Ant-man

[Velorath]

For a split-second even I found myself wondering about the logistics of going sub-atomic if the Pym Particles are supposed to just reduce the space between molecules or whatever the explanation was.

[jgsugden]

Calling something worthy of rewatching is shitting on it? This movie had a few more flaws than the other Marvel movies, but it was also a fun spectacle.  It walked two paths that both were nice, but walking both took a bit away from each. I'd rather they made a standalone Ant-man or a mainstream Ant-man that was less Sean of the Dead, but that is like being stuck with the New York Strip rather than the Porterhouse or Ribeye.

[Khaldun]

It's quite good. Not extraordinary or anything, but entertaining. I think it shows how well-oiled the Marvel machine is at this point, and I don't mean that in a bad way--they're smart about how to steal the DNA of another kind of film just enough to make each new film good. It's a contrast to the Iron Man films, which have been pure star vehicles. I do totally see what people are saying about the Edgar-Wright parts--if you've seen the movie, you can REALLY see which parts were his in conception. Not enough to make me think "that would have been better or worse", but different.

I think they're slowly building up to something like Agents of Atlas--a revelation that there were truly secret 'superheroes' at an earlier date, somewhere between Peggy Carter and the first Iron Man. I kind of like that.

[Threash]

About the

[Velorath]

I find myself liking it more the more I think about it and rewatch parts. I think it was a smart move on Marvel's part to close out Phase 2 with what I imagine will be a one-off movie (earliest opening in the schedule is end of 2019 and there are probably much higher priorities than an Ant Man 2). Aside from a couple cameos and the post-credits scene, this is very much a stand-alone movie. There's no Thanos, no Infinity Stones, no Nick Fury or Coulson. It's one of the only movies in the MCU that didn't feel like part of it was either a build-up or pay-off to stuff in other movies. As much as I like the interconnectivity of the MCU, and even though Ant Man is obviously going to be in Civil War, it's nice to have a break from the bigger picture stuff especially since we're getting what is essentially another Avengers movie next.

[Soulflame]

Decent movie.  Definitely worth seeing.

[Khaldun]

[MahrinSkel]

--Dave

[MediumHigh]

This was better than it has any right to be. I think the movie had one thing I'd change.

Villain dying at the end. Seriously wasn't the best part of the film was seeing the satisfying end to a villain I could see more. They could still sorta bring him back for latter use but yeah the movie tied itself up too neatly.

[Threash]

He wasn't a villain worth keeping around for more, he was basically exactly the same villain as the first IM.  Certainly no Loki.

[Mattemeo]

Certainly no Loki.

This is currently Marvel's biggest problem - a slew of one-note charisma-vaccuums in place of a decent, relatable villain, and one they half addressed in AoU by making the bad guy... RDJ.
And although Ronan the Accuser was pretty one-note, at least he was fun.

[Evildrider]

He wasn't a villain worth keeping around for more, he was basically exactly the same villain as the first IM.  Certainly no Loki.

He was also a made up villain for the movie.  They basically just made him the insane Hank Pym Yellow Jacket persona.

[jgsugden]

I, sadly, think the plan is to bring Cross back when they bring back the first Wasp.  They at least kept that door open with the vague death.

[Khaldun]

I doubt they'll bring Cross back. He really is Stane Volume 2. And really, this is what the MCU needs most in Phase 3: more compelling antagonists. I think the Red Skull deserves some credit for being not terrible, but so far Loki is the only one with any degree of motivational complexity and layered characterization. This might be a problem with the source universe, actually--the more iconic, exaggerated setting of DC Comics creates more iconic villain-hero dualities.

In the Marvel Universe, someone like Spider-Man mostly faces costumed guys who are kind of sort of schlubs and guys like he is in one sense or another, trying to make a score or make a small point or to get out from under heel. They're all kind of interesting but also kind of interchangeable: the Shocker, the Scorpion, Jack O'Lantern, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Electro, Mysterio, etc. are mostly interesting for their gimmick, not their personalities or motivations. Avengers-level bad guys are also kind of a mess, for the most part--Kang's motivations shift with every story and introduce endless time-travel bullshit muddles to boot; Ultron is just a Dalek with a daddy complex; ridiculously overpowered assholes like Nefaria or Graviton; or guys with good but impossibly comic-booky kinds of motivations like Thanos. Zemo and the Masters of Evil might have potential--the 'rival team' thing is a fun kind of story, but looks like Zemo gets thrown away a bit in "Civil War" and besides on the level of personal motivation, he's sort of a low-rent Doctor Doom with daddy problems (modern-day) or a low-rent Red Skull who should learn to stay away from glue (Nazi era).

It's a real issue for Marvel Studios--I hope they're making it a focus in Phase 3. Charismatic actors can only do so much to fix script-level and even genre-level problems.


The one suspension of disbelief moment I couldn't help but feel during the film was someone shooting a flying ant but not shooting Ant-Man while flying on the ant. I don't think bullets can hit a flying ant and not hit a man sitting on the flying ant. Just saying.

[Velorath]

I, sadly, think the plan is to bring Cross back when they bring back the first Wasp.  They at least kept that door open with the vague death.

He'd make a good addition to a Masters of Evil team if they ever decide to go that route. I doubt they'd bring him back as a villain for another solo Ant Man movie (and again if they even do one it would be at least 4 1/2 years away).

Actually, depending on how they handle Zemo in Civil War he's probably the best bet right now for an ongoing post-Thanos threat. There are some interesting aspects to his character, and at least in the comics he has ties to a lot of other villains (works with Fixer frequently even outside the Masters of Evil, created Vermin, founded the Thunderbolts, etc...).

[Khaldun]

I thought it was Mentallo who has the bro relationship with the Fixer. (Sorry, that was really a geek too far.)

[Yegolev]

Overall I thought it was great and a nice break from the over-the-top-ness of most recent comic movies.

[Strazos]

I liked it; will buy on BluRay.

[HaemishM]

When they went all "quantam realm," I expected the Microverse to show up. Which would be all kinds of awesome, and has some precedence in the comics, as Wasp was thought dead after Secret Invasion but had actually shrunk into the Microverse.

[Lakov_Sanite]

When they went all "quantam realm," I expected the Microverse to show up. Which would be all kinds of awesome, and has some precedence in the comics, as Wasp was thought dead after Secret Invasion but had actually shrunk into the Microverse.

[Velorath]

I thought it was Mentallo who has the bro relationship with the Fixer. (Sorry, that was really a geek too far.)

Mentallo and Fixer had a partnership/rivalry but Fixer was one of Zemo's main guys in the Masters of Evil and in forming the Thunderbolts, and was also the only one that stuck with Zemo after the Thunderbolts turned on him.

[Triforcer]

Marvel has better heroes than DC, but far worse villains.  Before the current slate of marvel movies, if you asked me to name marvel villains I would say Magneto, Blob, Toad and the blue skinned shapeshifter.  Even AFTER the movies, I can still only remember Loki.  They are wise to not let villains try to carry movies ala the various Batman movies.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Even prior to the movies the marvel A-list villains were slim pickings.  Of the top of my head the ones most non hardcore fans might know were:

Magneto
Dr. Doom
Red Skull
Venom
The guy with the gold glove.
That racist asian one.
"Was the hulk a bad guy? I think I saw him fight the avengers once."

And that's just about it.  Of those choices they already wrote off the mandarin and red skull because of terrible writers with no forethought and the rest the MCU doesn't have access to.

[jgsugden]

The villain problem is usually a time problem.

If you want depth in a character, you need the screen time to develop it.  If you're developing that depth with villain screen time, that leaves less screen time to develop the heroes, for bang-wiz special effects, etc... 

If you're not going to give the villains screen time to develop depth, then they have to be caricatures if you want to avoid them being non-descript generic tools that people barely remember.

Cross needed more time on screen to develop into anything more than one of Wright's typical villains.  When has he written a deep villain?  Hot Fuzz, Sean of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim, World's End.... The bad guys are melodrama bad villains - they have the depth of an ice cube tray.  I think they'd have been a bit better served to just embrace the melodrama nature fully and leave out the "Pym particles driving him mad" and "daddy issues" components.  A businessman with no morale compass that pushed Pym out to steal the research would have been quite believable and enough of a villain. 

As for Marvel's well known villains prior to 2008: If it made it to major film or to generations of Spidey cartoons, the character would have decent visibility to a reasonable number of fans outside of the comic book readers.  If you were a kid in the 70s, 80s, 90s or 00s - there was a Spiderman cartoon in syndication for part of your youth.

[Mattemeo]

Marvel's premiere villains are all out on loan to other studios, and of those, only Magneto has been served well. Doom written by someone who wasn't a flailing idiot would be amazing.

[Mattemeo]

Cross needed more time on screen to develop into anything more than one of Wright's typical villains.  When has he written a deep villain?  Hot Fuzz, Sean of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim, World's End.... The bad guys are melodrama bad villains - they have the depth of an ice cube tray.

To be fair, Wright doesn't so much write bad guys as developed characters, more that he writes antagostic concepts - Shaun of the Dead is about arrested development juxtaposed literally with a Zombie breakout, Hot Fuzz is about small town cultural vanity and community awareness/neighbourhood watchism taken to extremes and World's End is about the loss of youth and the inability to embrace change, even when the change is functionally imperceptable. Scott Pilgrim is a different matter but that's an adaptation of O'Malley's writing and any under development in that film can be ascribed to cramming 6 book's worth of exposition into 2 hours of film.

[jgsugden]

...
To be fair, Wright doesn't so much write bad guys as developed characters, more that he writes antagostic concepts - Shaun of the Dead is about arrested development juxtaposed literally with a Zombie breakout, Hot Fuzz is about small town cultural vanity and community awareness/neighbourhood watchism taken to extremes and World's End is about the loss of youth and the inability to embrace change, even when the change is functionally imperceptable. Scott Pilgrim is a different matter but that's an adaptation of O'Malley's writing and any under development in that film can be ascribed to cramming 6 book's worth of exposition into 2 hours of film.

100% correct - but here they needed a character villain.  The more I think about it, the more I wish they'd gone in the opposite direction with the writers: Have someone wright a Marvel flick and then ask Wright to script doctor to add his angle to certain scenes, rather than have his vision underlying an entire film that was tweaked to make it more mainstream.

[Fordel]

I still WTF at how they handled the Mandarin. They took that goofy ass villain, made him legitimately menacing, then just tossed it all aside for a quick laugh.

[jgsugden]

I still WTF at how they handled the Mandarin. They took that goofy ass villain, made him legitimately menacing, then just tossed it all aside for a quick laugh.

...and then revealed that the menacing figure we thought was out there was really out there and was pissed off about being treated like a joke.

[Mattemeo]

I thought the whole Mandarin reveal was brilliant. Not the Guy Pearce/Killian version, obviously (again, the actual bad guy is a non-entity designed to die in a boss-battle), but Trevor Slattery is just a wonderful creation as both 'The Mandarin' and his actual self - taking a villain as utterly absurd as The Mandarin and turning the whole thing on its head - that they've since revealed that the real-life actual Shia La... sorry, Mandarin is aware of all this and pissed off about it is just gravy.

[Slyfeind]

I thought the whole Mandarin reveal was brilliant. Not the Guy Pearce/Killian version, obviously (again, the actual bad guy is a non-entity designed to die in a boss-battle), but Trevor Slattery is just a wonderful creation as both 'The Mandarin' and his actual self - taking a villain as utterly absurd as The Mandarin and turning the whole thing on its head - that they've since revealed that the real-life actual Shia La... sorry, Mandarin is aware of all this and pissed off about it is just gravy.

I would love to see the For Real Mandarin in a future movie. (And again played by Ben Kingsley.)

[jgsugden]

Given the box office and the plethora of characters they want to get into films, I kind of doubt we'll see a sequel to explore this stuff.  However, I would not be surprised to see them recast Pym and use the character on TV (Douglas might do an episode of TV?) to continue these threads.

[Khaldun]

I'm on Team Trevor too. I think it's the only way to handle the woefully bad orientalism of the original villain--subvert it.

Though I wish the puppetmaster in the shadows had been more interesting than Killian, who was just kind of dull and generic.

[jgsugden]

I know a lot of people dislike AICN, but they have an interview with Reed in which he breaks down how he came on board and confirms where a lot of the film elements originate - all of which lines up with what I was thinking about what came from Wright, what came from Rudd and what came from the Marvel Machine (McKay and Reed included there): http://www.aintitcool.com/node/72397

[Lakov_Sanite]

There is only the slimmest chance that the mandarin will reappear. Yes they gave a hint to there being a real mastermind but it was relegated to a dvd extra and never addressed again.  Marvel is not in the habit of closing any potential doors anymore but outside of a new iron man movie where would he even fit?