Week 45: Ant-Man

This was fun! I liked it more now because my expectations were lower this time: It's not trying to be a top-tier Avengers-grade adventure, but a smaller, more casual little escapade. It coasts on Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas's endless charisma; I could watch two hours of these guys chatting about anything. It has the structure of a heist movie and I wish that it had leaned harder into that genre (Ocean's 0.000011?), and that its characters had acted as smart as they all must have been with their advanced degrees, because that could have been really neat -- but I still enjoyed the smaller, simpler, and still quite satisfying film that it is instead. I liked the pop-culture references and the earwormy main theme and the re-enactments of Luis's rambling stories.

The only thing that I really disliked was how truly evil they made Darren Cross to be. There's no explanation given for him being so completely unhinged except for Hope's comment about the particles messing with his brain, which I don't understand, because he wasn't directly exposed to any Pym Particles that we saw. His proximity to them in experiments was the same as the research assistants, and none of them seemed homicidal. In the comics, there have been several different Yellowjackets, some of whom were heroic, so it's a shame that the movie version is one of the biggest jerks that the MCU has produced. (And without spoiling the announced Thunderbolts movie, a less-evil Yellowjacket would have been perfect for it, but this version is so nasty that I don't think anyone wants to see him again.)

Smaller thoughts:

• It was fun to see Agent Carter and a version of Howard Stark again in the prologue, but if I were Hank Pym, I wouldn't declare to a room full of spy-assassins that they'll never get my coveted technology as long as I'm alive.

• Holy crap, how large are the managers' offices at Baskin-Robbins restaurants?!

• I already called out Thor for using "princess" as a gendered insult, so you can imagine that I wasn't pleased to hear it again, this time from a female character. Ugh.

• Of the many deep-cut references hidden in the movie, my favorite must be the cameo by Garret Morris as the driver on whose taxi Paul Rudd lands during the first "test run." Morris played Ant-Man in a Saturday Night Live sketch back in the 1970s, which until this film was the only live-action version of the character, so the filmmakers wisely thought to invite him here.

• Was it just me, or did Hope say that "we have days" to stop Cross, which was immediately followed by a montage of Hope and Hank training Scott for what seemed like many, many days?

• It's silly sometimes when a comic-book character has an elemental weakness, like Superman to Kryptonite, but this film positions titanium as Ant-Man's weakness twice, first on the nuke in the flashback and then on Yellowjacket's armor. Interesting choice. I wonder if vibranium, or one of Marvel's other fictional metals, was considered?

• Did it seem to anyone else like the romance between Hope and Scott came out of left field at the end? Even by the standards of modern Hollywood blockbusters where the female lead and male lead always automatically fall in love with no chemistry (well, almost always), this one seemed especially perfunctory.

• What is the deal with the Hydra buyer in the room for Darren Cross's demonstration? Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. established that Hydra is thoroughly wiped out at this point, and even for people only watching the movies, the ending of Winter Soldier should have made the same point. Not only does Hydra still exist, but they're just being open about their identity now, which feels… more alarming than anyone in the room treats it.

• When Cross asks why Hank rejected him, Hank should have said that he was corrupted by power: He once showed promise as a young researcher who wanted to better the world, but as he came to grasp the lucrative and destructive potential of the science, he grew greedy and evil and hateful toward anyone who stood in his way. That would have justified him acting so evil and been more satisfying than "particles messing with his mind." (7/10)

Watching the Newsfront minis was fun to lead into this.

I'm going to start with the good, since I tend to focus on the things that annoy me:

I don't know the history of the Ant Man character. Is Pym actually the original Ant Man and we're now seeing the rebirth of the superhero in Lang? Or is that just a creation for the sake of the film?

I like seeing Peggy Carter make an appearance.

Luis's stories crack me up every time.

Paul Rudd's comedic timing is fantastic.

The fight scene on the railway in the bedroom was great. I loved the humor of this epic battle taking place at a micro-level, and the quick cuts to a toy train falling harmlessly off the track, or clattering across the windowsill. There's another movie that had something similar, and I just can't put my finger on it.

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A brief history: Hank Pym was the original Ant-Man in the comics in the 60s and 70s. Marvel did a storyline in 1981 where he was under a lot of strain and turned evil, shooting a villain in the back and hitting his wife Janet. She divorced him, Cap fired him from the Avengers, he was a villain for a little while, and eventually he went good again as a series of other hero identities. Around this time, thief Scott Lang stole the Ant-Man suit (part of the aforementioned strain on Pym) because he needed it to get medicine for his sick daughter Cassie. Lang kept the suit and joined the Avengers as a reformed thief, lasting until he was killed in 2004 and the Ant-Man character went dormant. When making the movie, Marvel Studios debated which man to put in the suit, and settled on Lang because of the ugly wife-beating past of Pym in the comics. The movie led to Lang being resurrected in the comics and starring in the first-ever Ant-Man comic book; previously, the character had really only appeared in Avengers comics as a member of that team.

Good point about the titanium. I completely agree. The entire Yellowjacket suit isn't made of titanium, so there must be a gap or seam somewhere that Scott could get inside. It's pretty clearly just done to force the story along.