Ant-Man (and Avengers 2)
Posted: July 24th, 2015, 11:10 am
I feel like I was one of the few people who was a bit disappointed with the second Avengers movie. It was an entertaining movie with some fun moments (especially the Hulk/Iron Man fight), but it's the first Marvel movie that feels like it's straining under the weight of the elaborate mythology and ever-growing cast of characters that have been built over the last 7 years. The humor was often forced, the character moments felt perfunctory and the action (beyond the previously mentioned Hulk sequence) looks weightless (especially in the wake of the amazing practical effects of Mad Max: Fury Road) and is rarely exciting. James Spader's performance as Ultron, the growing relationship between Black Widow and the Hulk and the weirdness of the Vision (who really does feel like a Silver Age creation compared to the streamlined, modernized superheroes in most of today's movies) were the biggest things I took away from the movie. Maybe I will feel better about it after a rewatch.
If you want the opposite of everything I just described - light, airy, silly, trim, unencumbered by layers of continuity - then you need to see Ant-Man. Don't let the box-office deter you: Ant-Man is this year's Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie that people who know nothing about the Marvel Universe can enjoy just as much as someone who has been following these movies from the beginning. If you were one of the people who checked out (as I did) after Edgar Wright left the movie, don't worry: he still gets the top screenwriting credit, and it feels an awful lot like something he would have done. There are moments of worldbuilding shoveled in here and there (reportedly one of the things that Wright and the suits at Marvel had a hard time agreeing about) but they are about as quick and painless as they can be. The villain isn't super memorable (a bit of a retread of the Jeff Bridges character in the first Iron Man movie) and it does feel a bit like a Disney movie for grow-ups at times, but it's nice to have a "low-stakes" Marvel movie - not every story should have to be about saving the world.
If you want the opposite of everything I just described - light, airy, silly, trim, unencumbered by layers of continuity - then you need to see Ant-Man. Don't let the box-office deter you: Ant-Man is this year's Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie that people who know nothing about the Marvel Universe can enjoy just as much as someone who has been following these movies from the beginning. If you were one of the people who checked out (as I did) after Edgar Wright left the movie, don't worry: he still gets the top screenwriting credit, and it feels an awful lot like something he would have done. There are moments of worldbuilding shoveled in here and there (reportedly one of the things that Wright and the suits at Marvel had a hard time agreeing about) but they are about as quick and painless as they can be. The villain isn't super memorable (a bit of a retread of the Jeff Bridges character in the first Iron Man movie) and it does feel a bit like a Disney movie for grow-ups at times, but it's nice to have a "low-stakes" Marvel movie - not every story should have to be about saving the world.