I know for a fact that if I could somehow get a message to myself when I was a teenager and tell past-Bert that the biggest movies in the cineplexes would be based on Marvel comic characters I don’t think I would believe my future-self. Back in the 1990s, not only were comic books and comic collectors perceived as being quite lame, but the very few successful movies based on comics that were being released were all from DC. The ones from Marvel were so bad they were skipping theaters entirely and going straight to video.
If I might not believe the popularity of the Marvel movies, I know I wouldn’t believe my future-self if I would have included that one of the biggest movies to date was going to be one featuring the character of Black Panther and that other characters like Ant Man would have their own film franchises too. That would’ve been too crazy to believe.
Yet we do live in a time where a character like Ant Man, who when I was collecting comics was almost entirely irrelevant, has his own successful movie series, the second of which Ant Man and The Wasp now in theaters.
Not quite your typical Marvel movie, the first Ant Man (2015) was an interesting mix of a heist, science, action and comic book movie all rolled into one. Whereas most comic book movies feature a big villain coming down to destroy the Earth or otherwise murder a lot of people, in Ant Man the setting is small but the stakes are still big.
Ex-con Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is forced to become the next Ant Man from the first iteration of the hero Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Pym’s been hiding his technology for decades after he lost his wife during a mission and needs Lang who’s good at breaking into places and stealing things to stop Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who’s on the verge of recreating the tech for his own nefarious purposes.
What happens if Cross wins? He’ll be able to sell the shrinking technology to the bad guys who will be able to do all sorts of bad guy things using it. But the world probably isn’t going to end because of it.
What’s interesting too about Ant Man is because the conceit of the film is that Lang can shrink down to the size of an ant, much of the film takes place in small, confined environments that usually don’t feature superhero battles. One part of the movie takes place in the bottom of a bathtub made cavernous because of Lang’s size, another inside a briefcase as it falls from the sky while the final battle between Lang and Cross has the most unique setting of any superhero battle I can think of.
It occurs in Lang’s daughter’s bedroom, but because the antagonists are teeny-tiny small things like her toy train set and stuffed animals become impossible large. At one point, the two are riding on the train and are trying to zap one and other with laser bolts of death. But when the camera cuts away to what the daughter sees at regular size, it’s a small, almost unnoticeable fight where those explosions come off as mere sparks you might miss if you weren’t paying really close attention.
Ant Man was one of the first modern superhero movies to have a comedic tone yet isn’t a spoof. It’s got all the elements of the traditional comic book movie, costumes, big action scenes, characters with personal problems, but it’s takes more of a fun approach to the material than most movies do. In the heavy Captain America: Civil War movie where the superheroes aren’t superfriends anymore, one of the two characters brought in to lighten things up during one of the big battles is Scott Lang.
This new Ant Man and The Wasp movie is set to team up Lang and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) as two characters with the power to shrink who must face off against the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who not only can shrink but she can easily move through things just like a, well, ghost.
