead we get Scott Lang and an entirely new character who isn’t from the comics. I can kind of see the logic that got them here, but I don’t completely agree with it.
I get that this is “MCU light” but it came out at a perfect time for me. My daughter was just old enough to start watching the MCU movies a couple of years before this one. So Guardians and this one were the first she got to see in the theater and they were great for her age. Now we’re caught up on everything and she’s super excited for Capt. Marvel. Yes, I agree Wasp is a better character (and hope she has more to do in future films) but the “light-ness” of this movie is a good intro to the MCU for the younger crowd, which is useful.
I would love it if there was an Endgame trailer with Luis Pena summarizing everything up to the end of Infinity War.
I agree with twels, the small scale (heh) of the movie is refreshing. The climax fight scene on the toy train was fabulous.
Ant-Man, while perhaps not as popular or consistent a character as the Wasp among comics aficionados, is likely more recognizable to general audiences. I will grant you that MCU is long overdue for a movie anchored by a female lead (the Wasp still had to share top billing with Ant-Man in the sequel), which I believe is due to sexist leadership at the studio, given that fans have been screaming for a Black Widow movie since her appearance in Iron Man 2.
I agree with most points of this review (and am very intrigued at the idea of it being done Luis-style), but I am with @2 that Hank’s hesitancy are more believable for me. I would say, though, that in response to twels’ first paragraph, it is a believable emotional response to this event that obviously scarred him and left him unstable (see the opening scene with SHIELD). Add to that the fact that he says he has had physical complications to using the suit so much and I can see how he would fight hard to prevent Hope from using this technology while still – to his credit – letting her live her own life and trusting her to do dangerous things. He obviously trusts her a ton, believes she is very capable, but there is some serious emotional baggage and known long-term risks involved with the technology that makes him want to keep her from being “the wasp”. He actually did a lot “right” – see his trust and encouragement of her to do hard, scientific, physical, cool things – but he has some big flaws he hasn’t worked through.
Question for those with comic knowledge: The movie explanation for Pym particles – while sounding plausible at first listen – falls apart and is inconsistent with how the movie actually shows it working. Does the comics offer a different explanation? I am referring here to the particles being shoved together so the mass is preserved so he can still punch hard, but then how do you carry a tank? Or why doesn’t giant Thomas float? I mean, I can just go with blah-blahlblah -science – comics. But, is there a different – more self-consistent explanation in the comics?
So, what I got out of this was that you hate that the movie was made, because a different movie should have been made, but you pretty much liked the movie, otherwise?
Good, I enjoyed it too! Paul Rudd was fantastic. My kids love Ant-man because he was in all the cartoons they watched prior to this movie coming out, although they too were kinda ticked off that there was no Wasp in the movie. The acting was mostly terrific, the script was very, very funny, the action sequences were cool, and different from the rest of the MCU, and lets face it, for a certain generation of parent, the Thomas the Tank Engine scene was spectacular in every conceivable way. Its the first time I’ve ever been pissed off at a trailer, because if that hadn’t been in it, I likely would have jumped out of my seat and hooted.
Keith, Hayley Lovitt does return for Ant-Man and the Wasp as the performance double for the young Janet, though her face is digitally replaced with a de-aged Pfeiffer’s.
I like this one. It’s a lot of fun, and I think it does a good job retaining aspects of Edgar Wright’s quick-cutting, visually imaginative filmmaking style even without Wright directing it, so it does have a distinctive feel for an MCU movie. And I like it that Scott is one of the unfortunately few MCU feature-film protagonists with an explicitly voiced policy against killing, and I like it that his team makes an effort to evacuate the building in the climax (although I think the fate of the knocked-out Hydra goons is left ambiguous). What I don’t like is the dialogue about how amazing it was that Scott took on an Avenger and didn’t die, because that implies that the Avengers’ default practice is to kill.
I also didn’t like Darren Cross. He only avoids being the most undeveloped MCU villain because Ronan exists. He’s a one-note character with no nuance, and “the technology drove him insane” is the laziest possible character motivation for a villain, because it makes his actions completely arbitrary.
The visual effects were magnificent, though. It’s been a long time since we had a major movie about miniaturization — probably Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace were the last ones (I forget which one came first) — but the effects tech has advanced so much in the interim, and Ant-Man did an amazing job making the miniaturized scenes look like real microphotography rather than Land of the Giants-style oversized props and sets.
Comic book storylines really are insane. I get whiplash just reading the synopsis. I could never keep up
Oh, if I had a dollar for every time a fan complained about what a movie “should” have been about. YMMV.
Disagree on many points. I wanted my two founding Avengers in a movie, so I was thrilled at Ant-Man and the Wasp sharing the screen. Ant-Man is a fun watch that nods to the greater Marvel universe, but isn’t bogged down by it’s grandiose Phases (or having to stay lock-step with the comic versions of the characters). These characters feel like they have so much history, and Michael Douglas was superlative as a grouchy Hank Pym. Was I disappointed not to see the Wasp in costume? Yes, but the second movie gets there, so we’re not inundated by too many heroes in the first one.
And if you want a recycled Iron Man plot…*cough Dr. Strange cough.
@8 / whitespine: In my experience, size-changing is one of those areas of comic-book science where you really can’t look too hard, or it all falls apart. Even scenes close together in this movie aren’t consistent. Scott cracks the bathroom tile when he first shrinks because he retains his mass…except when he falls on the DJ’s turntable a few minutes later, all he does is skip the record, and a few minutes after that, he can ride on a flying ant, which makes no sense if he’s still at full mass. And let’s not even get started on the tank-keychain. Basically, shrunken / enlarged objects in this context DO change mass, unless the plot calls for it to be otherwise, because a tiny guy punching out a full-sized guy is cool.
Hope is amazing, and I think her getting the Wasp suit was long overdue, but I think this would absolutely be a worse movie with her as the main character. She has a serious tone to her that works in the film because of the way it bounces off of Lang’s humor, and both the heist elements and most of the comedic supporting cast come from Lang as well. A Hope-centric movie might be good, but it would not be this movie in the slightest . . . and I can’t help but think it would be worse because of that. I like Ant-Man as a comedy, not a super hero film, and I don’t want Hope’s version of a standard super hero film as much as I want more of this.
I enjoyed this movie a lot, and it is one of the only MCU movies that my wife enjoyed watching. It definitely shows the fact that numerous hands were involved with its development, but despite that, I think it worked pretty well. While we didn’t get the Wasp in this movie, we did get her in the next movie, which was an even better film than this one.
I do agree with you that a fine cast, and especially the work of Michael Pena, was a big part of why this movie worked so well.
Captain Cross and Keith Rose: good catch! The expandable typo has been fixed and is now expendable. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Pena totally stole this movie. I would watch a film entirely narrated by him as Luis.
“he’s wearing the suit because he’s expandable”
Do you mean expendable? He doesn’t become expandable until Civil War.
d’oh! A bit late to the party…
If their intent was to make a screwball caper film, then it seems to me a flawed, sometimes clumsy character is a better fit than a super competent one. More opportunities for zaniness.
I really enjoyed this film, I like a good heist movie, and the added superheroics makes it even better. Rudd is a delight to watch being a cheeky Scott Lang, without being an actual smartass. Plus, Luis is a great comic relief, and my own personal canon is that Kurt is from Latveria. I do agree that Cross is forgettable, and that poor Judy Greer keeps getting “nagging mom or ex-wife” roles, and that sucks.
@6 – teacherninja: Yes, we need a Luis recap.
Keith, all you had to say was, “Evangeline Lilly should have been front and center,” and literally nobody would have argued with you.
I had zero interest in this character and couldn’t really understand why some people were getting really excited about it. But…I honestly ended up really enjoying it and it’s sequel. My team leader at work utterly detests anything Marvel with a truly terrifying passion (or MCU at least, she likes the first X Men movie…) and even she likes Ant Man.
It seems to me that you are more pissed off this isn’t a Wasp movie than anything else about the movie that actually DOES exist. That said, the one thing I really don’t get in this is the whole story about how Janet died. Surely if she reduced enough to pass through the plating she would be too small to damage the missile. This makes zero sense to me.
Given the way the second movie goes, isn’ it more of a “put on a bus” scenario than a fridging for Janet? Not that it really makes much difference in the end
@24: Fridging is when anything bad happens to a female character to motivate a male character, not just death (or apparent death, in this case).
Put on a bus is when an established character leaves for no apparent reason other than the departure of the actor/actress who played them and they don’t want to kill off the character.
So, really, they’re two different tropes that deal with two different things. One is about character motivation, one is about behind-the-scenes production.
I’ll admit, I didn’t think this one was going to work (muck like I thought Guardians wasn’t going to work) and then to my surprised both did for me at least.
No body has mentioned it in particular, but one aspect of the story that works for me is the divorced parent. This is actually expanded upon in the sequel, but that aspect of Scott Lang’s character comes across wholly honest and disarming. It links in pretty well with his “chaotic good” qualities that initially landed him in prison. It’s not played for interpersonal angry drama, but kept pretty much to a fairly healthy dual parenting role (inasmuch as was possible with the ex-con employment issues) and improves greatly (maybe TOO grealy — almost played for laughs there) in the sequel. I think it also pairs well with his non-lethal ethos that Mr Bennett mentioned above.
Paul Rudd plays this to the hilt and has that sort of good-guy affect that sells it. And it’s not the most important part of a character but he just seems more “normal” than the rest of the Avenger crew. Steve Rogers gets a bit of this as well but he’s spent enough of his time in rarified air that he doesn’t quite have the everyman thing anymore.
@CLB/10 For the record, Innerspace was released I. Summer 1987 and Honey I Shrunk The Kids in Summer 1989…
It’s really not a very good movie, but I sort of appreciate it’s laid-back attitude. Scott Lang is just some dude who happens to live in a world where he might stumble across a ridiculous suit that gives him powers. It’s not a higher calling; he’s not a hero in the traditional sense. The stakes are relatively low. Everyone is just sort of doing their jobs, going about their lives, and yeah sometimes something crazy happens–that’s the MCU. It’s a pity that Guardians of the Galaxy already cast shade on the self-seriousness of the genre, and did it so much better.
At least they did much better the next time around.
Okay, a friend of mine, kind of a comics nut from Second Life, which I mean as a compliment (really), had an entirely different interpretation on why Janet was fridged. “They don’t want to deal with the bit everyone knows about Hank Pym, the beating-his-wife part, so they kill her off?” was approximately what she said. (REALLY big Wasp fan. One of her original characters for heroine roleplay was pretty much a blatant knockoff of Janet. #aside) What’s so stupid about that theory is… one moment, practically possessed by comic book standards, caused Mark Millar to make Ultimate Hank someone who freaking committed aggravated assault via insect on Janet, and the rest is history. It’s ‘common knowledge’ that supposedly had to be ‘fixed’. But in this case, I kind of doubt it was the primary motivation, because the MCU is a little bit bigger than the core fanbase now, and they could have just … ignored that.
I’m just glad they unfridged her for the next movie. Then freaking THANOS happened… grr.
Its made pretty clear that Pym is not rational in his decision making in regard to Hope and Scott. He’s more than a little unhinged in general, and in the specific case of The Wasp (first or second) he’s simple not capable of making rational or logical decisions. The movie doesn’t sugar coat this at all.
Also, the movie needed Ant Man because the actor is funny. Wasp’s actor couldn’t anchor a comedy – she’s a straight man (woman?). So, for reasons of cinematic construction, you get Ant Man.
Its more reasonable to ask why the second movie is titled Ant Man and the Wasp, when the lead was clearly Hope. That’s a much better example of weirdness and sexism.
I don’t see Janet as being fridged. She had her own agency, she chose to shrink further while knowing the dangers. Pym was not motivated to Do The Thing because of her death.
Further, death of a character is a valid motivator, and I think people are sometimes too quick to call it a bad thing. Tropes are not inherently good or bad, they’re storytelling concepts, a kind of shorthand. This one is a concept that goes back a very long way. Orpheus was motivated to travel to the Underworld because of the death of his wife. It can be done poorly, such as the event that gave the trope its name, but it’s an integral piece to the Punisher’s character. Green Lantern would still be a superhero without the death of his girlfriend, making this a bad use of the trope, but Punisher would just be a soldier without the death of his family and would have no story.
Agree with @31 – if a female character’s death is always fridging, regardless of motivation, then doesn’t that just as effectively remove agency as the fridging trope itself? Janet Van Dyne sacrifices herself to save people, just the same as Steve Rogers does at the end of CA:FA, and despite neither being dead, both inspire their remaining comrades/significant others to certain courses of action. The memory Captain America’s sacrifice is pretty obviously an element in SHIELD and who forms it.
If you reduce the original Wasp’s sacrifice as fridging, then aren’t you just taking away from her the choice to be a hero? And Hank Pym’s actions regarding Hope and Scott are very obviously “this suit is dangerous in lots of ways, lets put someone expendable in that situation” and not “I don’t trust you in danger,” because as everyone is pointing out, he’s clearly okay with Hope being in danger.
Also, it’s kind of dismissive of the idea that Hank can have PTSD and survivor’s guilt and all that other emotional/psychological baggage to insist that he must get over it to let his daughter assume the mantle of the Wasp. I’d bet dollars to donuts that if the character’s genders were reversed, we’d see an eloquent defense of why female-Hank was perfectly justified in not-allowing male-Hope to don the suit that killed his father because of the lingering impacts of mental trauma.
EDIT: Also wanted to add to support this, that Janet van Dyne is already a hero at the time of her death. She isn’t some random noncombatant who is killed just to piss off her husband/boyfriend/whatever. I was always under the impression that that was an integral part of the concept of fridging; a character has no soul or, well, characterization, except for the fact that she was killed and her man got all het up about it.
Yup @@@@@ 31&32, that’s pretty much the same argument I made for Frigga’s death not being fridging. If a character makes a free will choice to sacrifice their life for the greater good it can’t also be solely to motivate a man in their life. And the Cap analogy is perfect, either Janet’s sacrifice is equal to Cap’s, or Cap was fridged to motivate Peggy to found SHIELD. I don’t see people jumping on the Cap got fridged bandwagon any time soon lol.
@33 Cap was fridged, literally not figuratively. (In natures fridge) So was Bucky.
My assumption about “fridging” was always that it wasn’t the kind of death that was a willing sacrifice to save others. Rather, the only point was to hurt or motivate the male hero of the story. It was usually an instance of the male villain killing her in a manner she was totally defenseless against. That’s definitely NOT the case here. The Wasp is thought to be dead. The only motivation she gives a male character in this film (Pym) is to not risk his daughter dying in the same fashion.
Also, not for nothing, but Ant-Man is hardly a nonentity in modern Marvel Comics. Scott Lang has been an Avenger in the late 1990s and early-2000’s period that definitely served as a creative springboard for the MCU. he’s also the father of a Young Avenger as, in the comics, Cassie takes on the heroic identity of Stature.
@27/capt_paul77: Thanks. I was pretty sure Innerspace came first, but I was too lazy to check. Still, closer together than I thought.
Oh, when was Lily Tomlin’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman? No, wait, I’ll do my own work this time… That was 1981.
@29/wizardofwoz77 (why are you both 77s?): Mark Millar didn’t originate the “abusive Hank” idea. That was also in 1981, in Avengers #213 by Jim Shooter and Bob Hall. The script described Hank accidentally striking Jan when he gestured furiously, but the artist was trained to “go big” and drew it as a vicious backhand that knocked her down. It was an isolated instance that was never repeated, but it created the meme of Hank as abusive in the eyes of the audience, and Millar expanded on that in the Ultimate Universe because he made everything there as gratuitously dark as possible.
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/articles/off-my-mind-is-hank-pym-a-wife-beater-or-did-he-ge/1100-143296/
@32/andrewrm: I’d agree that it’s not fridging for a female character to choose to sacrifice herself for her own reasons if she’s already an established character (within the context of the story being told, aside from whatever source material it’s derived from). That’s not the case here, since we’ve never seen MCU Janet Van Dyne before and her only role in Ant-Man is as someone whose loss motivates one of the male leads in the story. @35/twels: It’s not just about the motivations of the villain who kills the character; it’s about the motivations of the writers of the stories, whether they’re choosing to portray female characters as protagonists in their own right or merely as plot devices to serve male characters’ arcs.
However, I don’t think I’d agree that Janet was fridged here, because it was always pretty obvious that her disappearance into the quantum realm was a sequel hook and that she’d turn up alive if and when a sequel happened. So while her disappearance was mainly to motivate Hank’s actions (and his marginalization of Hope in favor of Scott), it was also done to set up Jan’s own story in the sequel. And yes, in the sequel she’s largely a quest object for the male co-lead, but she also manages to be established as a pretty independent and effective character in her own right. But I’m getting ahead of the discussion there.
Christopher: please stop perpetuating Jim Shooter’s pathetic attempt to blame Bob Hall for “misdrawing” Hank hitting Janet. That explanation never passed the smell test, and didn’t match the actual issue. It’s Shoooter trying to deflect blame for his turning Hank into a wife abuser.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@37/krad: I’m just repeating what the linked article says, but whatever. The point is, Mark Millar didn’t originate the idea; he just took a single unfortunate moment in Hank’s characterization from a 1981 comic and made it the defining aspect of Ultimate Hank.
Let’s not forget the wonderful in-joke cameo by Garrett Morris
My issue isn’t just that this should have been either a Wasp movie or an Ant-Man and Wasp movie. It’s that the movie itself is pretty much all about how Hope is more capable than Scott. The last line of the movie is Hope getting the suit and saying, “About damn time,” which is how the movie should’ve started, not ended. The movie itself twists into a pretzel to justify not letting the Wasp be the main character because the guy they fired off the movie wanted it to be about someone else. The movie itself supports the thesis, which is the big problem.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@40/krad: I think a lot of stories center on someone who isn’t the most capable member of the cast, because they’re more identifiable and everyone loves an underdog — or in comedies, because a super-capable character isn’t as funny as a bumbler. The Professor is more capable than Gilligan. Agent 99 is more capable than Maxwell Smart. Hobbes is more capable than Calvin. So just being more capable doesn’t automatically mean that Hope should be the main character.
@12 Jean
On Dr Strange. The thing that bugged me so much about that movie, was him already being awesome at everything, and just cracking magic with little challenge. We’ve seen that so many times (from Benedict Cumberbatch no less) it’s boring. Also I think surgery and sorcery are probably not that similar. It would have been so much more impactful if he just sucked at magic. If he was terrible, too logical, too unyielding. If we the audience were in the same boat as all the other magicians in thinking the Ancient one had lost it in taking this guy on. If even he just lost faith in himself, if the bad guys just didn’t care about him because he’s worthless to them.
But he keeps trying, because he is brilliant, and he is stubborn and he doesn’t know how to give up. So when the big bad thing happens, and he has to make the crazy play to save everything, he does it. Then in what is a blink of an eye to everyone, but is a thousand years of repeated deaths, and the ultimate crash course in magical combat against a god, he emerges the Sorcerer Supreme. (with cool grey streaks in his hair to show how time has affected him in some way) To me it would have felt more earned, rather than him just being great at everything. They could have even had him cheat at things, trying to gain power quickly and dangerously like Mads Mikkelson’s character (which they kind of have him do by basically reading things he shouldn’t, but is still smart enough to figure out without consequence). The EVIL GOD, being bested by a clever trick was cool, but it should have taken far longer for the evil one to stop trying (like how many chances does Dark Dormammu have to escape the dark realm?) but that should have been more transformative for Strange, it was the perfect narrative conceit to explain his superiority to the other sorcerers, who had all been studying for years.
Also I was so annoyed by the controversy around the character of the Ancient One, it’s so easy to fix. Just make them a being that is percieved differently by whomever is looking at them. So Dr. Strange sees a British lady, someone else sees a black guy, another sees a kid, and another an old Asian man. Everybody sees what they think the “Ancient sorcerer Supreme” should look like. It says more about them than the character itself.
As for Ant-Man, I remember being bothered by the change of hands as far as directors and writer went. I remember when Patrick Wilson was going to play young Pym. Not sure which version would have been better, but I enjoyed this one (the sequel not as much, though there were some cool bits) even if it did feel a little second string. I like Rudd in everything, and I like Evangeline Lily as Wasp. The bad guys are always narrativly weak in Marvel movies, and this was no exception, though as usual there’s an inkling of a more interesting story to them (like with Ronan the Accuser, and the Dark elf King, both of witch seem like dudes with neat motivations which never get explored).
The bad guys are not “always narratively weak” in Marvel movies. That’s an artifact of Phase 2 specifically. Phase 1 gave us Stane, Ross, the Abomination, the Red Skull, and Loki. Phase 3 gave us Killmonger, the Vulture, Zemo, Ego, and Hela.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, I’d been waiting for Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne to turn up since the Avengers movies started and this one…sort of gave that? Well, she’s there in a flashback and he’s a curmudgeonly mentor figure but it’s the mostly about “the other Ant-Man”. But okay, run with it, and it’s not a bad movie, a bit of decent end of term fun with a few decent laughs and a likeable but not traditionally heroic lead. It’s not a good idea to have all your tricks in the first movie (although it’s not a good idea to leave all your best stuff for a sequel that never gets made either!), so I can’t blame them for focusing on Ant-Man and not exposing Hope to the Pym Particles yet. I actually didn’t get that Darren Cross was meant to be unstable from the particles, and I’m not entirely sure that even makes sense given that he doesn’t perfect the process until well into the movie and so probably hasn’t shrunk himself until the climax (or are they meant to affect you just by being in the same room?), but when you’re trying to establish your hero and his supporting cast, it’s perhaps not necessary to have the most complex villain ever competing for attention.
Bob Chipman made a video describing the entire history of the MCU from the Big Bang onwards, and admitted that he would prefer Luis to have done it. You can imagine him losing focus like he does in the movies:
“So like the Universe started in a Big Bang, and there were six singularities which we now call the Infinity Stones, and Alan Guth was like ‘the Universe went from the size of a grapefruit to the size it is now in a fraction of a second” and he called it inflation and I’m like ‘Nah, man, you just made up an unobservable process with no basis in the Standard Model and even dark energy is on the completely wrong scale-“
“Luis!”
“Right, so there were six Infinity Stones…”
@42/Lurklen: I don’t think it would’ve improved Doctor Strange to have him bad at magic first, because learning a technical skill is not as interesting on a character level as learning to transcend a personal flaw. Strange’s journey through the movie was about overcoming his ego and learning humility. The fact that he was great at everything, including magic, was part of the problem he had to overcome, because it made him feel superior and unbeatable, and that pride was his biggest weakness. The reason the climax made him worthy of becoming the Sorceror Supreme wasn’t just because he finally figured out how to do the job; that’s emotionally boring. It made him worthy because he chose to be selfless — to sacrifice himself for the good of the rest of humanity. That was what he needed to learn in order to become a hero. Heroism isn’t about whether you know how to do something extraordinary; it’s about why you do it, and what you use it for.
@46:
That is excellent, and completely on point.
I would add though, that the part that makes it not work as well, for me, as some other MCU movies is the overlap with Tony Stark’s arc. Its just like, “Well, I’ve seen this before, goatee and all.”
That’s one of the reasons I would push back about this movie. The core of the main character arc is completely different than the rest of the MCU. Hope’s character arc, if she had been the lead of this movie? Not so much.
@43 I would definitely call Ross, Abomination, and Red Skull pretty weak. Stane is too, but he’s just too fun to watch, especially with the box of scraps line. Phase 3 has had spectacular villains, thiugh
@47/Anthony Pero: Aside from the whole arrogant-goateed-jerk-becoming-superhero thing, I think that Stark’s journey and Strange’s are pretty different. Stark is driven by his guilt at the harm his creations have caused to others, and is trying to make amends. Strange is driven by his desire to undo the damage he did to himself, and it’s only at the climax that he realizes the need to set his pride aside and put others first. And their relationships with their antagonists are pretty different too. Stark’s foe is a mentor-turned-rival and a reflection of himself. Strange’s foe is someone he has no history with, and his mentor/counterparts remain his allies, although that changes for Mordo at the end.
And even if they do have similar arcs in some ways, that’s not intrinsically bad. There are only so many story structures in the world. And reusing an existing pattern isn’t wrong; ask any writer of haiku, sonnets, or limericks. It’s what you create within the pattern that matters.
@49
I don’t think Tony, even as far as Infinity War is self aware enough to be making amends. He’s looking for a way to shift blame from himself, to exculpate himself, to make a way of it all being somehow not his fault. Amends come after personal acceptance and humility, and there is no sign that Tony has reached that standard yet.
@50/random22: I said “trying to make amends.” Imperfect execution doesn’t mean the attempt isn’t being made. Reality is not binary. Learning humility — like learning most things — is a journey, a process that takes time rather than being a single, instantaneous transition. Tony began that journey in the cave in Afghanistan, and he’s been struggling to make progress in it ever since, with setbacks along the way.
In a way, for comics fan, this movie is like trying to make a Rescue movie first instead of starting with Iron Man. Or even a War Machine movie.
But for non comics fan this is a perfectly fine movie, a good one, but not outstanding.
@54: I don’t know about that. I think most modern comics fans who knew who Ant-Man was were probably more aware of Scott Lang in the role than they were of Hank Pym, given that Pym has had about a gazillion alter egos since.
@54/Ryamano: Hey, at least Scott Lang’s been around since 1979. The movie Guardians are based on a reboot from 2008 (although the individual characters were older). While we’re at it, the X-Men movies started with characters introduced in the ’70s and ’80s like Wolverine, Rogue, and Storm, rather than going for the original ’60s line-up.
I think it was a great idea to start with Scott and have Hank be the retired veteran. It avoids being just another cliched origin-story plot and gives the film — and the MCU — a deeper history. It’s the first legacy-hero narrative in the MCU, giving it a fresh dynamic.
Besides, I don’t agree with the idea that “fans” can only appreciate something that’s a slavish copy of the original version. That’s not fandom, that’s just fear of novelty. I’m a fan of plenty of things, and I have no problem with adaptations that do them differently and find fresh meaning in them. That doesn’t take away from the fan experience, it enhances it. If someone just did a note-for-note, verbatim translation of something I’m a fan of, that would be boring, because it wouldn’t give me anything new.
@36 and 38 CLB: What you’re referring to is the “one moment” I spoke of. I spend a little too much time on TV Tropes, and Hank striking Janet in 1981 is, I think, the page image for Never Live It Down/Comic Books. That moment of stress, whether or not it was written as a backhand or a swing, could well have inspired Millar to go full-on wifebeater with Hank in The Ultimates, and I kind of think it’s at least an indicator of the ‘common knowledge’ that “Hank Pym beats his wife”.
I completely count this as a fridging-with-retcon, because as presented, Janet only exists in the story to die and cause an emotional response in her significant other. I think that should be the definition of fridging, especially now that LGBT leads are starting slowly to trickle in, so the original ‘woman dies to become emotional issue for man’ definition has to evolve. Like I have HEARD it argued that Sofia Boutella’s character got fridged to drive a revenge plot for Charlize Theron’s character in… that movie I forgot the name of. Anyway. Point is, Janet BECOMES a fleshed out character in the next movie, but that’s retcon.
@57/wizardofwoz77: “I completely count this as a fridging-with-retcon, because as presented, Janet only exists in the story to die and cause an emotional response in her significant other.”
As I said, I think it was self-evident in the original film that Janet’s disappearance in the quantum realm was always intended to be a sequel hook. That’s why they had Hank look at a photo of Janet immediately after saying how amazing it was that Scott made it back from the quantum realm. That was the sequel setup right there, telling us plainly that Jan might be alive and Hank was going to try to find her. So, no, it’s not a retcon, because it was built into the original story. Janet was never, ever meant to be truly dead.
@57
The name of the movie is Atomic Blonde. Good spy movie and good action movie IMO.
While I agree that the way the Pym particles work in the film is inconsistent with the explanation given in the script, it is entirely consistent with the way they work in the comics, where they can play games with size, mass, momentum and more. At least they’re not pretending the shrinking effect is a biochemical process anymore. (“Shrinking gas”, anyone?) My guess is that the filmic Pym gave Lang an incomplete/inaccurate explanation because he didn’t think Scott had the brains to understand the a more correct one. (And it wasn’t important for him to understand the physics involved for him do his job anyway.)
@58 — Okay, I can see that. Having said that, building sequel hooks into movies, even in a franchise with this kind of performance history, don’t always pan out. I can’t recall how the discussion about B4’s singing Blue Skies turned out in the discussion for Nemesis, though I always personally believed that it was ‘Remember 2000’, a hook put there by the writer or the suits just in case Spiner changed his mind… but considering the movie pretty much killed the franchise, the hook went nowhere (until the novels and the game both concurred that despite all the talk about B4’s hardware not being up to Data’s aspiration levels, Data re-emerged, B4 offloaded himself onto a holodeck, and everyone is happy except for Brent … that was a LONG aside). And that was arguably the most vast cinematic universe to regularly inhabit the theaters before Marvel (even if its main home was TV), so you could almost set your watch to the idea of a fifth TNG or first DS9 movie. Instead Brent’s real last moment was an audio-only cameo in probably the worst finale of the 21st century not named “How I Met Your Mother”.
And yeah, I know “Ant-Man and the Wasp” probably got hard-coded into the schedule for the MCU regardless of how well this movie did, but I still say it’s foolish to plan on having a chance to continue your story. Especially with Joss Whedon being involved in the franchise, he of all people should know better than THAT. So I still criticize the movie for the direction they took with Janet, because for all they knew, they could’ve been stuck with it.
Apologies if this has already been covered, but is Scott Lang a reference to the character Scott Carey from book and movie The Incredible Shrinking Man? Or is the first name a coincidence? Can’t be, right?
Also, just wanted to comment on how amazing the de-aged Michael Douglas in this movie looked. They’ve come a long way in a short period since the wonky looking Jeff Bridges in TRON: Legacy.
I love this movie. I know there are issues with the movie but it amuses me so much that I don’t care. Anytime Peggy & Howard show up I’m happy and seeing the Triskelion in it’s early days was perfect. Big fan of Falcon. I love that there are 2 Ant-Men & 2 Wasps in the film. I like that it’s an origin story for Hope. She’s a superhero throughout who doesn’t have a suit but she gets the suit and the response to that is perfection. I liked it. I do want to see more of Wasp in action, hopefully in “Endgame” and a third film in this cycle – and hopefully in other films as well. And I’m a huge Bucky / Cap fan, so both of the credit scenes had me leaving the theater on a high. I saw it 2 more times and own it on blu-ray.
Also the WHIH Newsfront installments that tied into “Ant-Man” were great fun and were followed by another great season connecting to “Captain America: Civil War”.
@61/wizardofwoz77: While B-4’s singing at the end of Nemesis could no doubt have been used as a hook to justify bringing Data back, that wasn’t its intent in the context of the film’s story. On the contrary, the film went to some lengths to drive home that it would be impossible for B-4 ever to become like Data, that they tried and failed because his brain was just too primitive and incapable of growth, so it would be like trying to run Windows 10 on a Commodore 64. The song was just meant to be a ray of hope that Data’s download had given B-4 some potential to finally grow as himself, as a final gift and legacy left by Data. It was a ray of hope for B-4’s self-realization, not his extermination for the sake of retconning Data’s death. Although of course, if there had been another movie and they’d offered Spiner enough money, it could’ve been used as a way to bring Data back, which was no doubt a secondary consideration, but not the primary intent. Unfortunately it misfired because everyone assumed it was just The Wrath of Khan redux and that bringing Data back was the only intent behind the ending, overlooking much of what the film had explicitly laid out — not to mention overlooking the obscene immorality of the assumption that it’s okay to murder a developmentally disabled person in order to put someone else’s brain into him. If they had brought Data back that way, it would’ve been morally hideous and an assault on everything Star Trek stands for, so thank the Great Bird of the Galaxy that they never did it that way.
Also, you’re conflating the game and novel versions. The novels did not bring Data back in B-4’s body; Data’s memories were merely stored in B-4’s brain until they could be transferred into a new body while B-4 continued to exist in his own, basically the reverse of what Star Trek Online did.
” but I still say it’s foolish to plan on having a chance to continue your story.”
It’s never foolish to give yourself options. What’s foolish is assuming you know the future and planning for only one possibility. The smart move is to plan for multiple potential futures, e.g. by telling a story that’s complete in itself but also contains seeds that could potentially be used to drive sequels. That’s not assuming a sequel will happen, any more than wearing a seatbelt is assuming your car will crash. It’s just being prepared for the possibility. And that’s what they did here.
But that’s beside the point. What I’m disagreeing with is your use of the term “retcon,” which means a new idea inserted into the continuity after the fact. It’s something that wasn’t intended when the story was originally told but was retroactively written in later, like Luke Skywalker’s true relationship to Darth Vader and Leia. If the makers of Ant-Man had intended Jan to be permanently, truly dead and the makers of the sequel had subsequently decided to change that, then it would’ve been a retcon, a retroactive reinterpretation of the original continuity. But as I said, the clues are there that the makers of the original film always intended for Jan’s disappearance to set up a potential sequel.
@62/Spike: I never had a problem with the “wonky-looking” de-aged Jeff Bridges in TRON Legacy, because he was supposed to be a computer-generated character anyway. So if anything, he was the only character that really looked like he was supposed to. (Legacy totally missed the point of the original film’s aesthetic, which was an attempt to make live actors look like they were computer-generated characters before the technology existed to computer-animate anything remotely humanlike. It would’ve been truer to the spirit of the original if all the scenes inside the computer had been pure CGI, like in the TRON: Uprising animated series.)
In fairness to the Og Tron… It was made in the 80’s. Literally 90% percent of its effects were done by hand. And times change so It makes sense they updated the aesthetic (Though it never comes close to OG’s Moebius goodness (; )
I wasn’t criticizing the original Tron, I was criticizing Legacy for misunderstanding its intent. Tron was trying to make live-action look like CGI, and to embrace the potential of CGI to create totally novel kinds of imagery unlike anything in reality. Legacy was just one more of the countless modern films that strive to do the opposite and make CGI look like live action. Legacy also made the mistake of making the entire world as drab and monochrome as the Programs inhabiting it, even though the scenery in the original was vividly colorful.
it’s rare to see an Italian-American actor playing a character who isn’t a mobster or comic relief (or both)
Wait, what? What planet’s movies are you watching?
#64
Except in the flashback to a younger Jeff Bridges with his son he looks just as wonky as his computerized counterpart. It didn’t break the movie for me; I still liked it. But the tech has obviously come a long way since then.
As for Clu 2, I think it would’ve worked better had they made his face glitch once in awhile, maybe turned into something like a Picasso painting. That would’ve covered up some of the “wonk” and further sold the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with his program.
Completely with you on this. It was a weak movie that went way too far out of its way to justify sidelining Hope despite her being more competent than Scott in every way. As a woman, I felt insulted; as a moviegoer, I was bored.
In contrast, the sequel was great fun and a joy to watch.
This is the only Marvel Cinematic entry that I somehow skipped on seeing in theatres. That’s something I partly regret, especially considering the visual effects employed to make Lang’s shrinking feasible and credible. At least I made time to see the sequel in theatres.
As a film, it’s an okay, by-the-numbers heist film. It works as well as it does thanks in no small part due to its casting. Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas make the story work and both of them bring their A-game, with lively performances, giving some much needed layers to the characters and their world.
I was always baffled by Edgar Wright pulling out at the last minute. Obviously, this sparked a heated debate amongst fan circles regarding the way Marvel Studios treats its directors. I think part of the reason Feige and the Marvel brass were painted in such an ugly fashion is because this happened after the Patty Jenkins Thor debacle. That, plus reports of Whedon and Favreau burning themselves out in the filmmaking process, certainly contributed to the narrative of Marvel execs enforcing a tight leash on their creative talent.
I don’t know how much of that narrative bears merit. Obviously, if I’m a producer attemtping to juggle a massive cinematic universe, I’m certainly going to go the extra length to make sure these films connect to each other. But I like to think Feige has given these directors more than enough freedom to ensure that each film stands out in its own unique way.
As for Wright, it’s weird as to why he left so late in the process. The idea that he wasn’t satisfied with the idea of someone else taking a shot at his script before filming almost sounds unprofessional. He has to know this is usually how it works in studio feature films, where you always bring a fresh writer with a new angle. Ultimately, I don’t know how would a Wright-directed film stand apart from the Reed version. It was still Wright’s story treatment, after all.
One minor quibble: I’m usually accepting of young inexperienced actors, who have yet to develop nuance and layers of character. Having said that, I can’t stand Abby Ryder Fortson’s take on the daughter. Act 3 has her doing the shrill screaming for help that’s as over the top as it gets. She improves somewhat in the sequel, thankfully.
Re: De-aging visual effect. It seems to get better and better. The effect in Tron was about as uncanny valley as you can get. Same goes for the X-Men: United flashback. And now, from what I’ve seen in the trailer and other clips, Samuel L. Jackson looks almost normal in the upcoming Captain Marvel. Of course, Samuel L. Jackson looks freaking amazing for 71. 71! I wonder if the effect is easier to use on a black person, as it seems Caucasians show the wear and tear of aging a lot more. Laurence Fishburne looked perfect in his flashback scene in Ant-Man and the Wasp. (Again, Laurence looks amazing for his age of 58).
The big problem that is the sidelining of Hope in this movie is proven by the much better sequel. Ant-Man & Wasp work better both together and as an ensemble with the rest of their cast. The center of gravity for Scott Lang is that he is forever a step behind the supporting cast; he’s not quite as smart, as clever, or as competent as his family (either family), he’s always a little bit of a disappointment to both of them, and he’s always struggling to prove that he even has a right to be wherever he is. That works great in the next movie, where he is constantly reminded how much better at this superhero thing Hope is.
They hadn’t quite worked that out in the first movie. It’s been a bit since I watched it, but I remember its scenes having odd pacing; scenes stretched out a little too long, or else they cut abruptly to something else. It was remarkably uneven for an MCU film.
@58 – Chris: Correct, that’s why she “shrinks and disappears into the quantum realm”, instead of getting shot, or hit by a car. Any comic book death where there’s no body to be found (and even then) is an obvious return hook.
@68 – Eduardo: I’ve always been mystified by the complaints about what Marvel did to Wright, when by the time Ant-Man was actually going to be made, the MCU was already a big franchise and you knew Marvel was going to pull rank. (It’s like when people complain that a certain comic writer was made to accommodate for a company-wide event at Marvel or DC: those are the rules of the game in this particular field.)
However, knowing now that Wright had been trying to get this made way before there was an MCU or anything remotely like that, I can understand his attitude. Superhero comic book films were a different beast back then.
@71/MaGnUs: It took surprisingly long for Marvel to develop and greenlight Ant-Man. A 9 year gap between Wright’s 2006 pitch and the final release. One wonders how many drafts he had to go through in-between before quitting.
But it was probably for the best, because right after Ant-Man was out, Wright took the basic idea of making a heist film and promptly made Baby Driver. Now that movie speaks for itself, especially given the insanely tight choreography work and use of soundtrack. Even the title character moves and operates almost like an overpowered superhero.
@72– Actually, the delays were due to Edgar Wright wanting to finish his Cornetto trilogy and other projects before tackling Ant-Man. By the time Wright got around to making Ant-Man his priority, the Marvel Cinematic Universe already had take off and had become its own thing, and apparently Wright’s vision no longer fit.
This film was entertaining without being great. Some of the humour lands, some of it really doesn’t. There is a weird tension between dark and light in this film.
A good example is Lang’s situation as an ex-con. While it shows the very real, distressing reality of a criminal record interfering with employment, it also shows prison as not that bad a place for Lang (A white guy who looks like Paul Rudd is going to find prison a lot harder than the film portrays it).
I also found the child support payments for access to his daughter…icky? There are legitimate reasons why Cassie’s Mum/Step-Dad might not want Lang to have access but the suggestion its cash for contact it pretty messed up for a film of this tone.
line: child-support is court-mandated. Lang was not fulfilling his terms of the divorce agreement. It’s not “cash for contact,” it’s “you actually fulfill your end of the bargain, and I’ll consider renegotiating the part about visitation,” which is 100% reasonable on Maggie’s part.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I found this one to be perfectly pleasant — better than Age of Ultron, certainly; probably in the bottom stretch of my MCU rankings, not because it’s bad or anything, but because many of the others are just better. I did like the generally light tone, and the fact that the stakes weren’t all that high, relatively speaking. And it had some neat effects.
I’m just sad that we didn’t see any of the Micronauts when we visited the quantum realm.
@75 And given that Lang is apparently on parole too, he’s lucky that he’s not back in prison for missing payments. Yes, not paying child support can invalidate parole and be enough to have someone sent back to jail; no, the courts do not accept “I was fired” as a reasonable excuse. His ex is giving him more than enough slack, more than she really has to.
@76 – hoopmanj: Marvel doesn’t own the Micronauts (although they might own certain concepts or characters from the comics), Hasbro does. Hasbro/Paramount have announced a Micronauts film for 2020.
(@75: krad but why is Lang still on the hook for child support when there is a new step dad in the equation?)
My jumbled thoughts about Ant-Man:
– when I heard that they had chosen to do Lang instead of Pym I was disappointed because Lang doesn’t start off at all heroic and he’s kind of a bumbler. But casting Paul Rudd makes it work for me. I find Rudd extremely likeable as Scott Lang. Pym and Hope Van Dyne are both abrasive and arrogant. I wouldn’t want to watch them in a movie unleavened by Lang and his gang of comic relief.
– re: Pym’s wife-beating reputation; I don’t think it’s down to a single panel in the comics. Pym has often had issues with mental stability and anger management. This makes it easy to believe he might lash out at loved ones. In fact, IIRC Pym and Van Dyne were married during one of his psychotic episodes when he was Yellowjacket.
– I also didn’t like the idea of the Wasp going sub-atomic to defeat the missile. If the idea was that she could shrink so small that she could pass right through the shell of the missile by passing between atoms then surely she is too small to affect even the electronics of the missile! It only works if she is able to re-grow once past the fuselage.
– I agree with those who say the smaller stakes make this movie easier to like. It annoys me when every superhero movie has to be about saving the entire city, or even the world. Sometimes you just need a friendly neighbourhood Ant-Man.
– After practicing for years to say “crazy, stupid, fine”, I still can’t do it with the verve that Luis does :(
@80/vinsentient: When I heard Luis describe that woman as “crazy stupid fine,” it occurred to me later that he probably said “crazy stupefyin’,” and I just misheard. But I decided to look up a transcript the other day just to settle the question in my mind once and for all, and I was surprised to see that, at least according to the closed captioning, he really did say “stupid fine.”
@80 – vinsentient: She shrinks enough to get into the missile, and while she’s still large enough, she deactivates it, then keeps shrinking into the quantum realm.
One thing that I am glad for quite honestly is that the Latter day comics versions of both Pym and the Wasp are nowhere near this movie – and that the version of Janet Van Dyne we meet in the next film bears little resemblance to her comic book counterpart.
Just taking the portrayal of the Wasp through her history, she starts out flirting with all the other male Avengers to make Hank jealous. And if memory serves, Hank talks about her resembling a younger version of his dead first wife. Then, when Hank breaks down mentally (he believes that his emergent “Yellowjacket” persona has killed Hank Pym), she marries him – KNOWING that he is in the midst of a psychotic break. The instance of Hank beating her is actually portrayed pretty savagely and in the aftermath, she’s got a black eye and facial bruises and is forced to admit to the other (male) Avengers (Cap and Thor at least, if memory serves) what happened to her (Thor angrily asks “Did he strike thee?”) Then, she goes admittedly through a good few years where she comes into her own and becomes Avengers chairwoman. Jan’s only other significant relationship I can recall comes when she dates Tony Stark who – until the end of the issue – keeps the fact that he’s Iron Man a secret. I guess the deranged stalker villain Whirlwind, who once was her chauffeur might count somehow. Oh, then she hooks back up with her abuser and there’s a truly tasteless bit in Geoff Johns’ run in which we see a thoroughly trashed room with Janet (off panel) screaming things like “Hank! Don’t! Stop!”, only for it to be revealed that they’re having shrinking power-enhanced sex (seriously, the image of a moist miniature Hank standing in the midst of Jan’s cleavage is one of the weirdest images you’ll see in mainstream comics). Then, of course, Jan gets killed, motivating Hank to take on her superhero name.
So yeah, there is some baggage with Pym and the Wasp that the movie wisely sidestepped by using the Lang version of Ant-Man.
@78/MaGnUs — Yeah, sadly I know there are rights issues (which is also why we won’t ever see reprints of the Marvel Micronauts, ROM or Shogun Warriors series, I assume).
Christopher: I just re-read Avengers #212-213 for the first time in a while, since I wanted to make sure I remembered the issue properly.
Jim Shooter is so full of shit, his eyes have probably turned brown.
The two issues in question are a detailed chronicle of Hank abusing Jan in myriad ways, gaslighting her, treating her like shit, dismissing her, belittling her, and making her feel worthless and a burden. Not only that, but a few pages before the blow that Shooter insists was supposed to be an accident (and which gave Janet a black eye), he pounded a console that she was on as the Wasp, just barely missing her. If he’d actually struck her with his full-sized fist, she’d be dead right now.
Hank’s abuse of Janet was detailed and thorough — that blow that Shooter is trying to hard to absolve himself of is just the climax. It’s what gets focused on, but it’s the culmination of two issues’ worth of abuse that Shooter himself as the writer is 100% responsible for.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The line—and defenses of it—about visitation and child support reflect a poor understanding of family law in California and many other states (see https://www.courts.ca.gov/1193.htm). In short, child support and visitation rights are separate issues in the eyes of the court; and legally, one cannot hinge on the other.
Also, assuming the divorce was after Scott’s incarceration or even after his loss of employment, there likely would not have been any substantial child support in the divorce decree, since it is based on income when the divorce is finalized. Basically, the ex and the boyfriend (new husband?) come off very petty in this scene, despite the later reconciliation. Their characterization is much better in the next movie.
I’m not sure we should be defending someone’s right to be a deadbeat dad. I’m fine with him being told to pay his damn child support.
@86: The sequel confirms (or at least, Luis’ rambling does, so take that for what it’s worth) that Scott was indeed in prison when he got divorced.
Also, shout out to my dad who realized before I did that David Dastmalchian (Kurt) is also the guy who plays Murdoc in the new MacGyver. I guess the accent threw me off. (Pretty good fake Russian for a guy born in Kansas…)
@88/LazerWulf: Dastmalchian has also appeared in The Flash as the villain Abra Kadabra.
If anything this discussion is making me wonder if the attempt to redeem Ant-Man in the MCU was a bit wrong-headed–if they shouldn’t have gone more in the direction of the Eric O’Grady version of Ant-Man, a scoundrel who only barely qualified as an antihero. I don’t know that Paul Rudd would work as an antihero though, or that the MCU was ready to be that experimental at that time. And his more lighthearted sad sack works pretty well in Ant Man & The Wasp–that movie probably would have been dragged down by a more disreputable Ant-Man.
I wonder when we will see our first real antihero in the MCU. I guess Venom sort of counts? (I didn’t see Venom.)
@90 Venom isn’t part of the MCU
@90/Colin: The Punisher? Personally I consider him a villain, but the MCU version has been done in more of an antihero mold.
Somehow the Netflix MCU characters seem even less likely members of the MCU than Venom, you know? They keep talking about Venom crossing over with Spider-Man, but the Netflix characters seem totally dead.
Some interesting comments re cash for child access above. Full disclosure here I am neither a parent nor divorced so I don’t have a horse in the game.
As I’m not an American I don’t know much about child-support laws in the US, but of course this is not the first – and unlikely to be the last time that a US film just assumes a *global* audience must just be familiar with their laws.
For those who see it as an acceptable punishment for Lang that he doesn’t get to see his daughter, I find this interesting as course the one really being punished is his daughter – who doesn’t get to see Dad. Of course families of criminals are among the victims but I find the attitude that Lang got what he deservers without considering the impact on Cassie very “interesting”. Without wanting to open too big a can of worms, this might point to some of the big cultural differences to the US attitude to crime and punishment and the rest of the western world.
line: I don’t think Lang “got what he deserved,” but I also totally understand Maggie’s perspective here, too.
Look at it from her point of view: Lang committed a rather serious crime and got caught at a time when he was married with a kid. He put himself in a position to be incarcerated while fully aware that he had a kid to help support. Based on Maggie’s dialogue in this very movie, his visitation rights and his child support are both spelled out in the divorce agreement, and one thing that he doesn’t get to do is drop by unannounced. So from Maggie’s POV, her convicted felon of an ex-husband has violated their divorce agreement twice over by a) not paying child support and b) violating the terms of his visitation rights. She said she’s willing to renegotiate the visitations, but only if he actually catches up on child support which, I hasten to add, is completely fucking reasonable of her to demand of her ex-husband the convicted felon. Yes, from the movie-goer’s perspective, he’s the star of the movie, he’s a hero, he’s played by a guy who’s cute and funny, but from Maggie’s end of the world, he’s her convicted felon ex who can’t follow the terms of a divorce agreement he signed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Whoa KRAD! No need for the anger. We are talking about fictional characters here, not an actual family.
All that you’ve mentioned above about following through what you said you would do, sticking to the agreement etc is reasonable. The only issue I have with it – it ignores Cassie’s needs.
line: No anger, just emphasizing my point. And I’m from New York, so “fucking” as an adjective doesn’t indicate anger, just that I’m awake. :)
And you’re right, Cassie’s needs are not being served here, but sadly in contentious divorces, the kids’ needs are usually the last things that are serviced.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
No worries, I think they have the same culture around the f-bomb in a few cities I’ve been to. Yeah its kinda realistically tragic about family situations – which is why I found it a little bit off in a light-hearted film
@89 – Chris: Oh, I didn’t recognize him in Flash!
@90 – Colin: O’Grady never qualified even as an antihero, he’s a scumbag, and then turned into a straight up villain.
@80 MaGnUs I get that’s what the movie was trying to tell us. I am questioning how it was possible. She didn’t shrink small enough to squeeze through a seam or joint in the fuselage. IIRC she shrinks small enough to pass right through the metal skin. If she is going to go right through a sheet of metal how can she affect wires, circuit boards or anything else?
A wizard did it.
@97: The issue of Cassie’s needs “not being met” is an interesting one from my point of view. Are Cassie’s needs really being met when her dad drops by out of the blue and then disappears for big stretches? Are they met when the family’s primary breadwinner goes to jail/prison for a long stretch? Are they met when Cassie’s father doesn’t help with the basic “care and feeding” concerns? As someone who works with children, I think I can safely say that Cassie’s mom is being 100% responsible and cognizant of Cassie’s long-term health when she sets and holds boundaries with Scott. Yeah, he wants to do right by Cassie, but he doesn’t really manage to until late in the first film.
@99 I don’t think the Irredeemable Ant-Man stuff would hold up very well today, but you know what I mean. There is a bit of an incongruity between the idea that Scott Lang is a criminal and Paul Rudd’s geniality. Luke Cage delved a bit into the pain someone can go through in prison, as did Jessica Jones and Daredevil–that’s not something we ever feel in Ant-Man.
It’s interesting that we really don’t see much of the criminal justice system in the MCU. We see the Raft in Civil War, but we only see our protagonists locked up there–never how the villains are treated. And it’s treated as a big unjustice that the heroes would be thrown in prison. And I guess we see the Vulture in prison, briefly. There was that short focused on the Mandarin.
I think the MCU is a little inconstent on these issues really!
@103: Lang’s crime was non-violent, so it’s doubtful that the prison he was sent to was a SuperMax. The prisoners there trade punches as a farewell ritual, but otherwise seem amicable to each other. And we do see Kingpin and Punisher in prison in DD Season 2, but that most likely IS a SuperMax, and so it’s reasonable to expect the environment to be different.
Also, I don’t think the MCU version of The Raft is a prison so much as a Black Site to hold the offenders off-the-grid. I don’t think there was much due process involved in that. Though considering Lang and Barton were eventually able to make plea-bargains, maybe they were treating it as a jail?
Lang’s crime would have put him in a medium security prison, so not quite the “lap of luxury” that is minimum security, but not the lockdown-level insanity of a maximum security prison, either. (I actually toured a medium security prison as research for my 2008 CSI: NY novel Four Walls.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@104 Lang and Barton did not make plea deals until after Cap broke them out of The Raft (or at least I don’t think so).
My guess is that they would not have been able to do so while in The Raft. Ross doesn’t seem like the type to allow bargains. Perhaps after they escaped, Lang and Barton went and turned themselves in to the FBI, thus avoiding further trouble.
@103/Colin R: “There is a bit of an incongruity between the idea that Scott Lang is a criminal and Paul Rudd’s geniality.”
Not at all, because Scott’s crime was a Robin Hood-like act to steal his employers’ unethically obtained wealth and restore it to the workers it was intended for. And the films’ Ant-Man is basically in the long literary/cinematic tradition of the gentleman thief, a charismatic antihero who steals for the challenge or for a noble cause but is usually not a bad person otherwise — characters like the archetype Arsene Lupin, his manga/anime descendant Lupin III (who’s generally not at all a gentleman except in Hayao Miyazaki’s debut film The Castle of Cagliostro), Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the cast of Ocean’s Eleven or Leverage, Carmen Sandiego, etc.
Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang is not very convincing as a Danny Ocean or Lupin III either. He’s not a dashing romantic thief, but rather a bit of a bumbler. Judging by Baby Driver I guess maybe an Ocean’s 11 style caper is how Edgar Wright pictured his Ant-Man, but I don’t feel like that’s the film or the Ant-Man that we got. It certainly isn’t how Scott Lang appears in the future.
As an alternative to the divorce/child custody issue, how about the one where a non-violent ex-con can’t even keep a minimum wage job at an ice cream parlor where the manager considers him a reliable, hard worker? There is no criminal rehabilitation in MCU America any more than there is in the real one. Kinda hard to make child support payments with no income.
So what does Lang do? He falls back into a life of crime just to make child support. That he “lucked out,” and the break-in was an audition to work for an unbelievably wealthy super-scientist, is pure cinema magic. in reality, he would be facing another long prison sentence for being a repeat offender.
As “line” said @98, heavy stuff for a lighthearted comic book movie albeit with a heist theme. Ant-man is still high up on my MCU list.
And a P.S.: Scott Lang may not be a super-scientist, but he’s no slouch intellectually. Paul Rudd plays him, well, as Paul Rudd. But he’s a talented security hacker, and incredibly good at improvisation when the team’s plans go awry.
@108/Colin R: My point was not that all thief-antihero characters have to be portrayed identically, because that would be stupid. My point was simply that there’s nothing inherently incongruous about a character being both genial and a criminal, because there’s a wide range of sympathetic criminal protagonists in fiction. Indeed, fiction romanticizes thieves and con artists so much that I’m really surprised you’d even think it’s incongruous to cast a genial actor as a movie-style criminal.
I don’t think it’s incongruous for a criminal to be likable in a movie; I think Paul Rudd’s specific portrayal of Scott Lang in this particular movie is incongruous and doesn’t quite add up. Scott Lang as mostly ordinary guy who is struggling to be part of his family and to keep up with the geniuses and superheroes around him sort of works; Scott Lang as reforming criminal always sits more uneasily. He doesn’t have either the edge or the suaveness to pull it off, and it’s not really something the movies ever really focus on; like, he doesn’t really seem motivated to BE a Robin Hood figure. It’s just a biographical detail that doesn’t add much to the characterization.
(I think Paul Rudd could convincingly play a slightly edgier version of Ant-Man, but he doesn’t.)
@74,75: It seemed mean to me, too. Scott has no money because no one will employ him; it’s not as though he’s choosing to withhold child support. And his ex-wife is relatively well-off (she’s married to a cop, and cops make good money), so it’s not like she’s in immediate need of the money.
Alimony payments from a poor person to a well-off one bug me: they’re not about supporting the kid, they’re about who had the better divorce lawyer.
@112 said: Alimony payments from a poor person to a well-off one bug me: they’re not about supporting the kid, they’re about who had the better divorce lawyer.
There’s a gulf of difference between child support and alimony. Alimony is a payment to uphold the standard of living for the spouse (it’s geneally called “spousal support in the US). Child support is literally the non-custodial parent’s share of the cost of care and upkeep for the CHILD. Cassie’s stepdad seems like a nice guy – but Cassie is not HIS obligation, legally speaking.
Plus, we don’t know how long Cassie’s stepdad was in the picture. There could’ve been a long period of struggle for Cassie and her mom – during which Cassie’s mom is shouldering ALL the costs and burden.
KatherineMW: City cops make okay money, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “good” money. And it’s not alimony payments, it’s child-support — there’s a very important difference there. Alimony is payment to support the spouse from whom you’ve separated because he or she can’t bring in money on their own and need the support to survive. As you point out, Maggie doesn’t have that issue. (We have no idea what her job is, but her living situation seems pretty stable thanks to being engaged to a cop. Honestly, even if there was alimony, it would no longer be required once she became engaged to Paxton.) Child-support is helping pay for the child(ren) the couple had together. And raising kids is obscenely expensive.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I do think from Maggie’s point of view it makes sense to keep Scott away from Cassie, even if he’s ‘trying’. As others have pointed out, the unreliable presence of a parent figure can be traumatizing. Of course we know how unfair the situation is, especially knowing that he’s having a hard time finding employment and is TRYING to turn a new leaf. But from Maggie’s perspective she may just be trying to do the best she can with what she knows.
As others have pointed out, the fact that he’s not sent back to prison is movie magic. Even the fact that Paxton is willing to get his charges dropped kind of stretches my disbelief.
I like this movie, although I generally tell people who want a crash course in the MCU that it’s skippable. I enjoy the different style, and I’ve really liked Paul Rudd since he was in Clueless. Luis and the rest of the gang is aso a high point, and I had first been introduced to Evangeline Lily through the Hobbit movies. I had at first been a little resistant to the Tauriel character (and I don’t love the whole love triange aspect they put her character in) but she won me over, and I really loved her in this movie as well. As you say, towards the end, I was also thinking “It’s about time!” when she finally got her suit!
On rewatch, two things struck me as inconsistencies between what we’re told and what we’re shown.
We’re told that Scott’s backstory is as an electrical engineer who Robin-Hood-hacked an evil corporation (one time, is the strong implication). But we’re shown an obviously practiced expert at B&E who leaves the hacking to someone else.
We’re told that the villain is going crazy because you can’t shrink without the protective helmet without going crazy. But we’re shown that he doesn’t shrink until well after he’s already crazy – and his lab assistants and Hope have at least as much exposure to the Pym Particles or whateve. (It’s never actually clear, by the way, what Hope is supposed to be doing in the company. What’s her job?)
Despite these issues, and the ones you highlight, I did enjoy this movie. Sometimes you just have to note the inconsistency and then roll with it.
@116/Mike: On the Vistacorp thing, it was the company he worked for, and he’d already tried refunding the customers’ money through normal channels before he realized it was embezzlement rather than an accounting error. So maybe it didn’t require elaborate hacking skill, just the ability to break into the boss’s office and access his computer. Maybe a little hacking to get passwords and stuff, but contrary to media portrayals, a large part of hacking is just exploiting human weakness to trick passwords and personal info out of people or con them into believing you’re authorized to have certain access.
As for Cross, I think it was established that he’d been experimenting with his own knockoff version of Pym Particles for some time. I think it was the exposure to the particles, perhaps when testing the strength-enhancing properties of the Yellowjacket armor, that affected his mind even without successfully shrinking.
@116, 117 Plus, we’re shown in the movie Scott modifying/fixing the circuitry of the suit. Electrical engineers are skilled and very smart, but they’re not computer hackers. Scott is smart and mentally agile. He only seems shlubby next to theoretical physicists and accomplished martial artists.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, so I’ll just say that it’s fun. I love the humor, I love the characters, I just have a good time watching this film. Sure, Hope is more qualified than Scott to be the hero. But she still gets to be awesome here, and even more so in the sequel. It’s like ‘Our Man Bashir’ or ‘Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang’ from DS9. It’s well-made fluff that entertains for a couple of hours.
“Classic Ant-Man wit! This line perfectly captures his charm and humor, making even the most intense moments hilariously relatable. Scott Lang, the ultimate scene-stealer!