“And The Wasp” is a Bad Ant-Man Film

MCU movie are accused of being cookie-cutter. With Ant-Man And The Wasp, I feel that the unique elements of the previous film were lost because they fell outside of the template.

What is Ant-Man’s thing? Shrinking. The first film is all about shrinking (and a bit about ants, and a bit about daughters). That sequence where he shrinks for the first time? Stunning, terrifying, and (done as it is with current effects technology and a Marvel budget) it is something you won’t see anywhere else at the cinema. I’d even say that it’s better that Doctor Strange’s similar CGI revelation sequence in his film.

Then there’s the training montage where Scott Lang learns how to use those shrinking powers practically. Then the heist where they have a goal that can only be achieved by shrinking. It’s all about shrinking, and all the best special effects in that film were dedicated to Ant-Man being ant-sized and the uncanniness of his everyday environments turning into giant playgrounds.

Now, in Ant-Man and The Wasp, the shrinking suits are just a vehicle for more superpower fights. It is a way to beat up baddies with some added special effects. That’s it. Marvel took something unique and turned it into factory-line superhero action. Very disappointing.

Even the Quantum Tunnel device in And The Wasp takes away from the magic of shrinking. It is practically no different to any other portal to another dimension, and the MCU has not shortage of those already. The shrinking aspect of of the device has little impact. Consider: the horror of what happened to Hank’s wife was that she was lost in a universe inside a single random atom or quantum of space, lost in known space out in the sky above the pacific ocean, but utterly lost nonetheless to the infinity of scale. A universe in a random atom — it would be impossible to find the atom, to begin with, and even if you did you would still have a universe to search. The Hangover films are about how hard it is to find somebody just in Vegas. There was simply no coming back from the way that Janet was lost. But the new movie didn’t lean into that at all. They just built a machine that found her. Boring.

There are one or two cool size related moments in the new film. I love Hank’s suitcase laboratory, and his run-in with monster microbes, but there’s nothing that compares creatively with with the battle of Cassie’s bedroom, and it never particularly feels that the plot demands a hero that shrinks.

Some ideas for How Ant-Man 2 could have working shrinking and size change into it’s plot:

• Scott advances from being a thief to a spy for Shield, and uses many of the same skills from the first movie to sneak around to get information.
• A journey deep underground to find a MacGuffin, traversing impossible small cracks and passages in the earth, with a particular focus on a terrifyingly close up view of the animal ecosystems down there, starting with garden moles and worms and ending with giant-sized fights between Ant-Man and the monsters of the Mole-Man.
• Scott has to go into somebody’s body to fight an infection or perform a medical procedure, just like in the old Avengers comic where Hank Pym shrinks into Vision to repair him (Avengers Vol 1 93 “Journey to the centre of the Android”) Maybe in this film Hank is dying and Scott has to traverse his arteries and organs to save him. Is that too weird?
• While we’re talking about classic comic book stories, I love the John Byrne Fantastic Four comic Terror in a Tiny Town (Fantastic Four Vol 1 236) where Doctor Doom traps the family in a unfamiliar town, but, plot twist, he actually shrunk them down into robot bodies and the town is a model sitting in Doctor Doom’s castle. The four heroes have to tackle Doom’s castle at miniature size. The MCU Ant-Man series already mirrors the elements of crazy science, exploration and family dynamics that the Fantastic Four comics are known for. Something similar could have worked for an Ant-Man movie.

Of course, there are a million great size-related ideas to be found already in sci-fi novels, classic shrinking comedies, and the superhero comics themselves (including shrinking heroes from other publishers). The above ideas are just off the top of my head. But isn’t is ridiculous that given the long history of interesting, unusual, thought-provoking and fun shrinking-centred material out there, Marvel couldn’t even come up with something good, something true to the Ant-Man premise, for one of their blockbuster films?

Bad shrinking isn’t my only issue with Ant-Man And The Wasp…

The Wasp Is Just Another Ant-Man

Hope is mainly a bodyguard for her dad. She puts on the Wasp suit to beat up the gangsters so she can take their gizmo. She could have instead used the suit to steal the gizmo discretely later, but that’s more of a Scott Lang approach. The Wasp takes a different approach to her powers than Scott did in the last movie: to her it’s all about the combat. She’s a badass. That’s cool…

Except now it turns out Scott is all about the combat too! They just spend the whole movie using these incredible, physics defying powers to dodge punches and become hard to see.

When you have a team-up movie, aren’t the characters supposed to complement, contradict or contrast one another, so the the effect of their presence together is more them them… both just being there? That’s the problem here. Ant-Man and the Wasp is just two Ant-Men. It’s pointless. What can two shrinking heroes with the same goal accomplish that one cannot? Buddy cop movies work because one cop is the professional and one has the street smarts but won’t do things by the book. There is tension there. Thor and Hulk’s chemistry in Ragnarok sparkled because they have different personalities and want different things, but still have to work together. One is like fire and the other is like water.

Hope and Scott almost have an interesting dynamic. They don’t like each other, but they find that they work incredibly well together. There could have been a tension between getting them to work together and the need to have them together to meet their goals, or their skills being complementary in a fight but their personal relationship or lack of trust being the thing that gets in the way, and they need to overcome. The movie never takes it this far, though.

The main issue is that they aren’t distinguished when it comes to powers and capabilities. Basically, either of them could solve any problem, and I’m not sure having two of them there would make them much more capable against Ghost or make a difference when it comes to beating up the mooks.

Some ideas for how the Wasp and Ant-Man could have been different to one another to make for a better story:

• Scott can only grow and Hope can only shrink. They have to combine their powersto succeed.
• Scott is stuck ant-sized, so Hope has to deal with any human sized problems while Scott does the small work. I would love a scene with the two talking to each other while tiny, then Hope grows to full size while we still see things from the perspective of tiny Scott. I would love a scene where Scott rides into battle on Hope’s shoulder, and they fight together helping each other out at different sizes.

One last thing…

I feel that more clarity was needed on what exactly Scott and Hope can and can’t do… and in particular how they could be beaten. Most of the problems they have are random contrivances like Scott’s regulator going awry. I think this even film breaks some of the rules of the previous film, like Ant-Man needing his helmet on in order to shrink. There was that cool bit in Ant-Man where he in tied up in the police car trying desperately to get his helmet on so he can escape. No such restriction in And The Wasp.

Basically, Ant-powers are just too powerful. Not only can they grow and shrink to any size at any time, but they can also do the same to any object in the world, and are so fast, strong and hard to see when small their opponents don’t stand a chance. There is no threat in the fights against the crooks because you never really believe that Scott and Hope don’t have the capability to incredibly easily beat them all or at least escape unharmed.

What to do about this? Well, here’s just one idea for a restriction on their powers that would have made it easier for us to get excited or scared during the fights:

• A delay on growing and shrinking. Like, they can only do it every ten seconds. There is a scene where Wasp is staying tiny and dodging a meat tenderiser in the kitchen, when it obviously would make more sense for her to just grow to a size that the tenderiser wouldn’t be as much of a threat. If she or Scott were stuck at one size for a short time, such contrived sequences would make sense and actually be quite exciting.

Maybe you could come up with something better than that, but I think it helps illustrate my point.

***

Of course, I want new movies in a franchise to explore new ideas and possibilities, so it’s not like I just wanted the Ant-Man sequel to be only about shrinking again. I just feel they didn’t use or explore the most unique elements of the Ant-Man concept and characters, and instead we really did get a cookie cutter superhero action-comedy, probably one of the most creatively lacking films in the entire MCU franchise.

I say that as somebody who loved the first Ant-Man film, though I know many people did not. I honestly think Ant-Man is one of the best films in the MCU, up there with Iron Man and The Winter Soldier.

If they do make an Ant-Man 3, which I feel is unlikely, but if they do, I want them to commit to Ant-Man’s key concepts, not shy away from them. I want them to come up with a new challenge for the heroes where it feels like they could easily fail, and it is only by pushing their physics bending powers and mad science to the limit that they can succeed. And I want every character to have their place in the story, and in the action, and to have a role that is particular to them.

By the way, the best Marvel character for Ant-Man to share the screen with in a Ragnarok or Civil War-esque third film would be Gamora. I love the chemistry between the two of them in Gerry Duggan’s recent Guardians of the Galaxy run.

Tom, out.