To be honest, I wasn't quite as excited to see this movie as I was to see the other films in the MCU, mainly because I felt the film was going to treat Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne as an afterthought in favor of Scott Lang. I have nothing against Lang, but I thought it would've been nice to see Hank become the Ant-Man in the MCU, alongside Jan as the Wasp, and they get to eventually fight Thanos. I had been hearing a lot of people saying the film was good though, so I decided to go see it with my dad.
I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It was a fun little romp, and as sad as I was that we would most like not get to see Hank and Janet kicking Thanos's butt in the future alongside the Avengers, I actually found myself not thinking about that during this film.
The film focuses on Paul Rudd's Scott Lang, a brilliant ex-con and divorcee who wants to go straight and make things right with his daughter, Cassie. He is recruited by Michael Douglas's Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, to don the suit to aid him in preventing Pym's former protégé, Corey Stoll's Darren Cross, from weaponizing his invention, the Pym Particle. The particles allow a person to shrink to the size of an ant, while maintain their normal strength.
The film has a lot of wonderful moments of humor, especially from Michael Pena's motormouthed Luis, who is the funniest character in the film. And the final battle is definitely one of the most unusual final battle in a MCU, or really, any film. It's a hilarious final battle.
The film didn't feel much like a standard MCU film, which was a breath of fresh air. It was a heist film with superpowers, and it was a well-executed story, showing that the MCU can tell a story in a variety of genres, and I hope we continue to see such variety in the MCU. Am I the only one hoping the Black Panther movie is a technothriller like Rising Sun and Captain Marvel will be a space opera?
I don't have many complaints about this film, though. One is Darren Cross. He seems a bit much like Obadiah Stane from the first Iron Man film to me, but I didn't think about that watching the film. I have heard the critique that MCU villains tend to be a bit flat, and I can see why. Personally, I think the problem is they don't get the development that the heroes do because except for Loki (and likely Red Skull), many of the villains die in the film they first appeared in. We don't really get to see villains grow and become more rounded over time like we see the heroes do. I would've loved to have seen Cross again, so he could get more development and growth.
I also wished we got to actually have Janet Van Dyne in the film. To me, Marvel really missed out on a opportunity to do what the site TV Tropes calls Fun with Casting and have Kathleen Turner play her. I would have loved to see them back on screen together again. Even more fun would've been having them pay homage to Romancing the Stone or Jewel of the Nile in the dialogue:
Jan: Hank, are you going to tell Scott the Colombia story again?
Hank: Why wouldn't I? We got married after that little adventure!
Yeah. I really grew to like Jan after watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and her not being included made me sad. Ah well, at least we will get a Wasp in the MCU.
All in all, I'd recommend seeing this movie. It's a fun way to kill a couple of hours, and it does bring a lot of down-to-Earth charm to the often grand-scale MCU. I cannot wait for a sequel.
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