Sorry that this one took a while, I
just never got around to the theater. I know, my bad. I’m already paying for
not getting around to seeing Deadpool 2
in theaters. Wade hasn’t returned my calls at all since last month. I shiver to
think what he’s planning, but that’s an issue for another day. You’re here to
hear about Ant-Man and The Wasp. Let’s
get to it.
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| Marvel makes really cool posters. |
We open to a flashback to the 80s,
when the original dream team to bear the monikers Ant-Man and The Wasp were
working as covert agents for SHIELD. We see Janet van Dyne maskless for the
first time, and she looks like Michell Pfeiffer. Neat. For those that don’t
remember, our insect themed heroes last mission together was to stop a Soviet
missile from nuking part of the US. Being unable to cut through the metal, Jan
disables a regulator on her costume, allowing her to shrink past safe levels,
to slip between the molecules of the missile and disable it. Unfortunately, she
shrank so much, so fast, she was lost in the sub-atomic quantum realm. Hank
explains to a now adult Hope van Dyne that he’d given up hope on ever seeing
her again, until his successor Scott Lang traveled to the quantum realm and
back again. They begin developing a device, a tunnel to the quantum realm to
try and save her. This project, along with Scott’s place as Ant-Man and the
budding relationship between Hope and Scott is somewhat complicated by the
events of Captain America: Civil War. Siding
with Cap made Scott a criminal, but he worked out a plea deal to make things
work with his family.
We flash to the present day, three
days from the end of Scott’s two-year house arrest. He does his best to keep
busy, learning things like close-up magic, playing with his daughter on his
weekends with her, and helping his crew from the last movie set up their new
security business. Oh, and putting up with zealous FBI guys that search his
place if he sets a literal foot outside his apartment. He’s obviously losing
his mind, but hey, just three more days. What could complicate that? Turns out
a lot of things. Upon passing out in the tub, which is super dangerous by the
way, Scott suffers from a bizarre dream. He remembers seeing the trippy
landscape of the quantum realm, a spectral image of a Wasp, and playing a game
of hide and seek with a young Hope. He turns to a mirror, sees a Michelle
Pfeiffer face and wakes up. Feeling… disorientated after that dream, Scott
pulls out a hidden phone and calls Hank. He just get’s Hank’s voice mail, and
just leaves a message.
The next day, he’s knocked out and
kidnapped by a clearly peeved Hope. She removed his ankle bracelet and stuck it
on a super-sized ant that was trained to follow Scott’s usual routine. Not sure
that sciences, but we’ll just gloss over that. Scott’s taken to Hope and Hank’s
lab. There, the also peeved retired hero explains the weirdness to Scott. Turns
out, he and Hope had built their giant bridge to the quantum realm and switched
it on. It shorted out, but five minutes later, Hank got the call from Scott.
They theorize that somehow Jan had reached out through Scott and left a message
on how to find her. Again, not sure that sciences, but moving on. They’re
keeping Scott to see if he can help them once they finish remodeling their
device. To protect the lab, and keep Scott in his sights, Hank shrinks his lab
down to a portable suitcase size.
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| Not a villain, but very much an antagonist. |
They’d arrange a meeting with black
market tech dealer named Sonny Burch to finish the bridge. Burch had sold them
a number of pieces already, they just need one final piece to finish their bridge.
Unfortunately, he had recently discovered his customers were the rogue Pym and
van Dyne. He, believing their working on an Arc Reactor but with Quantum parts,
had arranged a meeting with several interested parties for their work. Dude is
trying to sell something he hasn’t even seen. That’s just stupid. Hope tries to
turn him down, but Sonny refuses to give them the parts and take the money too.
Oh… stupid man, you don’ kicked the wasp’s nest.
Donning her new Wasp costume, Hope
beats the hell out of Sonny’s goons. Shrinking and growing, plus wings
and her energy blasting Stingers makes beating up goons really easy. She leaves
him the money and tries to take the part but gets jumped by this weird woman in
white. Said woman seems to shift in and out of phase, allowing her to pass
through solid objects. Scott gets into a new Ant-Man suit that Pym had been
working on and goes to help. They fend her off, but she slips away, stealing
the part and breaking into the van to steal Hank’s portable lab. Side note, I
found it funny that they used the pronouns him and it for Ghost, when she’s
clearly a she. What? Hips don’t lie.
They try to think of a way to track
the lab, but Ghost had disabled the tracker. Without any other options, Scott
and co visit an old partner of Hank’s, Bill Foster. He’s a Lawrence Fishburne
looking kind of guy. Neat. The hope is that his fresh eyes might help him think
of something team Insect didn’t think of. There’s a LOT of friction between Bill
and Hank. He apparently took over as Hank’s partner after Jan’s disappearance,
under the alias Goliath. After some arguing, and a literal measuring contest
between Scott and Bill, Bill gives them the idea to recalibrate a part from the
Ant-Man suit to find the lab. After some shenanigans where Scott’s suit starts
fritzing out at his daughter’s school, she’d taken a trophy that Scott had stored
the costume in, they get the part from Scott’s original suit (new suits didn’t
have the part) and they track the lab down.
They break into the house Ghost is
staying at, but she gets the drop on them. After restraining all three, and
Bill joining them to reveal he’s working with Ghost, we get her backstory.
She’s Ava Starr, daughter of a former SHIELD scientist Elihas Starr. Her dad
was fired and blacklisted by SHIELD on Hank’s recommendation, but he refused to
stop working on his own quantum gate. The end result went haywire, killing the
Egghead and his wife, but leaving Ava alive. Unfortunately, she was left with a
condition that left her out of phase with reality. The phasing also causes her
to feel intense pain, which her suit and a special chamber help relieve. She
was essentially adopted by Bill after he split with Hank and spent years as a
Wet Works agent for SHIELD on the promise that they’d fix her condition. Turns
out SHIELD couldn’t deliver before the organization collapsed. The antagonists
explain that they’re going to finish Hank’s bridge but use it to syphon quantum
energy from Jan, to hopefully heal Ava. Hank claims that’ll kill Jan, but Bill
insists it’ll work.
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| Love the redesign on both the Ant-Man and Wasp costumes. |
Using a heart attack fake out and
some expanding ants, the heroes escape and get the lab back. They’re able to
get things set up and powered up. This allows Jan to somehow possess Scott.
Using Scott’s body, she’s able to pin point her coordinates for them to find
her. While they put the finishing touches to their bridge, Scott calls Luis and
gives him their location, just to fix an error with their project that’ll make
or break their company. Unfortunately, Sonny arrives and gives Luis some ‘not’
truth serum. Luis does another of his hilarious story summaries before being
forced to tell them where team Insect has set up, just in time for Ghost to
slip in and hear as well. Not wanting to get in the crossfire between
superhumans, Sonny calls his contact with the FBI and tells them where to go
and that Scott’s involved. Well, crap. Luis calls Scott, who has to bail on the
other two to make it home in time, much to their anger. Scott makes it home in
time, but Hank and Hope are arrested by the feds. They’re brought into custody,
while Ghost steals the lab again. After getting some encouragement from his
daughter Cassie, Scott breaks Hope and Hank out of custody and the team reunite
to save Jan before it’s too late.
So, the good first. The returning
cast is great, with Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas’s seriousness to
counterbalance Paul Rudd and Michael Peña’s more comedic moments. The new
members are also amazing. Do I need to say anything about Lawrence Fishburne?
Morpheus delivers as the super scientist trying to save his, essentially,
adopted daughter. He serves as a kind of grounding rod for Ava, keeping her
from performing the most extreme of actions. It’s his intervention that stops
Ava from targeting Cassie to get to Scott. He’s cool with her stealing and even
killing to meet their goals, but kids are over the line. Everybody needs
principles. Hannah John-Kamen is also great as Ava. She does a good job
portraying a character that isn’t evil, just pushed to her breaking point and
desperate to just make the pain stop. Pretty good for an original character.
Yeah, the Ghost of the comics is an anti-capitalist saboteur, terrorist and a
dude. I especially liked the effects for her phasing, they do this thing where
you see spectral images of Ava performing several possible actions while she
moves and fights. Also, I found it hilarious that Scott’s ex-wife and her
husband went from totally distrustful of him to the sort of people that
constantly group hug when they meet or leave. It’s cute.
The minimum is bad, but there. The
bit with Sonny hunting Scott and co felt really tacked on. Little more then an
excuse to work Luis and the X-Con crew back into the plan and give Ghost a
heads-up on their location. I also felt that the anger that Hank and Hope felt
towards Scott for running off to Germany to help Team Cap just sort of vanished
for a while before coming up again towards the finale. I won’t want them
constantly screaming at him or anything, just a few more comments about him
bailing or being unreliable, all I’m saying. Some of the hijinks also ran on
for a little longer then I’d have liked. There’s a small subplot (maybe just a
recurring gag) of Scott’s new suit constantly shorting out, causing him to
shrink and grow randomly and to random degrees. I glossed over the entire scene
at Cassie’s school, where they went to recover Scott’s original suit, just
because it was just an overlong short joke. His suit shorted out and left him
at about three feet tall. So funny. I’m rolling my eyes, FYI.
Overall, I’ll give this one an A-.
This is a much smaller scale (I couldn’t not do the pun) film then we’ve seen
from Marvel. For once, the fate of the world isn’t in the balance, or even the
fate of a city. All that hangs in the balance are the fates of two women. One
lost on the waves of reality, the other being torn apart by the powers she
wields. It’s a very human story, I think, which is good. Variety is one of
Marvel’s strong suits, and this movie is a good example. Ava and Bill aren’t
evil, or not completely, they’re just two people trying to save one of them
from a grizzly fate. It’s a no less valid struggle then Hank and Hope’s desire
to save Jan, it’s just conflicting with theirs. We also got a good introduction
to a new hero, in the form of Wasp. While Hope is no replacement for Jan, she’s
a fresh fighting heroine that deserves the credit in the title that she finally
gets. Her growth from sideline support of Ant-Man to his full partner is a nice
development for her character. We also saw Scott step up as a character, trying
his best to be a functioning parent for his daughter, a functioning member of
society (to an extent) and to own up for his mistakes in Civil War. It’s real growth, and I’m glad he’s getting it. So yeah,
it’s a small-scale bit of fun, but it’s a hell of a ride regardless.
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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