MCU Retrospective: Ant-Man and the Wasp

Written by Anna Harrison

In these retrospectives, Anna will be looking back on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, providing context around the films, criticizing them, pointing out their groundwork for the future, and telling everyone her favorite scene, because her opinion is always correct and therefore her favorite scene should be everyone’s favorite scene. Anyone in need of a palate cleanser after the previous movie?

70/100

Avengers: Infinity War was a sprawling, sweeping epic that jumped between characters and planets so swiftly that the audience never got a chance to catch their breath, and it ended with the bleakest moment in the history of the MCU. Ant-Man and the Wasp, however, is as light and zippy as the insects it takes its name from, proving to be a much-needed break in between the gloom and doom of Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame; it’s nothing particularly special, but it doesn’t need to be, since it easily coasts by on the chemistry of its actors and its lighthearted humor. This time, there was no messy firing, and Ant-Man director Peyton Reed came back with no drama; the biggest hubbub during the production of the film surrounded its name, as Ant-Man and the Wasp marked the first time a woman shared titular status in the MCU. (To quote the end credits scene from Ant-Man, “It’s about damn time.”)

The last time we saw Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), he was in a prison cell on the Raft, put there for aiding Captain America (Chris Evans) in Captain America: Civil War. The last time we heard about Scott Lang, we were being told by Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) that he and Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) were on house arrest after taking a plea deal, thus explaining why they didn’t appear in Infinity War. So what has Scott been up to, post-Germany but pre-Thanos (Josh Brolin)?

Well, as we have all learned over Covid quarantine, being stuck in your house for an extended period of time results in some odd hobbies. For Scott, this includes makeshift bowling, reading The Fault in Our Stars, learning the drums, and organizing treasure hunts for his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Forston). Even after the events of Captain America: Civil War, he’s still just a guy, a guy trying to make the most out of a bad situation.

In addition to taking overlong baths, Scott now also helps his friends Luis (Michael Peña), Kurt (David Dastmalchian), and Dave (T.I.) run a security outfit called—fittingly, given their criminal backgrounds—X-Con Security. Contact with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), has dwindled since they are on the run, trying to keep their technology from being taken by the government after Scott revealed himself in Civil War, but Scott—aside from bawling his eyes out over John Green—seems to be doing okay. He’s got his business, he has a good relationship with ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her husband, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), and he has only three days until he’s free, though FBI agent and parole officer Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) keeps a watchful eye. In short, things are looking up, and the supporting performers are as charming and funny as ever, with Peña once again providing some top-tier comedy with his long-winded monologues.

However, when Scott has a vision of Hank’s presumed-dead wife, Janet (Michelle Pfieffer), in the Quantum Realm (the place you go when you shrink super small and keep shrinking, or something—it’s one of those Marvel scientific inventions where you nod during the explanation and try not to think too hard about it), he inevitably crosses paths yet again with Hope and her father. Hank thinks that, during Scott’s trip to the Quantum Realm during Ant-Man, he became entangled with Janet. “Hank, I would never do that. I respect you too much,” Scott says solemnly.

“Quantum entanglement, Scott,” Hank replies, leaving us to ponder whatever the hell that means.

Hope, while thrilled at the prospect of reuniting with her mother, was also understandably stung (ha) about Scott’s escapade to Germany during the events of Civil War, and not just because doing so put a target on all her and her father’s backs. Her iciness lies largely in the fact that Scott didn’t even ask her to come with him, despite having trained with him (and “other stuffing” with him): “If I had asked, would you have come?” Scott asks, to which Hope replies, “I guess we’ll never know. But I do know one thing… If I had, you’d never have been caught.”

Though never stated outright, Hope’s resentment feels very rooted in her womanhood. Her father passed her over in Ant-Man, and then her ostensible partner did the same thing in Civil War, and while neither say anything outright about Hope’s gender, and Hope doesn’t either, it’s clear that she feels they overlooked her, unintentionally or not, because she’s a woman. It’s a narrative that has clear resonance outside of the movie, and it’s handled with a subtlety and grace that Marvel often lacks when it comes to acknowledging social issues, so Hope comes off as sympathetic and understandable in her anger rather than simply an ice queen. She is an excellent addition to the male-dominated superhero roster: competent, flawed, and, unlike many (most) of her female counterparts, never sexualized. She’s allowed to have moments of intense vulnerability with her mother, but can be angry and cold in equal measure, giving her depth that was missing in Ant-Man where she exists primarily to be the token woman. Here, Lilly gets a chance to really shine in the role; while good in Ant-Man, when given a meatier role on equal footing with her male co-star, she eats it up, and it makes you wonder (as Hope herself does) why she was left out in the first place. (And, frankly, there’s no good answer to that.)

So, though off to a rocky start, everyone is soon off to build some quantum tunnel (whatever the hell that means) or some such, requiring a testy trade with shady tech mogul Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins, having a great bit of fun), but unfortunately the parts and Hank’s lab (which has been shrunk to the size of a suitcase) gets stolen by an unknown assailant. To get it back, the gang has to go to Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), a bitter former coworker of Hank’s known as Goliath in the comics. He helps them track down the lab through some more quantum stuff (“Do you guys just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?” Scott wonders, echoing the audience’s thoughts), but when Scott, Hope, and Hank arrive to take the lab, they find themselves taken out again by that same unknown assailant, who reveals herself to be Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), aka Ghost, and it turns out that Bill Foster is working with her too. Like Ant-Man, this sequel is all about parent-child relationships, even if only related in spirit: Scott and Cassie, Hank and Hope, Janet and Hope, Bill and Ava. Some are good, some are less so, most are messy, but it’s something that connects all of our main players.

Ava is, like most Marvel villains, a bit undercooked, but she has immense potential, due largely to John-Kamen’s immense charisma. Ava is a casualty of both Hank and S.H.I.E.L.D.: when Hank, the consummate asshole, fired Ava’s father, he continued to experiment on his own; one went awry and killed both him and his wife, leaving Ava alive but with molecular instability (again, whatever the hell that means). As a result, she inadvertently phases in and out of solid objects, so S.H.I.E.L.D. got a hold of her and used that for their own advantage on covert missions, making her their own version of the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), but with a bit less brainwashing. Ava’s condition causes her constant pain and has begun to slowly kill her from the inside, and so father figure Bill wants to help her survive.

Doing so apparently means getting the lab and using Janet’s quantum energy (…whatever the hell that means) to heal Ava, which may or may not kill Janet. Somehow. It doesn’t exactly make sense, but John-Kamen nonetheless proves compelling; unlike Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and Vulture (Michael Keaton) from previous MCU movies, here Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t try too hard to paint Ava as a villain. In fact, she purposely chooses not to use Scott’s daughter, Cassie, as bait, though the option is brought up; most other MCU movies would have had the villain go down that route to establish that we shouldn’t sympathize too much with them. Here, we’re encouraged to. She’s only an antagonist because her goal of survival clashes with Hope, Hank, and Scott’s goal of freeing Janet, not because she is inherently evil or is going around beating up kids and killing her significant others. It’s an interesting take, and one with a lot of potential should Marvel ever pick up this thread down the road.

The remaining plot mostly involves four different groups trying to get to the lab: Ava, in an attempt to find a cure for her chronic pain; the bug trio, to try and get back the original Wasp; Burch, determined to sell it for a bunch of money; and the FBI, led by a Jimmy Woo determined to catch Scott breaking his house arrest. It’s not particularly complicated, nor is it particularly compelling in and of itself, but it allows for some killer comedy and sweet character beats amidst the chaos. In this case, less is more: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a better MCU entry because it doesn’t try too hard to connect to the greater universe, nor does it deal with world-ending apocalypses; instead, like its protagonists, it goes small.

It’s also very clever about its heroes’ use of their powers. It’s not only Scott who can shrink and grow, it’s now Hope, and it’s also a scientific lab, some Hot Wheels-looking cars, PEZ dispensers, and more. This makes all the car chase and fight scenes far more visually interesting than they would be otherwise, and provides no small amount of laughs. One great moment in particular involves Scott needing to make a run to his daughter’s school while his suit malfunctions, resulting in some incredible physical comedy when Scott gets stuck at around three feet tall. When you have a concept as absurd and delightful as a man who can shrink to the size of ants and grow to the size of whales, why not have as much fun as possible with it? Ant-Man and the Wasp certainly goes further with its main conceit than its predecessor did, and so even if there’s less plot to go around, it has a much firmer grasp on how best to deploy its characters and their powers. And, this time, we have double the shrinking shenanigans now that the Wasp has finally joined the team.

There is, frankly, not a lot to Ant-Man and the Wasp. But that’s okay—again, there doesn’t need to be. We just had an MCU-shattering event in Infinity War, so let’s take a little break, go back in time a bit, and enjoy watching some excellent actors bounce off each other. There’s some meat in here too, though: S.H.I.E.L.D.’s corruption continues to get exposed, once again showing that even our heroes can find themselves morally compromised; Hank and Janet reunite, and Douglas and Pfieffer, despite limited screentime together, sell the hell out of their relationship; Scott and Hope finally acknowledge each other as true partners and it isn’t some melodramatic, drawn-out saga like so many other MCU relationships are, but rather quiet and respectful. And, seriously, Michael Peña is an absolute gem in this franchise. It’s the perfect palate cleanser after Infinity War, and while it may not be the most memorable Marvel movie, but in terms of sheer enjoyment, it’s up there with the best of the best.

But, lest we get too comfortable, the end credits scenes are here to remind us that Ant-Man and the Wasp is part of a larger universe as Hope, Janet, and Hank all turn to dust from Thanos’ snap in Wakanda while Scott remains trapped in the Quantum Realm. The stinger at the very end, of a giant ant playing drums alone in Scott’s house, is equally absurd and eerie, as the camera pans over the static TV and the deserted streets of San Francisco. And so, even if you just tuned in to this movie for Paul Rudd, you’re gonna have to watch the next movie (technically the one after next) to figure out what happened to him—the Marvel machine keeps running, as always. But it was a nice break while it lasted.

Groundwork and stray observations: Marvel has no big master plan; rather, they plant seeds wherever they can in the hopes that some of them might one day germinate. None of these were planned from day one, lest the whole ship sink, but the seeds germinated nonetheless:

Ghost in the comics is a member of the antihero team the Thunderbolts, and with recent events from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Widow, a Thunderbolts team seems inevitable; hopefully Ghost is a part of that team. (I want a Thunderbolts movie or show so badly, my god.) We already have Yelena (Florence Pugh), Zemo (Daniel Brühl), US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Abomination (Tim Roth), Winter Soldier, and many more, and it seems like Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ role as Val is to serve as the Thunderbolts’ version of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). “There was an idea…,” except it’s a group of slightly less remarkable people.
Cassie makes multiple comments about being Scott’s superhero partner, alluding to her future superhero status (though she will be played as a superhero by Kathryn Newton, whom I greatly dislike, which is very, very unfortunate).
Jimmy Woo, who expresses amazement at Scott’s card tricks in the movie, reappears in WandaVision performing the exact same trick he sees in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Kurt appears in What If…? and continues to fear Baba Yaga, eventually getting killed by a zombified Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen normally, here a gurgling, animated zombie), but not before getting out one last, “Baba Yagaaaa!”
“Berkeley” was filmed at Emory University, specifically in White Hall, which is the ugliest building on campus. White Hall sucks. There was always gum under the chairs and hair tangled in the cushions.
On a similar note, Atlanta can passably stand in for many cities. It can’t really stand in for San Francisco, but they tried.

Anna’s Favorite Scene: Scott runs around an elementary school appearing like an oversized toddler. High-brow art. Or, honestly, the post-credits stinger, because it is so unsettling and such a weird vibe after a fun movie like this.

MCU Ranking: 1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2. Avengers: Infinity War, 3. Captain America: Civil War, 4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, 5. Thor: Ragnarok, 6. Guardians of the Galaxy, 7. The Avengers, 8. Spider-Man: Homecoming, 9. Captain America: The First Avenger, 10. Iron Man 3, 11. Iron Man, 12. Black Panther, 13. Ant-Man and the Wasp, 14. Doctor Strange, 15. Ant-Man, 16. Thor, 17. Avengers: Age of Ultron, 18. Thor: The Dark World, 19. Iron Man 2, 20. The Incredible Hulk

Ant-Man and the Wasp Trailer

Ant-Man and the Wasp is currently available to rent and purchase on most digital storefronts, and is streaming on D isney +.

You can follow more of Anna’s work on Letterboxd, Twitter, Instagram, and her website.

South of Heaven

Written by Alexander Reams

79/100

Jason Sudeikis is primarily known for his comedy. From his tenure at SNL and countless comedies including, but not limited to, We’re the Millers, The Change-Up, and Horrible Bosses. However for a time now, Sudeikis has been doing smaller, indie films that show off his dramatic side (Colossal, where he plays a wonderfully dark metaphor on alcoholism’s hold on a person and a toxic, manipulative relationship, and Race). Now mixing the two with his truly breathtaking eponymous role in Ted Lasso. (aka the best thing to hit TV screens since we first heard “Woke Up This Morning” on a certain New Jersey-centered show). Now he culminates this run of indie films with a film with a lot of big names, but still small at heart.

Following a 12-year prison sentence, Jason Sudeikis’ Jimmy Ray is released from prison and has one goal; spend the next year with his girlfriend/fiancee/sweetheart, Annie, played wonderfully by Evangeline Lily. This plan seemingly goes off without a hitch, sans the gorgeous Shea Wigham as a less-than morally sound parole officer, Schmidt, who hangs over Jimmy like his sins of the past. Eventually convinces the parolee to do a “favor” for Schmidt, which ends up spiraling Jimmy, and ends with him reverting to old habits. These old habits attract the attention from the mysterious and impeccably dressed Whit Price, portrayed serviceably by Mike Colter.

These preceding actions are impeccably written, clearly understanding their lead actors, supporting, not as much. As much as I love Mike Colter, I’m not sure he was the best choice to play Whit, and Shea Whigham feels like he is playing the same character he has in countless other films. Sudeikis is given so much meat to work with, and he takes advantage of this, chewing up the scenery every chance he gets, with one standout being a scene with a kid over a turkey sandwich. This scene particularly is my personal favorite, giving a break between all the chaos that has been occurring, and allowing the audience to breathe.

Standing with Sudeikis is a serivacably written Evangeline Lily and Mike Colter. While they do the best they can, the script just doesn’t hold up to muster. Which is unfortunate because the score, David Fleming channeling old school westerns in a modern world and the cinematography by Mike Mitchell, gorgeously captures the small town world that these characters occupy. I could not get past the writing that undercut Whigham, Lily, and Colter, a tragedy really, when you have such quality actors, but give them bare-bones to work with. Thankfully after all of this we are left with a truly world class turn by Sudeikis, who, by the end of this, has to answer the question “How far would you go for love?”

South of Heaven Trailer

South of Heaven is currently playing in limited theatrical release and is available to rent on VOD through limited providers.

You can connect with Alexander on his social media profiles: Instagram, Letterboxd, and Twitter. Or see more of his work on his website.

MCU Retrospective: Ant-Man

Written by Anna Harrison

70/100

Avengers: Age of Ultron was an ambitious, scrawling, sprawling mess, so worried with setting up the future MCU that it left its own plot to limp along. Ant-Man, on the other hand, switches gears, introducing a new cast and a new story, one that is largely self-contained outside of cameos from the likes of John Slattery, Hayley Atwell, and Anthony Mackie, and it’s a breath of fresh air after Age of Ultron’s world-ending robot hordes.

Yet for being such a breezy flick to watch, Ant-Man had a laborious birth. Edgar Wright was attached to an Ant-Man film as far back as 2006, though it was put on the backburner as Marvel began its plans for what would become the MCU proper and the leadup to The Avengers. In 2012, things finally got rolling: Wright shot some test footage, and by 2013 a script was ready. Casting soon became locked and loaded, but Marvel kept pushing back on the script; eventually, they even commissioned some in-house writers for rewrites without Wright’s knowledge, and this finally drove Wright away only two months before filming was supposed to begin.

“I think the most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie,” Wright said of the whole debacle. His firing is one of the nastier stories from the Creative Committee era; you can’t help but wonder what Wright’s film might have been like had he been given more creative freedom. Now free of Ike Perlmutter and his ilk, Marvel generally allows directors more creative control (to an extent, of course): Thor: Ragnarok very much feels like a Taika Waititi movie, just one with more action and starring the god of thunder, and Eternals is shaping up to closely resemble Chloé Zhao’s other directorial efforts, at least as much as a Marvel film can. Perhaps a post-Creative Committee Marvel would have been more willing to let Wright make an “Edgar Wright movie,” but who knows. (It would certainly make a great What If…? episode.)

Now with Ant-Man sans a director, Marvel had to scramble to find a replacement, courting directors such as David Wain, Ruben Fleischer, and Adam McKay before settling on Peyton Reed, previously a contender for the Guardians of the Galaxy gig. (McKay withdrew his name from directing consideration but helped out with the script enough to get a screenplay credit; he and Paul Rudd—also credited—used large chunks of Wright and Joe Cornish’s script, tweaking here and there but keeping roughly the same outline.)

Despite all the hullabaloo that occurred before shooting, the shoot itself was relatively smooth, and the finished product blends nicely into the rest of the MCU while still having enough merits on its own to make it a worthwhile, if slight, watch. It’s certainly a nice palette cleanser after Age of Ultron and gives everyone a bit of breathing room before the fisticuffs of Captain America: Civil War, the film which will kick off Phase Three.

In Ant-Man, our hero is just a dude: he’s Paul Rudd, America’s most likable everyman, funny and ageless but still a relatable guy. Scott Lang might have a master’s in electrical engineering, but he has to grind like everyone else. He’s not an uber-wealthy playboy, a genetically engineered super soldier, or a god from outer space. He’s… just a dude.

Well, not entirely. After blowing the whistle on embezzlement at his previous job, Scott hacked into his company’s bank account and distributed the money back to the customers, eventually getting arrested for his good deeds. Now out of prison and determined the walk the straight and narrow, he struggles to hold down even a job at Baskin-Robbins and is unable to see his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Forston), as he can’t make the child support payments he owes his ex-wife, Maggie (Judy Greer). Parts of his backstory—the kid, the ex-wife, the struggle to provide for himself and his family—may be more relatable than, say, the playing Robin Hood and getting thrown in prison part, but Rudd’s charming presence makes it easy to pretend that a Scott Lang could be among us. After all, at his core, he’s just a man trying to be better for his family.

However, Scott quickly backslides and gets roped into a get-rich-quick heist as he becomes desperate to find a way to make his child support payments so he can visit his daughter. He joins ex-con and friend Luis (Michael Peña), along with Kurt (David Dastmalchian, who should be in everything) and Dave (T.I., as in the rapper, who should not be in everything with all his recent sexual assault accusations), and the four set out to steal from an unknown man’s safe while he’s out of town. There, Scott finds nothing but an odd motorcycle suit, which he takes home.

Well, it turns out that motorcycle suit allows Scott to shrink to the size of an ant, and was purposely planted by Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) for Scott to find. Hank, it turns out, was the first superhero known as Ant-Man (in the comics, Hank is also the creator of Ultron, a role which was given to Tony in the MCU), and he’s been looking for someone to pass the mantle to so he can take down his rogue protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). That someone happens to be Scott.

Why Scott? There are the burglary credentials, of course, but there is also Hank’s desire to live vicariously through Scott. Hank too has a daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), though their relationship has become frosty ever since the death of Hope’s mother, Janet, and Hank seems to believe that if he can help Scott redeem his relationship with Cassie, then Hank can salvage his relationship with Hope. The father and daughter relationships in Ant-Man drive the film—specifically, the sins of the father—as both Scott and Hank try to live up to what they should be so they can have their daughters look at them with pride and love once more, though the order is taller for Hank, who has isolated himself from his daughter for nearly 20 years and all but driven her away completely.

Other than the Thor franchise, few other Marvel films have such a focus on family, and the complicated dynamics at play here elevate the character relationships in the film. The “overprotective parent (usually a father) wants to shield their child (usually a daughter) from the world so they inadvertently stifle them” trope has been done a thousand times before, but Douglas and Lilly do excellent work here and make Hank and Hope’s relationship more than the sum of its stereotypes.

While Scott and Cassie’s relationship can’t have quite the same depth (she is a small child, after all), Cassie is just so damn cute that you might want to end up adopting her, and her presence succeeds in grounding Scott the way Whedon wished Hawkeye’s nameless spawn would have in Age of Ultron. Cassie isn’t just some random child inserted so we feel empathy for a character, she has a personality and plot function in her own right, and as a result this MCU family is one we actually care about. Take notes, Joss! (Also, as far as I know, Peyton Reed is a decent guy, so maybe take notes on that too, Joss…)

Hope, of course, will join Ant-Man as a titular character in her next film, Ant-Man and the Wasp, as the stinger at the end (pun intended) hints at. As she very rightly points out to her father in this Ant-Man, she has all the skills necessary to stop Cross from selling the Ant-Man technology to Hydra, yet her father won’t entrust her to do so. Finally trying to rectify the pain he caused his daughter, Hank eventually reveals the truth about Hope’s mom: Janet had been a compatriot known as the Wasp and, in order to stop a Soviet missile in 1987, had to go “subatomic,” meaning she was lost forever to the Quantum Realm (aka the microverse, but Marvel can’t say that for legal reasons, because nothing’s ever easy when you sold off a bunch of your IP to keep your company afloat), and so he never wanted his daughter to risk befalling the same fate. Now that she understands the reason behind Hank’s overprotective nature, Hope manages to forgive him.

Of course, as the sole female of the movie, Hope was bound to become romantically entangled with Scott, though this movie is more setup than payoff. And, to the movie’s credit, Hope stands far better on her own two feet than most other Marvel love interests, and she has relationships that are important to the plot other than the one she shares with Scott. Hope stands nearly side by side with our titular hero in Ant-Man and has her own grand ambitions outside of him, so it’s no surprise that she gets co-billing the next time around. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, even if Evangeline Lilly’s wig strains believability in certain scenes.

But, of course, it’s not Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so Hope stays largely on the sidelines of the action as everyone prepares to stop Cross. Like Captain America: The Winter Soldier before it, Ant-Man attempts to cross genres, but where Winter Soldier went for political thriller, Ant-Man goes for heist movie, and the results aren’t as grand or elaborate as an Ocean’s Eleven, but they’re fun sojourns nonetheless (though why you wouldn’t go as balls to the wall as possible with your heists when your hero can control ants and get up to all sorts of shenanigans is beyond me).

The inevitable Ant-Man vs. Cross-in-the-Yellowjacket-suit showdown that we march towards is bolstered by the fact that it involves two men who can shrink to the size of insects, which results in some great set pieces and one excellent Siri joke. While he doesn’t play an overly memorable villain, Corey Stoll is quite good at creating a manic glint in his eye, and it’s enjoyable enough to watch his sanity slowly slip. (Does that make me sound psychopathic?) Gone are the masses of indistinguishable bad guys from the two Avengers movies so far; instead, we have two grown men running around a Thomas the Tank Engine playset, the life and death stakes with which they battle looking pretty meager when the camera zooms out and all we see is poor Thomas quietly falling off his tracks, accompanied by some pitiful sparks. The MCU has, historically, not been known for its creative fight sequences, so Ant-Man’s playful action provides an excellent dose of fun and makes full use of its hero’s unique and rather bizarre superpowers.

That said, Ant-Man is certainly not the most memorable Marvel movie, and falls pretty squarely in the middle. It’s certainly a good deal tighter than Age of Ultron’s unwieldy mess and the burgeoning relationship between Scott and Hope has more going for it than, say, Natasha and Bruce’s ogling of each other, but you’d be forgiven if you don’t remember specific plot details from the movie. This review isn’t as long as the others for a reason: there’s just not as much to discuss.

Ant-Man is perhaps the best example of your typical Marvel movie post-Phase One: it’s inoffensive fun bolstered by a game cast (Peña provides some of the best humor in the MCU) and an easy way to spend an afternoon. Like, really, it is a whole lot of fun. Marvel has finally become a well-oiled machine, and so Ant-Man comes off the assembly line ready to drive exactly how you expected (and how you like), but it’s not going to be winning races anytime soon. (Is that how car metaphors work? I don’t know.) For some, that’s an indication that Marvel is too stale, that it lacks creativity and too often plays it safe. And to a certain extent, that’s true: they’ve found a formula and they’ve stuck to it. But for others, that formula works even when it’s not firing on all cylinders, and maybe that’s enough.

If that’s good for movies as a whole, well, let’s wait until Avengers: Endgame to unpack Marvel’s prickly cinematic legacy.

Groundwork: Marvel has no big master plan; rather, they plant seeds wherever they can in the hopes that some of them might one day germinate. None of these were planned from day one, lest the whole ship sink, but the seeds germinated nonetheless:

“Tales to astonish!” Cross says at one point, mocking the tales of Hank Pym’s time as Ant-Man. Tales to Astonish was the comic series that introduced Ant-Man. Not groundwork, but fun.
If Scott returned from the Quantum Realm/going subatomic, it stands to reason that the presumed-dead Janet van Dyne could too, no? And we see a shape that looks suspiciously like the Wasp while Scott’s in the Quantum Realm.
In the comics, Cassie Lang becomes the superhero known as Stature. With the casting of Kathryn Newton as an older Cassie Lang, it seems inevitable that Stature (and the Young Avengers) will soon make her MCU debut. (Kathryn Newton has consistently rubbed me the wrong way as a performer, and it was shitty of Marvel to recast Emma Fuhrmann—the older Cassie in Endgame—without telling her. But I should withhold judgement until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania… I guess.)
Hank talks about how he never wants his work falling back into the hands of a Stark. Well, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but… that’s exactly what’s gonna happen in Endgame.
There was a whole theory that the TVA in Loki was actually located in the Quantum Realm. Technically that hasn’t been disproven yet, but it seems unlikely. Still…

Anna’s Favorite Scene: The Falcon vs. Ant-Man. The cameo is brief enough not to overshadow everyone else in the movie and keeps the MCU connected even when it’s not an Avengers movie, plus it’s funny to watch Sam get dragged around a bit.

MCU Ranking: 1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2. Guardians of the Galaxy, 3. The Avengers, 4. Captain America: The First Avenger, 5. Iron Man 3, 6. Iron Man, 7. Ant-Man, 8. Thor, 9. Avengers: Age of Ultron, 10. Thor: The Dark World, 11. Iron Man 2, 12. The Incredible Hulk

Ant-Man Trailer

Ant-Man is currently available to rent and purchase on most digital storefronts, and is streaming on Disney +.

You can follow more of Anna’s work on Letterboxd, Twitter, Instagram, and her website.