So Ant-Man & The Wasp kinda sucked.
It was pretty much just a bunch of fucking nothing.
The main conflict of the movie is that they want to rescue Janet, whom they had accepted was gone forever for 30 years. So the stakes are; if they fail, nothing changes. The status quo continues on as if nothing ever happened. What makes it extra egregious is that the trailers fucking lied to us. They have this voice-over from Luis saying something about how Ghost stole their tech and went crazy and tried to take over the world and it’s like;
Not only is the line not even in the movie, not one part of it was true. The line tries to make it sound like Ghost got her suit and powers from an accident that happened after stealing Pym’s tech, but her accident happened when she was a kid and could only be considered theft in terms of intellectual property rights, and it was done by her father, not her. The suit was actually given to her by SHIELD. She does steal Pym’s lab, but if that’s what Luis meant, he would’ve said “lab”. He wouldn’t have phrased it that way. Furthermore, her goal isn’t to take over the world or do anything destructive, she just wants to not die and the only person who stands to get hurt by her achieving that goal is a woman who was already considered as good as dead for 30 years. Plus like, I know this doesn’t apply to every culture, but in Western, or at least American culture, the general rule is that the youngest lives are considered most valuable. The closer you are to dying of natural causes, the lower the priority of your survival. So it feels kind of ass-backwards that I’m supposed to root for a woman who’s already had like 30 good years of life with a great career that included saving the world, and getting married and having a family who’ve had 30 years to accept her being gone, over a young woman who was an innocent victim of a tragic accident and has spent most of her short life in constant pain.
They don’t even make Ghost that morally gray. They basically give her this bullshit reason to hate Hank because she blames him for firing and discrediting her father, leading him to take reckless unsafe actions to try and complete his work. But they don’t want Hank to really be responsible so they have him say that her dad legit stole intellectual property and he had every right to do what he did. But either way, the dad was still ultimately responsible for his own choices. But the thing is, even though Ghost has that stupid tangentially-related reason for hating Hank, she never does anything to him. There’s a scene where she has him at her mercy, he fakes having a heart attack, and she just allows Morpheus to go for the pills to save him and doesn’t try to stop him until she realizes its a trick. There’s also a moment where Morpheus tells her that he won’t help her if she goes after Scott’s daughter. Like, presumably she was just going to hold her as a hostage, no reason why she would have to actually hurt her. But to Morpheus, that’s crossing a line, even though their entire plan is to kill Janet. And then Ghost just... Doesn’t go after the daughter. She says something like “There are other ways” and because Morpheus’s line to her right before it was “If you do that, I won’t help you” it tricks you into thinking she means there are other ways she can get what she wants without his help, and she’s going to cast him aside. But no, she just decides to get the lab back by actually going to get it instead of holding the daughter hostage and doesn’t turn on Morpheus until he tells her he’s not going to help her anyway because he’s suddenly had a change of heart because Hank said he’d try and help Ghost. But like, the whole reason Ghost is going through everything she’s doing is because she has like, weeks left to live. She doesn’t have time for Hank and/or Janet to come up with a miracle cure.
But then of course they get Janet back and Janet just has magic healing powers from being in the quantum realm and that fixes everything. Except the movie kind of implies that it doesn’t. She fixes Ghost, then the next time we see her she’s acting like she’s in pain and telling Morpheus to run away. Then in the post credits scene they say something about how they’re going to the quantum realm again to gather quantum energy for her. So I guess they just extended her lifespan a little but are still working on a permanent fix.
But none of that ultimately matters because at the end of the day, everyone gets snapped. Yeah, the entire movie that was about saving Janet, ends with Janet, along with Hank and Hope, turning to dust while Scott is stuck in the quantum realm with no way out. So there is basically zero reason to see this movie. Like, if you thought Iron Man 2 and 3 or Thor 2 were just filler movies of no consequence, at least some things happened that carried over into future films. Like, War Machine was introduced in IM2 and IM3 had Tony removing the shrapnel from his heart and getting rid of the reactor in his chest while Thor 2 had Loki faking his death and sending his dad away, setting the stage for Ragnarok. Ant-Man just ends with everyone either dead or out-of-commission with no hope of having any involvement in the next Avengers movie. Like, the only possible way this film could carryover any consequences to the next film would be if maybe Ghost survived the purge, still has her powers, and they make her one of the new Avengers alongside Captain Marvel.
Also, the movie ends with “Ant-Man and The Wasp will return?” which like, why would they even have that unless the answer was “yes”? Of course they’re going to return. I mean, it’s not like they didn’t already telegraph pretty hard that The Snap was going to be undone in Infinity War itself, but come on, restrain yourselves. I know people already assume that because it’s based on comic books the deaths are all going to be undone, but you’ve gotta at least try to make us think they’re permanent.
