Ant-Man and The Wasp
(2018. Director: Peyton Reed Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michael Pena)
SYNOPSIS:
Scott Lang is under house arrest after the events of Captain America: Civil War. However after once again coming into contact with Hank Pym and his daughter Hope Van Dyne, he must return to the mantle of Ant-Man to help them to travel into the Quantum realm in search of Hope's lost mother.Sometimes you have to go small to go big.
It's an old lesson in storytelling. As major blockbusters keep trying to outdo each other by raising the stakes higher and higher, our emotional connection with the plot gets stretched further away. A good storyteller will understand that a small, personal connection to the story will always inspire greater reaction from an audience than the largest of spectacles. For a recent example, Zach Snyder's debut Superman movie, Man of Steel, exploitatively co-opted some of the imagery of 9/11 to try to jolt the audience into shock at its unnecessarily carnage-filled climax, but barely registered a reaction beyond disgust at it's tastelessness. In contrast, by using a light, humanistic touch, Toy Story 3 managed to leave theatres of full adults reduced to uncontrollable sobbing with a scene of nothing more than a teenage boy giving away his toys. (Full disclosure: I can already feel tears welling up merely from typing that sentence.) Therefore it is a smart move on the part of Marvel Studios to follow up their biggest, most ambitious, and most shockingly tragic film to date, Avengers: Infinity War, with a relatively low-stakes adventure with the smallest (by all definitions) hero on their roster: Ant-Man.
2015's Ant-Man was a bit of a strange little oddity even by the standards of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where other 'MCU phase 2' movies, such as Thor: The Dark World or Guardians of the Galaxy, built up massive world-ending threats which were fairly hard to care about and were centred on completely dull and unmemorable central villains, Ant-Man was smart enough to keep the stakes minor but meaningful. Sure, it still had the problem of it's ostensible villain, Yellowjacket, being a generic dud, but he never really felt like he was the main antagonist of the film's hero, Scott Lang. That role instead was shared by the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and his daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly). Scott Lang's main conflict was his struggle to impress them enough so that they would want to help him to rebuild his life and repair his relationship with his daughter. This relationship, between Scott and his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), was the heart of the film and brought some natural, human drama to the film's ridiculous super heroics. This helped it to stand apart from the previous, more operatic, challenges found in previous Marvel adventures. Ironically, the films biggest weakness was in it's other father/daughter relationship, that of Hank and Hope. In the story, Hope is clearly the best candidate to take on her father's mantle but is pushed aside for a complete stranger (and worse, one they have no reason to trust) due to her father's patronising and somewhat sexist overprotectiveness of her. This creates an interesting character conflict but it is never satisfyingly resolved since the film itself also seems happy to ignore Hope's protests and leave her in a fairly underwhelming supporting role. From it's title alone, the sequel Ant-Man and The Wasp, looks keen to correct that mistake.
Skipping ahead a few years from the end of 2015's Ant-Man, Ant-Man and The Wasp quickly fills us in on the events since that film. Hope Van Dyne has already stepped up to the titular role of The Wasp, a superhero with similar powers and who partners with Ant-Man. This position was once filled by her mother Janet (Michelle Phieffer) back when Hank was the original Ant-Man, up until the day she was lost and presumed killed in action. In fact, Hope has continued to get into adventures as The Wasp on her own after Scott is forced to retire when he is arrested again (this time for helping Captain America to evade justice in his brief but fun cameo appearance in Captain America: Civil War.) While Scott is trapped under house arrest, whiling away the hours by entertaining his daughter with tales of his former life as a superhero, Hope is helping her father to continue his research. Together they are trying to build a device which they think will make it possible for them to travel to the 'Quantum Realm' in the vain hope that Janet may still be alive down there. In trying to acquire the parts needed for this machine, Hope falls foul of various characters keen to sabotage her plans and is begrudgingly forced to reconnect with Scott so he can help them to steal back their equipment and complete their mission into the unknown.
Recently Marvel Studios have put particular effort into solving their much discussed 'villain problem.' Between them, the last two MCU releases from earlier this year had two of the most interesting and well developed villains to feature in any Marvel release (Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and, even more so, Erik Killmonger from Black Panther.) It is a tough act to follow, especially for a film that is as tonally different from those movies as Ant-Man and The Wasp. Instead the film smartly avoids having any major supervillain threat, instead opting for a handful of separate and competing antagonists, who each find a way to throw a spanner in the works without feeling the need to monologue plans of world domination. The closest thing the film has to a typical 'villain' character is Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a young woman who can phase in and out of existence, allowing her to pass through walls and disappear at will. However she is given a fully understandable motivation for wanting the Ant-Man technology and it would even be quite easy to imagine an alternative film with her as the protagonist and Hank Pym as the villain. Walton Goggins (Justified, The Shield) has fun hamming it up as a low-level arms dealer and Randall Park (Fresh Off The Boat, The Interview) appears as a suspicious FBI agent who is tailing the protagonists in the hope of catching them breaking their parole regulations. Both characters are well utilised but are more funny than they are threatening.
It's this humour which is Ant-Man and the Wasp's best strength. A film built around these characters is unlikely to manage to pull off the surreal, interstellar conflicts of a Guardians of the Galaxy movie or the dark, political undercurrents of Captain America film. It makes sense then that Marvel would take a different tack and treat Ant-Man as it's most purely comedic series. Last year's Thor: Ragnarok took a similar approach, becoming probably Marvel's funniest film. However since the previous Thor films had already established a tone of near-Shakespearian dramatics, it was a jarring mix. Every major plot moment was undercut with humour which, while often hilarious, gave the film an oddly unsatisfying feeling. Ant-Man and the Wasp avoids this issue by taking time to flesh out each character's motivation and emotional relationship with each other before flinging them into the fray.
The Ant-Man series greatest strength remains the casting of Paul Rudd as Scott, an actor who can raise a laugh with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and who it is near impossible to dislike. (Off topic: I patiently await the director who is smart enough to make audiences deeply uncomfortable by channelling Rudd's natural affability into a genuinely chilling villain.) Ant-Man and the Wasp involves Scott throughout but he is kept at an arms reach from the film's central narrative, treating him more like a screentime-hugging comedy sidekick. Sadly this leads to a reduction in time spent with his own comedy sidekick, Luis (Michael Peña), who again gets some of the film's biggest laughs, but it's still a sensible move as it allows The Wasp to step up to the plate as the film's central protagonist (becoming Marvel's first female lead role, even if she is forced to share the films title with her only occasionally competent ex-partner/ex-boyfriend). Having had a whole previous film of preparation, while sitting on the sidelines, Evangeline Lilly is more than ready for the task. As The Wasp she shoulders both the majority of the emotional drama and most of the action beats with equal ease.
That action is well handled. It's fast paced, inventive and shot with style and clarity and it culminates in an outstanding car chase near the film's climax. With this film, Peyton Reed has stepped out of the shadow of (original Ant-Man director) Edgar Wright and shown that he is a perfect choice to take charge of this franchise.
Ant-Man and the Wasp may seem an unusual choice to follow the major cinematic event that was Avengers: Infinity War. There is no way it could be compared to the scope, the scale and the ambition of that massive, multi-series crossover. However, by setting it's goals lower, it easily vaults over them and ends up being the more consistently enjoyable out of the two films. Sometimes it's good to be small.
Review by The Mogul
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