With Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 and Ant-Man in 2015, Kevin Feige had proven that he could give pretty much any Marvel character(s) a movie and they’d thrive. Despite being about a character who has at best been at the mid-range of Marvel’s heroes, Ant-Man was a huge hit, just like all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and a sequel was pretty much inevitable, especially since that 2015 movie ended with Hope van Dyne being given the Wasp costume she should’ve gotten at the beginning of the film…
Peyton Reed had historically never been interested in sequels, but he took on this one for two reasons: one was that he had the chance to develop the movie from scratch, instead of coming in after development, as he had with the first film following Edgar Wright’s departure. Plus, he had become invested in the characters, and wanted to tell more stories with them.
Reed also worked on the writing of the script, though he took no credit, and apparently he, star/cowriter Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari spent a lot of time holed up in a room together brainstorming the story.
In particular, Reed wanted to fulfill the promise of the final scene in Ant-Man and have Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp be an equal partner to Rudd’s Ant-Man.
The Wasp was introduced as Ant-Man’s sidekick in Tales to Astonish #44 by Stan Lee, H.E. Huntley, & Jack Kirby in 1963, with Ant-Man having been the star of the anthology title since issue #35. The story that introduced Janet van Dyne also provided some of Henry Pym’s backstory, revealing that he had a wife, Maria Trovaya, who was killed.
Both were founding members of the Avengers, and that became the primary place for their adventures, as they were supplanted from Astonish by the Hulk. While Pym went through multiple identities (and psychological breakdowns), van Dyne evolved from the token female character, the flighty heiress who was quick with a snappy comeback or a flirtatious remark, into a capable Avenger in her own right.
When the couple split up following one of Pym’s breakdowns in Avengers #212-214 in 1981 by Jim Shooter & Bob Hall, the Wasp truly came into her own, no longer the second half of a team. She has led various Avengers teams on numerous occasions, and proven herself to be capable and strong and powerful, and a far more important character in the grand scheme of Marvel Comics than her ex-husband ever was. (While the pair have reconciled in the comics, van Dyne has refused Pym’s re-marriage proposal.)
Ant-Man established Janet van Dyne as being lost in the quantum realm, and her and Pym’s daughter, Hope, taking on the mantle of the Wasp at the very end of the movie. Hope van Dyne is a combination of two characters from the comics: Nadia van Dyne, Pym’s daughter by his first wife, who took over as the Wasp after Janet was believed dead; and Hope Pym, the daughter of Pym and van Dyne in the MC2 alternate future, who became a villain known as the Red Queen.
Back from Captain America: Civil War is Rudd as Scott Lang, whose actions in that movie have dire consequences in this one. Back from Ant-Man are Lilly as Hope van Dyne (with Madeleine McGraw playing Hope as a little girl), Michael Douglas as Pym, Abby Ryder Fortson as Cassie Lang, Judy Greer as Lang’s ex-wife Maggie, Bobby Cannavale as Maggie’s new husband Jim Paxton, and Michael Peña (Luis), Tip “T.I.” Harris (Dave), and David Dastmalchian (Kurt) as Lang’s fellow staffers in X-Con Security. Also back from Ant-Man is the character of Janet van Dyne, now played by Michelle Pfeiffer. New in this film are Walton Goggins as Sonny Burch, Hannah John-Kamen as the Ghost (a gender-swapped version of a villain from the comics), Randall Park as FBI Agent Jimmy Woo, and Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster. One of Pym’s many identities in the comics was Goliath, using the shrinking formula in reverse to become a super-strong giant, and for a time, Foster was the hero Black Goliath; in the MCU, Foster is established as a former S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague of Pym’s who worked on Project: Goliath.
Rudd, Lilly, and Douglas will all next appear in Avengers: Endgame (as will the X-Con Security van in one of the single funniest/greatest moments in that film). The character of Cassie Lang will also appear in Endgame, played by Emma Fuhrmann. A sequel to this film is in development with Reed confirmed to direct and presumably much of the cast of this movie coming back as well.
“You put a dime in him, you got to let the whole song play out”
Ant-Man & The Wasp
Written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Paul Rudd & Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari
Directed by Peyton Reed
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: July 6, 2018
In a scene that is obviously shortly after Ant-Man’s ending (based on Hope van Dyne’s haircut), Hank Pym explains to his daughter about the final mission Janet van Dyne undertook. She shrunk so far when she stopped the missile that she went into the quantum realm. But the fact that Scott Lang went into the quantum realm and managed to return gives Pym hope that Janet is still alive.
Jump ahead two years. Following the events of Civil War, Lang has agreed to a plea deal where he lives under house arrest for two years and probation for several years after that. (He presumably made this deal before Captain America broke folks out of prison.) He hasn’t spoken to Pym or van Dyne in that time—they’re seriously pissed at him. Lang’s way of coping is to take full advantage of his weekends with his daughter Cassie, creating elaborate heists out of stuff around the house. (The item they have to “steal” is the “World’s Greatest Grandma” trophy that Cassie got Lang as a present once, because it was the only trophy the store had. It’s his prize possession, and he says it must never leave the house.) Lang is regularly checked up on by Agent Jimmy Woo of the FBI, who reminds him that Pym and van Dyne are fugitives, and contacting them would invalidate his deal. Which would be a shame, as he’s only got three days left.
Lang, along with Luis, Dave, and Kurt, have formed X-Con Security, which Lang helps run from his house, with the others on site in their office. They’re hoping to score a big contract.
That night, Lang has a very vivid dream about the quantum realm, and then he finds himself in a memory of Janet van Dyne’s, including finding a little girl in a wardrobe. He digs a flip phone out of the wall, apologetically calls Pym, and leaves a long voicemail telling him about the dream. Then he breaks the phone.
The next day, Lang is kidnapped by van Dyne, who takes him to a lab where Pym and van Dyne have been experimenting with a quantum bridge. (They left behind a giant ant wearing his ankle bracelet with instructions to follow Lang’s usual routine.) They activated it the bridge the night before, but it burned out after a few seconds. A minute later, Lang called with his dream story. The details of the dream match a memory of van Dyne’s from her childhood. Janet is alive, and they have to get her. Pym and van Dyne are still pissed at Lang for going to Germany to help Captain America without even checking with them first, and now they’re fugitives because of him. Lang also confirms that he followed government orders to destroy the Ant-Man suit.
They need another component to keep the bridge from burning out. After shrinking the building with the lab in it to suitcase size, they go off to a meet. While Pym and Lang observe in the van, van Dyne meets with Sonny Burch, their tech dealer, who’s a bit shady—but since they’re fugitives, they can’t be fussy about who they deal with. Unfortunately, Burch has learned van Dyne and Pym’s real names and that they’re wanted by the FBI. He plans to turn them over—unless they sell him their lab. They refuse, and so Burch refuses to sell the component. In response, van Dyne puts on her own suit as the Wasp and attacks. She makes very short work of Burch’s thugs, and takes the component and the money from Burch.
However, someone else arrives to take the component—a woman wearing a white suit with a hood, who can phase through matter. She manages to get her hands, not just on the component, but also on the lab.
With nowhere to go, they hole up at X-Con, where Lang learns that he has a very small desk. Reluctantly, Pym agrees to consult with a former colleague, now a college professor, Dr. Bill Foster. There is no love lost between Foster and Pym, who worked together on Project: Goliath during their S.H.I.E.L.D. days. Foster and Lang compare growth stories—Foster only got as big as twenty-one feet, but Lang grew to sixty-five feet in Germany.
They stop comparing sizes long enough for Foster to suggest using a component in the regulators to track the lab. The problem is that Pym has upgraded the regulators in the new suits he created, and they no longer have that component. That’s when Lang admits that he didn’t actually destroy the Ant-Man suit—he shrunk it down and taped it to the bottom of the World’s Greatest Grandma trophy. They leave the university, the FBI on their heels (though Foster lies and says he hasn’t seen Pym in thirty years.)
When they return to the Lang house, the trophy is gone, and Lang realizes that Cassie absconded with it to use for show-and-tell at school. Lang and van Dyne infiltrate the school using the new Ant-Man suit Pym made, which doesn’t have all the kinks worked out yet—at one point, he’s stuck at about three feet tall, though Pym is eventually able to fix it.
(Before they go into the school, van Dyne asks Lang why he didn’t ask her to come with him to Germany to help Cap. Lang doesn’t say, “Because Marvel Studios didn’t want another girl in the movie, apparently,” but he does ask if she would’ve come if he’d asked. She doesn’t answer that question, but does say that if she had gone, he wouldn’t have been caught. Which mostly makes me really wish that van Dyne had been in Civil War. But I digress.)
Pym is able to cannibalize the older regulator to make a tracker for the lab, and they find it in an old house. The Ghost is there also, and she’s able to take all three of them down and tie them to chairs. It turns out she’s working with Foster, who set them up. The Ghost is Ava Starr, the daughter of another of their former S.H.I.E.L.D. colleagues, Eli Starr. Pym had him fired from S.H.I.E.L.D. and also disgraced in the scientific community for his poor work on the previous version of the quantum bridge. Starr tried to build a quantum bridge on his own, and it exploded, killing Starr and his wife, but leaving their daughter Ava alive—but stuck out of phase with reality, her molecules constantly separating and coming together. S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Foster to take care of her, and they made the suit that keeps her alive. S.H.I.E.L.D. (and, probably Hydra) used her as a covert operative, and when S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed, Foster took her in and has been trying to help her.
They think that if she absorbs quantum energy from Janet, she can be cured, or at least helped a lot. They need Lang’s connection to her for that. Pym fakes a heart attack, convincing Foster to grab his pills—but the pill box contains ants that grow to large size when the box is opened and who free all three of them. They’re able to escape, and they grow the lab in the woods.
Luis calls Lang because he needs a change on the presentation to the potential client. Lang tells Luis where he is so he can come over and they can fix the presentation together. Meanwhile, Pym and van Dyne can open the bridge—and as soon as they do, Janet is able to take over Lang’s body and rewrite the code for the bridge so that she can be found. But they only have two hours—after that, the quantum realm will shift and they won’t be able to contact her for another century.
Burch shows up at X-Con Security and uses truth serum on Luis. This is a mistake, as Luis is motormouthed at the best times, and the sodium pentathol only makes it worse. However, he reveals that the lab is in the woods. (And also that X-Con is in danger of going out of business, and if they don’t get this contract, they’re toast.)
However, the Ghost was also eavesdropping, and she now knows where Pym and van Dyne are. Burch has also called a contact in the FBI (who’s on Woo’s team) and passes that information on to Burch, in exchange for that agent making sure Burch gets the lab.
Luis calls Lang to let him know what happened. Lang apologizes, and he also has to get home, as Woo will go straight to his house first.
Pym and van Dyne reluctantly and angrily shut down the bridge and prepare to bugger off. However, as soon as Pym shrinks the lab, they see dozens of federal agents pointing guns at them.
Woo gets to the Lang house to see Lang himself present and accounted for (with some help from Cassie, who covered for him). After Woo and his people leave, Cassie convinces Lang that he needs a partner to help him. Cassie’s thinking of herself, but Lang is thinking of van Dyne. He also, with Cassie’s blessing, breaks Pym and van Dyne out of FBI custody with help from ants and both the Wasp suit and an FBI hat and windbreaker, which were shrunk and brought into interrogation by Lang.
They escape, and go after the lab, which the Ghost took from Burch’s pet agent. A merry chase goes through San Francisco, as Burch goes after the lab, as do Lang, van Dyne, and Pym, with help from Luis. (At one point, van Dyne accidentally shrinks the car of a civilian, who looks just like Stan Lee.)
Pym goes into the quantum realm after Janet, having convinced Foster that he’ll help the Ghost when he’s done. Burch goes after them again, and winds up with his hands on the shrunken-down lab. Lang has to go giant to get it from him, once he boards a ferry. But after he gets it back, the Ghost shows up and grows it to normal size right there on the street.
In the quantum realm, Pym is able to retrieve Janet. The couple is reunited and they go back to reality. Janet is able to ease the Ghost’s pain, and promises to work to fix her condition. Kurt and Dave tase Burch and his goons before they can try anything else, while Lang leaves the Ant-Man suit, giant-sized but empty, on a street.
Lang is freed from his house arrest, since the FBI has no proof that he ever left. Pym and Janet are able to vacation together, Lang is able to walk around free (he has dinner with his Maggie, Jim, and Cassie), and he also takes van Dyne and Cassie to a homemade drive-in theatre, using a shrunken car and a laptop.
Pym, van Dyne, and Janet, in order to fulfill their promise to the Ghost, send Lang into the quantum realm via a smaller version of the bridge that they’ve placed in the X-Con Security van (complete with its horn that plays “La Cucaracha”). Lang goes in, retrieves the quantum particles he needs to help the Ghost—but when he calls for extraction, there’s no answer on the other end, because the other three are all victims of Thanos snapping his fingers and wiping out half the population of the universe. Which we’ll get into in more depth next week…
“You can do it—you can do anything! You’re the world’s greatest grandma!”
I enjoy this movie so much more than its predecessor, and not just because it finally puts the Wasp front and center where she belonged all along. (In case I didn’t make that particular complaint clear, ahem ahem.)
For starters, it builds beautifully on the first movie, keeping the light, breezy tone that Peyton Reed and the writers all brought to the proceedings. The two Pym Particle movies are not trying to save the world from armageddon or huge-ass threats, they’re smaller scale, and tremendous fun for all that.
On the Blu-Rays of the MCU movies, there’s an option for an introduction by the director, and while they don’t add all that much to the proceedings, truly, I do like what Reed says in his: that these movies are about family. The heart of these two movies are relationships between parents and children.
And also about sundered relationships. In this movie, the two main antagonists are antagonists precisely because Pym is an asshole. In fact, everything that happens in this movie is because Pym is an arrogant snot. It’s interesting, he’s a completely different type of arrogant snot than Tony Stark, who’s way more narcissistic and self-centered. Pym simply believes he’s the smartest person in the room, and he’s not willing to brook anyone who will interfere with his work. This led to him dismissing and ruining Starr’s reputation and to sundering his friendship with Foster.
For that matter, you could argue that it led to his own fugitive status. The only reason why Lang was under house arrest was because Pym thought it made more sense to recruit a thief ex-con to wear the Ant-Man suit to stop Cross than it was to let his daughter do it, even though—as we see writ large in this movie where van Dyne kicks all the ass—she was much more qualified for it. And then Lang went and hied off to Germany (thanks to a relationship of sorts formed with Sam Wilson when he went to steal something from Avengers Compound on Pym’s orders) and got himself in trouble.
Parents’ love for their children—and vice versa—informs much of the film, from the deep father-daughter bond between Cassie and Lang (the World’s Greatest Grandma trophy is the best thing ever) to Janet’s equally deep bond with Hope seen in the flashbacks to Foster’s taking care of the Ghost to the Ghost herself, condemned to a lifetime of suffering because she ran back into the lab to make sure her Daddy was okay.
It’s also slots nicely into the overall storyline of the MCU without being obnoxious about it, from things like the fallout from the Sokovia Accords affecting the lives of Lang, Pym, and van Dyne to Pym and Foster’s time in S.H.I.E.L.D. being part of the tapestry of the storyline, including the fallout from the organization’s destruction in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Plus, of course, the mid-credits scene.
While I’m rewatching this before the Infinity War/Endgame two-parter, it’s important to note that this (and Captain Marvel, which I did several weeks ago) came out between the two Avengers movies in question. This worked out really nicely to keep fans of the movies sated with something between the two big epics. Where Marvel provided flashback backstory, Ant-Man & The Wasp was more of a palate cleanser: something simple and fun and delightful while we wait to find out what happened after half the universe got dusted.
Plus, naturally, we get that mid-credits scene where Lang is trapped in the quantum realm because Pym and the van Dynes were all dusted. Best of all, the events of this movie will actually be very important to the plot of Endgame.
None of which has a huge impact on this movie, which is, again, tremendous fun. Paul Rudd’s quotidian portrayal of Lang as just a guy trying to survive the weird life he’s been plunged into is a lot of the source of the movie’s charm. He’s kind of a low-key version of Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool for the MCU: making silly comments and truthful ones, as well. I particularly love him deriding the choice of disguise when they first visit Foster of baseball caps and sunglasses. “We look like ourselves at a baseball game!” Lang opines, a nice dig at all the other MCU films that have assumed that ballcaps and shades are sufficient camouflage. I adore his pointing out that Pym seems to just put “quantum” in front of everything to make it sound cooler…
I must also sing the praises of Hannah John-Kamen, who gives us what most of the best villains in the MCU have given us: a villain we understand, and maybe sympathize with a little bit. Ava Starr has led a completely miserable life, and while it isn’t entirely Pym’s fault—her father’s attempt to re-create a failed S.H.I.E.L.D. experiment in a homemade lab wasn’t the brightest idea in the world—it’s understandable why she blames Pym for some of it, and John-Kamen beautifully plays the anguish and agony that the Ghost has to live with. You don’t want her to win, obviously, but you understand why she’s fighting our heroes.
Evangeline Lilly is magnificent, giving us a Hope van Dyne who is superbly confident and superlatively competent. She’s very good at what she does, and I adore how she uses everyday objects for her own benefit, shrinking or growing them as needed, whether it’s using a giant salt shaker as a barricade or—the best damn moment in the movie, despite being given away by the trailers—using a giant Hello Kitty! Pez dispenser as a missile. I particularly like how there’s no doubt at any point that Burch is in way over his head dealing with her, and Burch himself doesn’t realize it until it’s too late.
Burch himself is a bit disappointing, but he has his moments. Walton Goggins is one of the finest actors of our time (his work on The Shield and Justified is some of the best stuff you’ll see on TV), and this role is not entirely worthy of his great talents. Having said that, it’s fun to have a little The Shield reunion with him and Michael Peña’s Luis—the pair played partners for one season of that great cop show.
Speaking of whom, Luis remains one of the best characters in the MCU with his rapid-fire commentary and overly detailed stories (his summary of the Lang-van Dyne relationship is classic). I still think it was a missed opportunity to not have Luis sum up Infinity War at the beginning of Endgame, but alas. (They made up for it by having the X-Con Security van play a hilarious but important role in the latter movie, at least.)
The supporting cast is strong, as well. Abby Ryder Fortson is adorable and a great helpmeet as Cassie. Even more so than Goggins, Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale are pretty much wasted in this movie, though I do like that they’ve all reconciled and become a strong family in the wake of the events of Ant-Man. Laurence Fishburne—last seen in this rewatch playing Perry White—is a delight as Foster, while Michelle Pfeiffer—last seen in this rewatch playing Catwoman—is luminous in her too-little-screentime role as Janet. (Rudd playing her when Janet possesses Lang is also hilarious.) Although, as I asked in my Aquaman rewatch, is having main characters’ mothers played by female leads in 1990s Batman movies be trapped in a nether realm of some sort for three decades going to be a trope now?
At the time of its release, this was an enjoyable little interlude between two big, heavy Avengers movies. Rewatching it now, it fits comfortably with Black Panther and Spider-Man: Homecoming in showing the fallout from Civil War. One of the useful things about doing a series of connected films like the MCU is that actions can have consequences. This movie works just fine on its own, absolutely, but it also comes about due to the events of several previous movies (The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War, and, of course, Ant-Man) and also provides an important plot detail for an upcoming one.
Next week, ten years’ worth of movies come to a head as we cover Avengers: Infinity War.
Note: Your humble rewatcher is doing a crowdfund for a couple new short stories in his original fantasy universes: “The Gorvangin Rampages: A Dragon Precinct Story” and “Ragnarok and a Hard Place: A Tale of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet.” Check it out!
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at PhilCon 2019 this weekend in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He’ll be doing a bunch of panels (including a speculative one on Marvel’s Phase 4), a reading for the upcoming Across the Universe, an autographing, and he’ll also be MCing the masquerade Saturday night. His schedule can be found here.
This is what a comic book movie should be: really fun. And I could watch Evangeline Lilly all day. Just saying.
My biggest regret is that, thanks to the events of Infinity War/Endgame, we presumably won’t see Abby Ryder Fortson again, because the way she & Rudd played their scenes together was one of the best things about the film.
Note that Eli Starr is the real name of Ant-Man’s (Pym version) traditional pre-Ultron arch-enemy in the comics, Egghead. I don’t believe he was ever shown to have a daughter, but he did have a niece, Trish Starr, who was romantically connected to Kyle (Nighthawk) Richmond, and who helped Hank Pym on several occasions. He also never had anything to do with the comics’ Ghost.
One of my favorite things about this movie is how the heroes and villains are working at cross purposes instead of outright opposing each other. Ant-Man and the Wasp aren’t out to stop Ghost, and Ghost isn’t trying to destroy the world. If they didn’t both need the same MacGuffin for different objectives, they’d probably be happy to leave each other alone.
When I saw this in the theater, I mentioned to my wife during the credits that it was a perfect palate cleanse after Infinity War’s intensity and trauma. So when the mid credit scene cut to the Van Dynes getting dusted, I came really close to shouting a bad word in front of a bunch of kids in the theater. Good times.
I didn’t do a full blog review, but reposting what I wrote:
It was a good movie, a nice change of pace after Infinity War. I liked the smaller, more personal stakes. Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost struck me as the kind of villain that might show up in an episode of Agents of SHIELD, and I mean that in a good way, in that it’s a more intimate, character-driven kind of conflict. (Not to mention a backstory that ties directly into SHIELD’s past, probably the Hydra side of it.) This was a movie about family for most of the major characters, and that made it meaningful and effective. (And Michelle Pfeiffer still looks pretty amazing.) Also, an excellent plot-relevant use of Luis’s chaotic storytelling style.
I kind of wish I’d gone on a different day, though, because I was stuck sitting near a woman who was very impatient with the characters. Whenever they were in a hurry but paused for a moment to exchange some meaningful dialogue, or even just to wait for their equipment to warm up before they could get underway, she’d loudly complain to her seatmate with “They’re still there?” or “Just go already!” or the like. She didn’t comment on much else (though she was vocally confused at first about the mid-credits scene until it finally sank in), but she really had an issue with people dawdling. Granted, she kind of had a point, since the characters’ delays usually meant that they ended up getting caught or surrounded, but still, it got kind of distracting.
It’s still a surprise for me to discover that a character in a comics-based movie was created by someone I know — in this case, Sonny Burch was created by fellow Star Trek novelist John Jackson Miller, whom I’ve met at Shore Leave a couple of times now. I saw John’s name in the credits and had to look up who he created, since I’d never heard of Burch before.
It was probably on this website where I read it but I loved the suggestion someone made that Burch should have been Justin Hammer. They’re basically the same slimy, in over their heads, dude. They could have worked it in…
I kinda also wanted Ghost worked into Agents of Shield.
Minor Easter egg: the name of Ghost’s father, Elihas Starr, is the name of the Ant-Man villain Egghead in the comics.
And beaten to the punch by tyg while reading.
This never occurred to me after seeing the movie, but do we know if Ghost was dusted or not? Because if she wasn’t and Lang was missing with her quantum cure for five years, she’s definitely phased out of existence and not in the reversible way
A delightful movie, proving once again that all movies should be narrated by Michael Pena as Luis. Every moment he was on screen was just so much fun.
Physics for the Pym particles & technology continue to be a hot mess. What happened to all the stuff inside the building that wasn’t tightly secured when it was shrunk, & suffered a lot of bumps? They again forgot that supposedly stuff retains the same mass when it changes size, so that building should have been impossible to move. A human sized ant would suffocate because there’s not enough O2 in the atmosphere to support that size, not to mention it wouldn’t be able to move as the chitin would be too heavy. But every sequence with stuff changing size is amazingly well done. The salt shaker & PEZ dispenser were excellent, and I loved that Scott says “doink!” when he flicks the gun out of the guy’s hand. Using the semi truck as a scooter, also brilliant. So the lack of consistency about the physics is a minor quibble.
Also, physics aside, odds are that SOMEONE would notice a building suddenly appearing & disappearing, at least when they were in the city.
hoopmanjh: Not necessarily. Buildings go up and down all the time in big cities. I doubt people notice beyond, “oh, wow, they tore that one down fast, wonder what’s gonna go up there next, how it’s not another damn Starbucks…..”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, as long as they weren’t actually looking at it when Hank hits the button …
Otherwise, yes, I agree — I’ve been surprised myself to be on one of my usual walking routes and all of a sudden there’s a vacant lot or a new building going up.
I disagree that Luis should have recaped the history of the MCU before Endgame. He should do it afterwards after someone asks him how his van got destroyed. After reciting the history of the entire MCU up to that point, he would end his story with the vans destruction and ignore the universe saving events that happened immediately afterwards.
Size-changing has always been one of the more “don’t worry about it” aspects of comic-book science. Most of the time, objects gain or lose mass when they change size, except when the plot says otherwise. Since that’s completely impossible, and the effects of size-and-mass-changing make for fun storytelling, I choose to stomp hard on my disbelief in this area.
(The other comic-book-science area that should bother me is super-speed, particularly as it relates to friction. Again, I actively choose not to worry about this.)
The pickiest of nit-picking: Ant (or Giant)-Man and the Wasp shared Tales to Astonish with the Hulk. It was a revived Sub-Mariner that supplanted them.
I enjoyed this film, but I found the humor less effective, more childish (in a bad way) than in the first one. Woo and his FBI team are made to be complete idiots. It is fair that Hope gets to be an action heroine this time, and she’s hella good.
John-Kamen is pretty good as Ghost, her suit and the FX for her powers are cool; plus I wish we’ll see Fishburne Goliathing at some point.
@14 Steven – I love that idea!
@14/Steven, that’s brilliant.
It was a fun movie, but the thing that stuck with me more than anything that actually happened in the film is that it is basically the kind of light comedy that used to be a staple of movie theaters. Superheroes can and will fill in the roles of every cinematic genre, from teenage melodrama to horror to western. It’s probably only a matter of time before we see a superhero sports movie, right? Personally I’m excited about the potential of German expressionism and superheroes.
I really love both Ant-man movies; to me they are close to the top tier of Marvel and I enjoyed this much more than Black Panther or Captain Marvel, even though they got more hype.
One thing I disagree with is giving the Wasp equal billing to Ant-man. Honestly, for the majority of comic history, she has been a vastly more important character than Ant-man — not necessarily more important than Hank Pym, but definitely more than Ant-man. This should have been a Wasp movie also featuring Ant-man.
@15/Brian, the problem arises because in the first movie they specifically stated the mass stays the same (which is why he can punch and throw people), and then proceeded to ignore that at almost every opportunity (he can ride an ant, doesn’t sink into the ground, etc.).
I like ths movie (and love Lilly as Wasp) but my enjoyment of it is hampered by the fact that it manages to trigger my anxiety in several ways due to my own personal quirks regarding:
1)Cars/driving/accidents/high speed chases
2)Kitchen items (knives/fire)
3)I haaaaate plots where it’s a bunch of ‘worst case scenarios’ that threaten to cause somebody to trip at the finish line which is basically what the whole ‘HOW GREAT YOU ONLY HAVE THREE DAYS OF HOUSE ARREST’ thing at the beginning of the movie was for me. I don’t know how to explain it, but the whole premise of the plot is one that made me squirm in my seat.
I remember coming out of the cinema and thinking that Hannah John-Kamen was completely wasted, and having just rewatched this I don’t feel it was quite what I thought, I still feel that she deserved more face-time. I generally like it, but probably not as much as Ant-Man: it sort of suffers from the Portal 2 issue, it’s technically better, but you can’t beat the “wow” of the first time.
How much time has passed between the end of the movie and the mid-credits scene? I only ask because it seems Hawkeye is still under house-arrest when his family gets dusted, but Ant-Man is the ex-con and gets out long enough before the Snap that Hank and Janet were able to get back from their vacation and create a mini-Quantum Gate (or maybe they just shrunk the one they had?).
Also @9: That’s a good point! I hadn’t thought of that.
(20) On the surface it looks like a cool idea, but the already enormous superhero movie cultural blob absorbing every genre does smack of media consolidation, in my opinion, and that is worrisome in a landscape that is becoming increasingly vertically integrated. I’d hate to see these movies take the Amazon route. Everything under one roof, so who needs anyone else.
@25 LazerWulf You make a good point about the dusting timeline since Clint is still under house arrest. However I don’t know that we have to assume that Hawkeye and Ant-man were both offered/accepted the same deal (or even at the same time). For all we know, Ant-man took a deal immediately and Cap didn’t even have to bust him out, whereas maybe Hawkeye got busted out but realized that leaving would put his family in danger so he took a deal shortly after.
@25/LazerWulf: “How much time has passed between the end of the movie and the mid-credits scene?”
It’s not specified, but I assume it’s probably at least several weeks, maybe months. As you say, we have to account for the vacation and the time needed to set up the new experiment. As for Hawkeye having a longer sentence, he’s a bigger fish, a former SHIELD agent gone rogue, so they probably threw a larger book at him than at Scott.
I don’t know about you but this was the the textbook definition of forgettable MCU fare for me.
Both of this films are fun if forgettable diversions but the question that plagues me for both is WHAT THE EFF DID JANET VAN DYNE DO TO THAT MISSILE?!?
JVD is lost in the quantum realm because she needed to shrink smaller than the spaces between molecules in order to penetrate the missile housing. Sure, why not. But… then what? The whole point is she gets small enough to get INSIDE THE MISSILE. To like, yank out wires and crap. Which means she’d have to get big again! IT MAKES NO SENSE.
I am aware that these are popcorn films, enhanced in the micro by their dialog and spectacle, and enhanced in the macro by their scope. At some point you accept the inconsistencies (like how the mass of a Pym Particled dingus is always “whatever is convenient”) and have fun, but for some reason this has bothered me from the moment it was introduced in the first flick.
I suspect the problem for me is because it’s so plot central. I’ll accept that there are complex behaviors that manipulate the mass of a shrunk/embiggened object, and that Our Heroes just don’t explain it on screen. But the tragedy here – the weight of the thing – depends on JVD’s sacrifice being a logical extension of the rules of the world as laid out, and these just don’t for me.
@30/Erik: The Wasp has some kind of “stinger” energy weapons, doesn’t she? At least she does in the comics. So even if she was shrinking uncontrollably, maybe she was still able to fire powerful enough energy bursts to damage the missile’s control systems in the moments before she shrank too far.
I admit, I do miss Lilly’s haircut from the first movie. Mmmmm…
@21. vinsentient: “One thing I disagree with is giving the Wasp equal billing to Ant-man.”
Thought for a second you were going in a different direction with that. Nicely played.
Parenthetical: the closer we get to the present in this rewatch, the less reaction I have (unless there’s a side issue, like the Scorcese problem). If feels like yesterday when we were asking where the extra mass goes or comes from, depending on shrinking or growing. Also, Hank pulling a building as if it weighed the same as a suitcase is one thing. But wouldn’t all its contents be a jumbled broken mess after he tips it? Any kid tipping a playhouse could tell you what happens. Unless, of course, he also activates a stasis field…
I liked the film, but too many goofy things like that regularly took me out of it.
@ChristopherLBennett: “I saw John’s name in the credits and had to look up who he created, since I’d never heard of Burch before.”
Burch was created for my first Iron Man arc back in 2003 — in our take, he was a Pentagon official who used nefarious-but-legal means to steal Tony’s technology. (That prompted Stark to volunteer to put himself forward as Secretary of Defense, which kicked off that entire year of stories.) The Ant-Man version kept the nice suit and the drawl, while de-ageing him and putting him outside the law.
The MCU filmmakers drew from that “Best Defense” arc in several ways — the reporter Christine Everhart in IM1 and IM2 also came from it, and Jon Favreau was such a fan of Adi Granov’s covers from that arc he hired him to design armor for the movies.
They brought me and my wife in for the AM&W premiere, as well as artist Jorge Lucas from Argentina — a fun coda to a fifteen-year-old project.
Wasn’t Wasp’s absence from Civil War at least partly because Evangeline Lilly was pregnant at the time?
@34/JJM: Thanks for the insights, John.
I suppose the most prominent comics-to-screen character created by someone I personally know (not counting creators I just briefly met at a convention once) is probably Mike W. Barr’s Katana, who’s appeared in Arrow, Suicide Squad, Beware the Batman, and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Funny, I would’ve thought it would be a Peter David character, since he’s so prolific, but it doesn’t seem that a lot of his characters have been adapted to the screen, at least in live action.
“Hope van Dyne is a combination of two characters from the comics: Nadia van Dyne, Pym’s daughter by his first wife, who took over as the Wasp after Janet was believed dead; and Hope Pym, the daughter of Pym and van Dyne in the MC2 alternate future, who became a villain known as the Red Queen.”
I’m not sure how accurate it is to say that Hope van Dyne is a combination of both Nadia and MC2 Hope as Nadia was only introduced in the comics a year after the original Ant-Man film introduced the MCU Hope. If anything, Nadia was an attempt to fill a Hope-shaped gap in the comics albeit with a notably different character.
I generally enjoyed this movie, but I was hoping for Michelle Pfeiffer to have one Crowning Moment of Awesome when she dons the Wasp suit again and does something.
I really loved the idea of a mother-daughter superhero dynasty – there are so few in Comics-dom. Like the Black Canary family.
If feels like yesterday when we were asking where the extra mass goes or comes from, depending on shrinking or growing. Also, Hank pulling a building as if it weighed the same as a suitcase is one thing. Minor Easter egg: the name of Ghost’s father, Elihas Starr, is the name of the Ant-Man villain Egghead in the comics.
I have a problem with the physics of Ant-man. Every time Ant-man tenths all of his physical dimensions, he increases his average density by a thousand fold. If Ant-man is 1.83 meters tall and has a mass of 100 kgs, he would have a mean density of 950 kgs/m3 (roughly). If Ant-man tenths his size in all dimensions (to an height of 18.3 cm), his density would increase to 950,000 kgs/m3. If Ant-man tenths his dimensions again (to an height of 1.83 cm), his density would increase to 950,000,000 kgs/m3. Now, if he does it two more times (to an height of .0183 cm), Ant-man’s density would be 950,000,000,000,000 kgs/m3 or 950,000,000 kgs/cm3–that’s mighty dense! If Ant-man shrinks himself, at the above rate, a few more times he’ll reach the density of a neutron star! The writers of these movies need to come with an explanation for why Ant-Man’s density does not increase as he shrinks. Or, have I missed an explanation?
#40 – the explanation is that there is no explanation. Its a comic book and physics is irrelevant.
@40/Paladin: As Ryan North covered in an issue of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, the square-cube law and other such physics usually applies in the Marvel Universe, but Pym Particles (and certain types of cosmic rays) somehow cancel out the effect.
@41 & 42, If I’m correctly recalling my old Official Handbooks to the Marvel Universe (which I might not be), I think that Pym Particles either shunt your mass to another dimension (if you’re shrinking) or draw extra mass from that same dimension (if you’re growing). Of course, that still doesn’t really make any sense, since we’re not made up of just some amorphous thing called “mass,” but there you go. Maybe somehow it’s shaving some mass off of the user’s subatomic particles something-something-quantum-something… ;)
–Andy
Oh, and nice review, Keith. My only problems with the movie were, 1) It ought to have been called The Wasp and Ant-Man, and 2) I think the yellow on Wasp’s costume is too muted, so it often just looks like she has a plain black costume. I’d have liked for it to more assertively evoke the look of a wasp.
Wonder if she’ll have another costume in the sequel, since her comic namesake is known for frequent costume changes!
–Andy
Perhaps, in future Ant-man movies, the writers could have Hank Pym talk about how the Pym particle extracts Higgs bosons (the mass particle) from matter. Thus, proportionally lowering Ant-man’s mass as he shrinks or adding mass as he enlarges.
@21:” One thing I disagree with is giving the Wasp equal billing to Ant-man.”
I think this is part of the joke. Hope is clearly better at the pure heroics. Remember, this is a comedy, and that’s the punchline. OTOH, Scott is a thief, and a very good one, and these are heist movies. Hope’s solution is the typical Marvel solution – punch things. Scott isn’t quite as good at the punching, so he needs to be sneaky.
I mean Scott isn’t that good a thief–he’s gotten caught every time he stole something. The joke of Ant-Man is that he’s just an ordinary screw-up who is always out of his depth. Yes, he’s ‘smart’ in the totally conventional way that a decent architect or accountant might be smart, but that’s no help when the world you find yourself in is nuts.
Wasp is a noticeable improvement over the first film. It feels more loose, less beholden to conventional structure. The jokes are broader. The characters sparkle more. I guess that’s a result of Peyton Reed being able to start from scratch with his own vision, rather than being forced to deal with Wright’s previous material.
I’ve always had issues with heist films, given how plot-heavy those tend to be, leaving little room for characters to breathe and come alive. This one mostly sidesteps those issues. It’s a fun little adventure with surprisingly low stakes involved (even the third act doesn’t have much of a climax, unless you consider Scott Lang falling asleep to be much of one).
Every actor is more comfortable in their respective role. Even Fortson, who was the weak spot in the first film, has improved leaps and bounds, making her more of a character and less of a cypher.
This film was another solid hit in the villain department. Ava Starr is a tragic figure, driven solely by pain, Hannah John-Kamen brings visible anguish and humanity to the role.
When I first saw LOST 15 years ago, I always figured Evangeline Lilly was destined for bigger things. She doesn’t disappoint, and brings all that experience, crafting yet another admirable female superhero to the MCU. I hope we get more of Hope Van Dyne in the upcoming future.
It’s not an uber dramatic, high-stakes film, but it shows the work of the MCU filmmakers at their most assured and confident.
This was the first Marvel film I watched, and while I really enjoyed it, the credits scene left a real sour taste in my mouth. We go through the movie, and its real fun … and then they all die in some kind of unexplained random afterthought.
I had no idea what happened, or what it was all about. It might have been great for people invested in the Marvel goliath, but for someone who wanted a fun comic book film it was a wrong note in the wrong place. I wished I didn’t stay for the credits (which I always do because I like to see the people who made a film).
Probably the sequel will have them up and alive again with no explanation for people who haven’t watched Marvel Infinity Avengers War or something.
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@Danger: “I had no idea what happened, or what it was all about.”
You skipped Infinity War and went to see the minor movie? If you’ve seen any other Marvel movies, by now you know that end credit stingers link these movies together. There’s something in each one that ties to the others. That’s a feature, not a bug.
@51/Sunspear: Nothing wrong with just seeing the individual movies you want. That’s the way something like this should be done — the parts should stand on their own, and the interconnections should be an added bonus. That’s why they put the connecting scenes during/after the credits — because they’re not part of the story per se and are thus optional. The people who are only interested in the current movie can leave when the credits roll; it’s just that other subset of viewers like us, who are invested in the whole, who need to stick around and see the connective scenes.
@CLB: That’s going to be a lot harder to do once this happens:
“If you want to understand everything in future Marvel movies, [Feige] says, you’ll probably need a Disney+ subscription, because events from the new shows will factor into forthcoming films such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The Scarlet Witch will be a key character in that movie, and Feige points out that the Loki series will tie in, too. “I’m not sure we’ve actually acknowledged that before,” he says. “But it does.” -Kevin Feige
MCU’s future
It’s the nature of the beast, fully based on the inter-connectivity of decades of comics. If these small addendums in credit scenes are throwing people off… they ain’t seen nuthin’ yet (Thing voice).
@53/Sunspear: If that’s so, it’s the wrong way to go about it. No multi-series continuity should require every viewer to follow every piece of it. Each part should be able to stand on its own as an independent whole while also serving as part of the larger whole. It’s a bad idea to alienate one audience to target another. You want to strike a balance between the needs of the people who just like one or two series and those who follow the entire whole.
This has always been the guideline for those of us who write Star Trek tie-in fiction. The Pocket novelverse is a sprawling continuity in its own right by now, but whenever we’re asked the question “Do I have to read X to understand Y?” we try to make sure the answer is no — that every individual book or series is fully understandable, with any necessary information for that story provided within the story itself, and that the connections between different series are just a bonus. We don’t want to deliberately make things confusing for any of our readers.
@CLB: I agree with you in principle, but it doesn’t look like we have a choice in the matter. It may be problematic if audiences need to have seen WandaVision to fully appreciate the next Doctor Strange movie.
i plan to watch whatever shows Marvel produces (esp. Loki, She-Hulk, and Moon Knight), so won’t be a problem. But wonder what this will do to the audience who doesn’t even like credit scene teasers.
@55/Sunspear: I dunno — while the quoted article claims that Feige says you need Disney+ to “understand” the movies, it’s not a verbatim quote. Anything that isn’t a direct quote from the interviewee should always be treated as suspect, because reporters often interpolate their own assumptions or put their own words in their subjects’ mouths. So maybe that isn’t what Feige actually said.
On the other hand, Infinity War and Endgame are leading examples of movies that are impossible to understand if you haven’t seen the previous movies.
I trust Scott Derrickson and Kevin Feige to put together a movie that is self-contained enough that one doesn’t absolutely have to have seen the two Disney plus shows. However, time will tell.
(51) “I am big. It’s the pictures that got minor.”
@CLB: it’s true that the journalistic style of the Bloomberg reporter sometimes precludes him from using direct quotes. He’s kind of inconsistent about it and it’s annoying. Every time you include “(someone) says”, you should have an actual attribution. But unless Feige disputes the context, I’d accept that the future of these Disney+ shows will be entwined with the films. If it’s true that they will be spending roughly $25 million per episode on some Marvel shows (“more than HBO is believed to have spent during the final season of Game of Thrones”), these will be mini movies.
@59/Sunspear: “But unless Feige disputes the context, I’d accept that the future of these Disney+ shows will be entwined with the films.”
Sure, that’s likely, but my point is that it’s a common error to mistake “Story A and Story B are connected” with “It will be impossible to understand Story B unless you’re intimately familiar with Story A.” You can connect two stories yet still make them independently comprehensible, because exposition is a basic skill that any competent writer should learn how to use. Laypeople don’t have to learn those skills, so they don’t think about them, so they tend to jump to the conclusion that the only way to understand a story is to have seen it. They don’t think about the ways that writers use exposition to fill an audience in on events it hasn’t seen.
For instance, say you haven’t seen Thor but you’re watching The Avengers (2012). By the time Thor shows up in that movie, a lot of the groundwork about Asgard and Thor has already been laid through earlier dialogue — and the first conversation between Thor and Loki is a pretty thorough review of the events and character conflicts of the previous film, so that novice viewers can quickly get caught up on what they need to know about who these guys are and what their relationship and baggage are. Similarly, Steve Rogers’s first scene in the film opens with brief flashback clips from Captain America, and literally his first (non-flashback) line in the movie is “I slept for seventy years.” The movie tells you what you need to know about the character even if you didn’t see the previous movie. It doesn’t just assume you have the knowledge already; it efficiently brings you up to speed in a way that works within the story. That’s how you do it.
So that’s why I don’t trust that the reporter interpreted Feige’s statement accurately. No doubt Feige did say that the movies would build on elements from the Disney+ shows, that they’d be interconnected. But that does not necessarily mean that you can’t understand them without seeing the Disney+ shows. Well-done exposition can always fill an audience in on stuff it may have missed.
@CLB: agreed about the exposition, if done well. Movie audiences may understand the self-contained story from a few well-placed lines of dialogue, but it will be richer if they also watch the shows.
This part “So that’s why I don’t trust that the reporter interpreted Feige’s statement accurately”: I just took Feige’s pitch as part of what he’s now required to do in his newly minted position, that is, sell Disney+. Almost all other Marvel TV is being shut down or ending, while all new shows will be under his purview. Integrating these will be a good thing (in my view anyway). It’s what viewers expected and never materialized with Agents of SHIELD, which was hampered by having to wait for developments in the movie universe, and finally simply kept at arm’s length.
@61/Sunspear: ” I just took Feige’s pitch as part of what he’s now required to do in his newly minted position, that is, sell Disney+.”
Maybe. But it’s impossible to know that for sure when we don’t have a quote of his exact words, only a reporter’s paraphrase. So I’m not going to assume anything about what he actually said or meant.
And yes, integration is a good thing. That’s not in dispute. I’m just saying that whether two stories are integrated is a separate question entirely from whether you can comprehend one without the other, even though a lot of people confuse the two issues.
@CLB: No maybes about it. Vertical integration of a media behemoth mandates it. It’s the name of the game.
Not sure why there’s such a high threshold of resistance to what Feige likely said. Just a cursory search of half a dozen other sites shows most other reporters are following the original’s take. There’s skepticism and there’s denial…
Thought experiment: say some of the new series will be very dense in story elements. The new Falcon and Winter Soldier series will feature the return of Zemo and possibly sets up the Thunderbolts. There’s little chance any future movie will stop in it’s tracks to sum up an entire series worth of story. It will be a condensed summation, not exposition dumps. Think of it as integrated multi-media serialized storytelling that will be designed to flow seamlessly from streaming episodes to the longer format movies. It’s something they’ve wanted to do for years. (See the reports that it would’ve been Daredevil in the airport battle before the Sony deal.)
It makes sense to do it this way, especially if you have a larger story to tell, whatever it may be… say the Coming of Galactus and/or the Celestials. If a small scene in this movie left someone confused, This may invite the kind of “event” fatigue comics readers complain about.
@63/Sunspear: “Vertical integration of a media behemoth mandates it. It’s the name of the game.”
Not to the point that new viewers can’t even comprehend a story. That alienates them and makes them uninterested in seeing more. What you want is to give them a story that they can follow and enjoy on its own terms, but that also teases other connected stories to whet their appetites. If you want to fish for new viewers, you want to make the bait appealing enough that they’ll bite the hook. Every installment is going to be someone’s first taste, so you have to make it satisfying enough for new viewers that they won’t be driven away. If they literally can’t understand the story, that will make it an unsatisfying experience and they won’t want to see more.
As with all things in life, it’s about finding the right balance between different considerations, rather than reducing it to a binary, all-or-nothing choice.
“Not sure why there’s such a high threshold of resistance to what Feige likely said.”
It’s not about Feige. It’s about how to read the news in general. In any context whatsoever, it is vital to differentiate between a direct quote and a reporter’s paraphrase. And in any context whatsoever, it is vital not to confuse speculation for fact. That’s not about Marvel or Kevin Feige, it’s about being an intelligent, rational adult and protecting yourself from being lied to. This is Defensive Newsreading 101.
“Just a cursory search of half a dozen other sites shows most other reporters are following the original’s take.”
Defensive Newsreading 102: Most news sites just mindlessly copy what the original source said. The fact that the original source is cloned does not make it any more trustworthy. If it contains an error, then all those other sites will just restate the error. That’s why it’s vital to read defensively — to track down the original source and see what it actually said — and what it didn’t say.
The purpose of journalism is not to make us passive and credulous, to turn off our brains and blindly accept what’s spoonfed to us. The purpose of journalism is to inspire us to ask questions and think critically, to seek out knowledge for ourselves rather than blindly believing what we hear.
“There’s little chance any future movie will stop in it’s tracks to sum up an entire series worth of story.”
I never said it would, so that’s a pure straw man. I already gave you a perfect example of exposition done well in a way that fits smoothly into the story — The Avengers (2012).
“Think of it as integrated multi-media serialized storytelling that will be designed to flow seamlessly from streaming episodes to the longer format movies.”
Yes, and that is what I am saying they will do!!! You still don’t seem to understand my argument. For the third time, I am not disputing that there will be integration. Okay? Do you get that now? I am not disputing that. I am merely questioning the reporter’s choice of words that viewers could not understand the movies without seeing the shows first.
You’d think they’d learn from comics where needing to follow a bunch of different series is one of the things that keep people from reading them. It’s bad enough keeping up with movies, add in TV series and the MCU will crater as people are too fatigued and too confused to keep watching.
I assume Disney wants you to spend all your leisure time watching their properties but they’ll lose anyone who can’t stay on top of every new show because once you fall behind, you’ll never catch up.
@CLB: “I am not disputing that.“
You don’t have to yell! hehe.
You are not taking into account the level of integration. It sounds like it will be such that a simple expository recap won’t do the trick. There simply won’t be time to pause to insert such explanations.
Therefore, it makes sense that viewers will no fully understand what they are watching in future movies. Some of the information will simply not be there.
As far as Feige’s statement, I have no problem accepting the content and context of what he said. The reporter says “he said” even though it’s not in quotes. He’d have to be terrible at his job (and teh English language) to not understand Feige’s meaning at the fundamental level you’re suggesting. (You are overemphasizing the paraphrasing. It’s likely just bad punctuation (and bad style if it confuses some readers).) Also, marketing is a fundamental part of Feige’s job and Disney+ is launching today, so him boosting the service is elementary. “You will need to watch these shows!”
You seem to be saying that it ought not happen extensively on a creative level, or that it can be easily solved with some good expository writing. I think we’re past that point already. The next age of Marvel content will be far more interlinked in the manner of crossover events comics has done for decades. So yes, you will have to watch some of the other content for individual movies to make sense. Resistance is futile.
@66/Sunspear: “You are not taking into account the level of integration.”
You’re still not listening. I am not talking about “the level of integration.” That is not the subject. I am saying that you can integrate two stories closely without making them impossible to understand independently. I am not questioning the level of integration; I am rejecting the reporter’s assumption about the way integration works.
“It sounds like it will be such that a simple expository recap won’t do the trick. There simply won’t be time to pause to insert such explanations.”
You’re making invalid assumptions about how exposition works. As I tried to prove with my Avengers examples, it is not simply a matter of stopping to give infodumps. That’s the crudest, dumbest way to give exposition. It’s hardly the only way. A good writer, like Whedon, can incorporate exposition smoothly into the story, so that it isn’t just an infodump but actually contributes to the story currently being told. The best exposition is invisible, which is why you don’t recognize it for what it is.
“Therefore, it makes sense that viewers will no fully understand what they are watching in future movies. Some of the information will simply not be there.”
Wrong. That’s only true if it’s badly written. I’ve been working in just such an interconnected context (Star Trek tie-in literature) for over 15 years now, and I’m telling you, it’s not as unachievable as you think to make the individual pieces comprehensible by themselves. It’s a skill that can be learned, like any other. The fact that you can’t imagine how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means it isn’t your field of expertise. But it is mine.
(65) Indeed, one shouldn’t have to consult the manual to enjoy a movie.
@CLB: ” it isn’t your field of expertise”
Pffft. You don’t know what my field of expertise is.
I was wondering about your pocket universe, though. Does it scale to the levels we’re talking about here? I don’t think so. You work with a corporate entertainment IP, so it seemed like understanding Feige’s position would be relatively simple. If you follow the recent announcements, it’s fairly obvious where they will go with future development. It’s the direct opposite of the environment you cite. Example: the upcoming Picard will have little to do with the novels’ version where he’s remained a captain for fifty years, never making admiral rank.
We’re not talking about “loose, figurative language that cannot reasonably be understood to convey facts.” (secondhand John Oliver quote) The level of fundamental misapprehension you insist on ascribing to the reporter isn’t tenable. He’d have to be an idiot to muck it up so badly.
So, until and unless Feige directly refutes or rebuts what was attributed to him, you simply don’t have a case. We’re reaching exponential levels of Douting Thomases now. It’s really not necessary.
@69/Sunspear: The Star Trek novel continuity at Pocket is huge. It’s been building up for nearly 20 years now and encompassed multiple show-based and book-original series. In terms of the sheer number of installments, it’s surely above 300 novels and shorter works by now, comparable in scale to the MCU (which is currently up to about 23 movies, 353 TV episodes, and several shorts). Here’s an incomplete diagram of the interconnections, current up to a couple of years ago:
The Almighty Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Order Flow Chart Fifth Edition
And the kind of misapprehension I’m talking about is actually very common among laypeople, which is why it immediately stood out to me here. As I already remarked, those of us who work in the Trek novelverse are constantly asked “What do I have to read to understand your book?” They just assume that interconnection makes comprehension difficult. That’s not idiocy, it’s just not having the training to know how experienced writers handle exposition.
@CLB: But how much of it is canon? How much of it will be recanonized after Picard comes out? The analogous relationship of MCU to new Disney shows is that of TNG to the TNG movies and now the streaming series.
The difference from novelverse to filmed media is that the Disney+ shows will be canon right off the bat. Maybe that’s fundamentally what we’re talking about here. Those who don’t care about the linkages between movies have been able to ignore credit cut scenes. That seems not to be the case moving forward. It’s already not the case when factoring in the giant “season enders” Infinity War and Endgame. Endgame in particular is probably incomprehensible to viewers who haven’t seen any prior movies in the sequence.
[goes off and reads Gizmodo article]
[Googles release dates]
Feige and his bosses may have plans right now for maintaining high levels of story integration between platforms, but I wouldn’t bet on those plans coming to fruition. The specific example given above is actually one of the things that makes me doubtful on the point — both WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness are currently set to premiere in spring of 2021, theoretically within weeks of each other. I rather think that what will happen is that Feige and his creative teams will discover is that the development and production cycles for streaming series and feature films are nearly as incompatible as those of feature films and broadcast-TV series. Or, to look at it another way, what stands most strongly in the way of inter-media continuity is that it’s a time-commitment problem on both the creators’ and the consumer’s side of the experience.
On the consumer’s side, we as viewers and readers have a limited amount of time available to take in everything Netflix and CBS All Access and Disney+ want to offer us (and have time to read Trek novels and the latest Seanan McGuire book and the comment sections of Tor.com essays), let alone see MCU movies in the theater.
And at one and the same time, the creative teams of all those Disney+ series and MCU feature films and what-have-you have fairly narrowly defined windows of time in which to produce that material — and not a lot of room within it to add the hours to review notes and memos and scripts from three other streaming shows and three upcoming movies and various theme park rides and Web content and tie-in novels. If they’re serious about even attempting to do that, they’ll need to create and staff a Continuity Office purely for the purpose of keeping track of the whole extended multiversal ball of wax — and then the various individual creative teams will have to find time to interact with that Continuity Office.
Which is likely, in the long run, to work out about as well as keeping track of comic book multiverses has on the print side…which is to say, not very well. One of the reasons the Trek novel franchise has been able to maintain a fairly high level of continuity over time is precisely because for the lion’s share of that time, they’ve not been hampered by having to fit into the borders of a parent TV continuity…and now that there is a television presence again, the novel program has benefited greatly from being directly represented in the TV shows’ writers’ room(s).
On the MCU/Disney+ side of the equation, I think we may see a fairly narrow window of significant crossover action when the initial cluster of MCU streaming shows premieres. But I also think that the amount and density of crossover action will drop off sharply as production on the streaming properties and the movies inevitabiy de-synchronizes. Note that over in the Arrowverse, we’re starting to get media buzz that actual screen time for some of the outlying high-profile guest appearances is going to be minimal — and it remains to be seen how or whether they’ll attempt to continue the crossover events after Arrow itself cycles out of the rotation, considering how difficult it’s been to coordinate them as they’ve grown more complicated.
@John C Bunnell: yeah, all that sounds likely. It will be ambitious at first, then desynchronize. After a few years, there will be a Crisis of Secret Wars reboot.
But, there are economies of scale to factor in. I wouldn’t assume Disney can never screw up. Look what happened today, launch day for Disney+, when they used the tech they bought from Major League Baseball to start the streaming service. They bought it to get something up and running relatively quickly, rather than developing their own. This would’ve worked as a plot on Silicon Valley. By comparison AppleTV launched painlessly, while they’re content offerings were lukewarmly received. One’s a tech company, the other a content delivery producer.
Still, I doubt they would scale up their TV/streaming production in tandem with MCU movies if they didn’t think they could handle it. As I said, I’ll likely consume it all. My hesitation is about how it will be received by those who are already overwhelmed by by the superhero saturation/domination.
@71/Sunspear: “But how much of it is canon?”
None of it, but that’s utterly beside the point. The point is that the novel continuity is all interconnected within itself, that the prose stories reference each other and build on each other, and yet we’re still able to make each one accessible on its own by making sure that any relevant information from other stories is explained. Our guiding principle is that every book may be somebody’s first, so we want them to be accessible instead of confusing.
I mean, good grief, the first Star Trek story ever written, “The Cage,” depends on an event the audience never saw, the battle on Rigel VII that killed Pike’s yeoman and two others and left him so depressed and full of doubt. And yet the audience can still follow the story because it tells us what we need to know. Most stories require explaining past events that we never saw, and whether those events occurred in an earlier story or not is irrelevant to the craft of exposition.
And while we’re on the subject, the MCU isn’t canonical either. The comics are the canon; the MCU is an adaptation. So it’s silly to worry about canon in this conversation.
Comics are the Old Testament, movies the New Testament. Further, you could say the movies are gospels and the upcoming shows will be epistles.
I think the main question is if Disney will make movies where people who haven’t seen the TV shows walk out of the move at best confused and at worst confused and dissatisfied? While I’m sure they’re going try and reward people who keep up to date on all the content, I doubt they’ll do so at the expense of accessibility.
@75/Sunspear: You’re just making my point. “Canon” doesn’t matter. It’s not a standard of worth; it’s nonsensical to argue about which made-up stories are “real” when none of them are. And it makes no difference to how stories are told. All it really defines is who the author or originator of a series of works is — the canon is the stuff from the creators of the series, as distinct from the work of other people who adapt it. That’s the only thing it means, and it’s utterly irrelevant in most contexts. Stories are stories. And exposition, bringing a story’s audience up to speed on events they didn’t witness, is one of the most elementary and essential skills of a storyteller.
I mean, if people needed to see Rogue One to “understand” why Vader was chasing Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, then people must’ve been terribly confused for those first 39 years. Or maybe they understood perfectly well because the original movie brought them up to speed in three paragraphs.
@CLB: “the MCU isn’t canonical either. The comics are the canon”
““Canon” doesn’t matter. It’s not a standard of worth; it’s nonsensical to argue about which made-up stories are “real” when none of them are.”
These two statements don’t go together. You might say they’re contradictory.
You’re right though that it’s a sidetrack.
@78/Sunspear: The contradiction is yours. My point is that on the one hand you’re talking about the MCU (an adaptation) as a “canon” in its own right, yet on the other hand you’re dismissing the Star Trek novelverse (also an adaptation) as unimportant unless it’s canonical. That’s a double standard, and it’s also totally irrelevant to the conversation I’m having about the craft of exposition in storytelling.
No. Think you’ve used this charge of “nonsense” before when talking about assessing importance to mostly self-contained realms within IPs. I’m not saying the novelverse is unimportant, just that it has only tangential bearing on the filmed media. It is internally self-consistent, or tries to be, no one is disputing that. But I can ignore the whole output and not lose a thing when I watch Picard.
That will not be the case when the Disney shows are released. They will count as volumes or chapters within the larger story, just as self-consistent within the IP as the novels in the STverse.
You base your assumptions (that’s all they are) about how this will roll out on your writing experience. The person directly responsible for developing this sub IP (getting away from religiously-tinged language of canon and laypeople (a favorite of yours :p)) is saying otherwise. Exposition within individual movies may carry the ball as you suggest, but it will not be the full story. Hence, your understanding will necessarily be more limited than if you consumed all of it, no matter how good the shorthand exposition is.
This whole discussion hinges on one viewer who hated a credit scene. What’s coming (starting a year from now) may possibly alienate a lot more people. Your optimism about how this will be handled is based on what you know of craft, and that’s fine, but it may not be warranted.
@80/Sunspear: You keep failing to understand the topic of this conversation. The “relevance to the filmed media” is not the issue here, because I’m not talking about the filmed media. I’m talking about whether it is possible for a writer to make an audience member understand events in stories they did not see.
“Hence, your understanding will necessarily be more limited than if you consumed all of it, no matter how good the shorthand exposition is.”
Of course it will, but that doesn’t mean it will be impossible to understand the story by itself — that’s the point. Naturally there’s a larger context that a novice won’t get, but the story by itself should not be so incomprehensible that it drives the novice away. They need to be able to follow the basic story that’s presented to them, who the characters are and why they do what they do, even if some of the broader context and details go over their heads. What’s important to the story you’re telling needs to be in the story you’re telling. What’s important to the larger interconnected whole is optional.
@CLB: “What’s important to the larger interconnected whole is optional.”
That’s the crux of it. Feige suggests that you will need to see the “optional” material. You assert otherwise, that the information a viewer needs will be self-contained within that one particular story.
Your expectation of good storytelling is one thing, asserting your view (stating the ideal) over what the guy in charge says is a bit much, and frankly doesn’t matter till we see the result.
@81/Christopher: “You keep failing to understand the topic of this conversation.”
Apologies for intruding, but how can one participant in a two-people conversation fail to understand the topic of the conversation? Don’t you create the topic of the conversation together?
“I’m talking about whether it is possible for a writer to make an audience member understand events in stories they did not see.”
I think every reader knows that it’s possible. We all have seen, time and again, the dialogue, the asides, the little subordinate clauses or long paragraphs, diary entries or reports, that establish past events during a story. And more often than not it’s impossible to tell whether these are events from an earlier book or mere backstory.
@83/Jana: As I’ve said, those of us who work in the Trek novel continuity are frequently asked “Can I understand your book if I haven’t read all those others before it?” So it’s really quite common for people to assume an interconnected continuity makes its individual installments hard to understand, which is why I suspect that line in the interview reflects the reporter’s assumptions rather than the reality.
@84/Christopher: I might have asked that question myself. I know that it can be done, but I also know that it isn’t always done. For example, I didn’t know that the Trek novels are self-contained before you brought them up.
For an example of how the intertwining story in multiple formats can go horribly wrong, consider Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to tell their event storyline with both Magic: The Gathering cards (which depict specific events but are first and foremost about making a good game) and two novels. The prequel novel is generally considered to be good, but shipped after both the card set and the primary novel. The primary novel, on the other hand, has numerous contradictions with the story as told by the cards and the prequel novel, and was generally much worse received.
This is a small project compared to the heft of the MCU, but getting everything to its release date with the quality that you want while simultaneously intertwining these story beats is a huge task for even the smallest projects. The fact that the MCU managed to pull it off with the credits scenes and intertwining movies is a notable achievement; they were less successful when it came to intertwining Agents of Shield and Agent Carter with the larger picture. (OTOH, the mid-first-season bombshell due to Winter Soldier did jump-start the show in a huge way and I greatly liked the way that ended up.)
@86 On the other hand Agents of SHIELD waiting for the Winter Soldier bombshell lent itself to recommendations like “the show gets really good after the first 18 episodes.”
@85/Jana: The point is, even when the novels aren’t self-contained, it’s just a basic writer’s skill to provide whatever outside information your audience needs to understand them. I mean, no story is completely self-contained; even a standalone story or a series pilot depends on past events that need to be explained (like how “The Cage” depends on the Rigel VII battle or the original Star Wars depends on the theft of the Death Star plans, the whole backstory of the Jedi and the Empire, etc.). The methods for giving your audience the information they need to follow the story are the same regardless of whether that information was established in an earlier story or not. Even if your book is the eighth or twentieth in a series, you assume it’s going to be somebody’s first book in that series, so you write it with an eye toward bringing that new reader up to speed, the same way you’d bring readers up to speed about the backstory for a standalone or first novel (or movie).
Although the trick is making sure the exposition doesn’t bore the established audience that already knows that stuff. So you want to keep it efficient and engaging rather than just being a dry, wordy infodump. But that’s true of exposition in general. For instance, my old Analog editor Stanley Schmidt had a tip that a good way to make exposition interesting is to put it in the context of an interpersonal conflict, e.g. one character drawing the information out of another who’s reluctant to reveal it. It’s easy to do that if the exposition is specifically about a character conflict, like my earlier example of how The Avengers had Thor and Loki’s first confrontation bring the audience up to speed on the events of Thor while also serving to establish their emotional conflict in the current movie.
@86/prophet: The thing about the MCU’s coordination between movies and TV is that it could only go in one direction. Movies take far longer to make than TV episodes, so Agents of SHIELD had months of lead time to know what was going to happen in the next movie and write episodes that built up to it so that they could be in sync with it when it came out (although that ended when the TV and movie divisions were split and the TV people weren’t as much in the loop anymore). But by the same token, it could never work the other way around.
I mean, if people needed to see Rogue One to “understand” why Vader was chasing Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, then people must’ve been terribly confused for those first 39 years. Or maybe they understood perfectly well because the original movie brought them up to speed in three paragraphs.
@77/Christopher: Even though you don’t really need Rogue One in order to understand A New Hope‘s backstory, I do appreciate what it does to the original film’s context.
Specifically, the scene where Vader confronts Leia over the Death Star plans. The original film gave the impression that Leia’s corvette merely received the stolen imperial data, thus Leia’s proclamations of being a senator on a diplomatic mission would have their merit.
Rogue One, however, expands on that by not only having the actual ship present in the battle of Scarif, but we get Vader himself seeing the ship escaping the battle with the plans, right in front of him. Thus, the original scene becomes a lot more interesting since we now know that Leia is lying through her teeth in front of a murderous Sith.
@89: Eduardo: “Even though you don’t really need Rogue One in order to understand A New Hope‘s backstory, I do appreciate what it does to the original film’s context.”
Exactly. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The interconnections between stories aren’t supposed to be some absolute requirement for comprehension; they’re an added layer on top of the individual stories, a larger context to put them in. Ideally, an installment in a series can be appreciated either as a self-contained story on its own or as a piece of a larger series. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one to get the other.
I thought Leia was always lying in that scene. She said she didn’t know what Vader was talking about, playing dumb about the stolen plans, even though she was the one who put them into R2.
@91/Fix-the-Lighter: Yes, Leia was always lying — the only thing Rogue One changes is how obvious her lie is to Vader. In the Rogue One version, Vader actually saw her ship receive the plans, so she never had a chance of convincing him. Which makes it a bigger act of chutzpah that she even tried.
#83-85: We should probably put a “for relative values of” in front of the “self-contained” for purposes of Trek novel continuity — specifically, a fair percentage of the novel line over the years has appeared in the form of mini-series of one sort or another, and for at least some of those, you really wouldn’t want to come in at the middle or with the last book.
And just to be confusing, it is not always entirely clear from the cover treatments whether a particular cluster of novels constitutes a new free-standing series or a plot-driven multi-book story arc . I’d point particularly at Star Trek: Vanguard and Star Trek: Destiny — the first is a series of more or less free-standing works in a newly established setting, whereas the second is a trilogy featuring a plot that unfolds over the course of the three books. I would not want to start someone in the middle of the Destiny trio (or, to use another example, the “Vulcan’s Soul” trio by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz), but the Vanguard group is structurally more similar to the overall NextGen group, such that each book can be more easily read on its own.
We’ve talked about this before, too, elsewhere — specifically, with respect to Jeffrey Lang’s The Light Fantastic, featuring Data in a face-off with holographic Professor Moriarty. There are several prior novels — one by Lang, plus a trilogy by David Mack — which I believe neither Jana nor I have yet read, and whose plots do a great deal to put Data in the time and place where we find him at the start of Light Fantastic. But it’s possible to read Light Fantastic on its own, even without that background, and enjoy the story Lang tells in that particular book.
Tying this back to the MCU: I’m quite sure that Kevin Feige is hoping that the lion’s share of his audience watches everything, and thereby catches all the Easter eggs in (for example) Multiverse of Madness that may have been set up in WandaVision. But I’m also fairly sure that he’s wise enough not to release a version of Multiverse of Madness that can’t be easily understood unless you’ve also seen every hour of WandaVision that’s aired on Disney+ by the time the former work hits theaters. The two productions should ideally complement each other, while not being dependent on one another.
@93/John: Sometimes I wonder why there are so many trilogies. Why do books have to come in threes, and not twos or fours?
About The Light Fantastic, that’s right – I didn’t read the earlier books, I read that one at your recommendation, and I understood and enjoyed it. Although Data was no longer quite the character from the TV show. It was a bit like meeting an old friend after a long time apart. Perhaps that isn’t for everyone, and also puts some people off reading the current Pocket novels.
@94/Jana: Three-act structure seems to be pretty basic in fiction. Beginning, middle, and end. Setup, confrontation, and resolution. And people seem to like things being in threes in general, like the Trinity in religion or the rule of three in writing. As the linked article says, three is the smallest number of entities that convey a clear pattern, or that create rising tension with the first two parts and resolve it in the third.
@95/CLB: Good point regarding the “the things in three” prejudice we humans seem to have. IIRC my religious history, the Hindus also believe in a tripartite God: Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and Shiva (the Destroyer).
CLB/ Another point to ponder: we English speakers have a tendency to use particular word orders. For example, we usually say: “that’s black or white thinking” versus “that’s white or black thinking”. Another example: at every wedding I have attended, the preacher or judge has said, “I now pronounce you, husband and wife”, versus “I now pronounce you wife and husband”. Finally, I rarely here anyone say, “The good ole blue, white and red” to describe the U.S. flag.
@97/Paladin: While it doesn’t apply to any of your examples, there’s apparently this whole complicated rule about the order of multiple adjectives before a noun, one that native English speakers do without noticing but that non-native learners of English are taught in detail: https://qz.com/773738/how-non-english-speakers-are-taught-this-crazy-english-grammar-rule-you-know-but-youve-never-heard-of/
Anyway, in addition to the usual reasons why doing things in threes is popular, I’ve always thought that part of the reason trilogies are popular in movies is a matter of time. It generally takes 2-3 years to make a movie, so a trilogy can take close to a decade, which is a long time for the same people to be involved in a single project. So it’s not surprising that people would be inclined to wrap things up and move on after three movies. Although that’s less the case with modern franchises that are churning out one or two movies per year. (Which isn’t just a modern thing. Back before TV came along to fill the niche, it was common to have ongoing film series that came out with 2-3 installments annually, like the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series or the films based on the Blondie comic strip.)
@98/CLB: The article on adjectival word order was interesting. I took Russian in college for six semesters, and I seem to remember that word order was not as important in the Russian language as it is in English–something about case endings and/or declensions (?). It was 35 years ago.
Thre isn’t too much I can say about the film other than it is remarkably pleasant and fun.
I will say I based on shrewdly Feige & Co. have played the continuity so far, I suspect the entirety of the WandaVision/Doctor Strange crossover will be like this in his new movie:
*Doctor Strange finds himself in a weird new dimension*
STRANGE: “Wanda Maximoff! What are you doing here?”
WANDA: “Uh, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Let’s get out of here.”
To return to the topic of the article, what I disliked about this movie was the number of coincidences required to have a movie at all. Like how it’s on the last day of Scott Lang’s house arrest that X-Con security has to prepare their presentation for their last chance to stay afloat, which is also the one time in the century that the quantum realm can be accessed. Of course it’s just at this moment that Ava Starr decides to try and steal Hank Pym’s technology. Remove any one of those pieces (or Pym’s incredibly stupid decision to rely on Burch for anything), and you avoid the unimaginable chaos that ensues. Fortunately, through a series of yet even less credible coincidences, nobody dies in any of these completely reckless uses of poorly understood technology.
A bit late to the party, but Ant-Man and the Wasp is one of those examples of what I was talking about over in the Infinity War about the stronger musical foundation of Phase Three
Christophe Beck’s score is as delightful as the sequel itself. I loved the first Ant-Man score and the Leitmotif he gave Scott, but the sequel’s score is stronger.
I especially love Wasp’s leitmotif and ““It Ain’t Over Till the Wasp Lady Stings has instantly became one of my favorite music cues from Phase Three and one of my favorites in the entire MCU.
I know it’s kinda late, but as she walks out but before Ghost appears, Hope very considerately picks up the bag of money and leaves it on the table in front of Burch. Just because Burch is an asshole doesn’t mean she was.