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Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

That's not how physics work.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is an American superhero movie directed by Peyton Reed starring Paul Rudd (Scott Lang), Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne), and Michael Douglas (Hank Pym). It is based on the characters and storyline created by Marvel Comics, and is a direct sequel to the movie Ant-Man which was released three years prior. In addition, it's also part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Therefore, the movie takes place two years after the events of one of Marvel Studios's most successful movies Civil War (2016) wherein Scott is enlisted to help Captain America and his friends go up against Iron Man and his friends. Ant-Man and the Wasp deals with the fallout of the aforementioned fight and the legal repercussions that Scott has to endure because of it. However, as his house arrest draws to an end, Scott is forced to break the law once again in order to help the people whom he let down by having gone out on his own to assist Captain America in the fight. The movie focuses on Scott finding a way to accomplish both goals without comprising either his freedom or his chance to mend his broken relationships in addition to finding Hope's—his love interest and one of the people whom he let down—mother who is stuck in the quantum realm.

Going into this movie, I didn't really have any expectations for it. I just wanted to see if they would all fade away into grey particles at the end of the movie. (Spoiler alert: they don't disappoint.) However, I still left the movie theatre feeling more or less disappointed by the movie. I don't think I can really review this movie without revealing at least some spoilers so consider yourself warned.

Peyton Reed returns to direct the Ant-Man sequel after having taken over the original movie's project back in 2015 when Edgar Wright left because of "creative differences." And I gotta say, without the slight hints of Wright's visual comedy and glimpses of the version of the movie which he wanted to make shining through in the final product, the sequel to Ant-Man comes off as being pretty tepid. Ant-Man and the Wasp is your favorite but warm beer. It's the prettiest dress in the store but is also several sizes too large. It's that one last bowling pin you can't knock down. It's the type of movie Mindy St. Claire would be allowed to watching while living in The Medium Place. (The Good Place is also one of the best TV Shows out there so go check it out.) In short, Ant-Man is two steps away from being the next Civil War for me but it's too… passable of a movie for me to hate it.

And yes, I hated Civil War. Come at me, bro.

I'll start by listing out the two most common MCU movie problems which Ant-Man exhibited with gusto and which I thought weren't that glaring or at least bothersome until now:

They have terrible villains.

The excessive amount of jokes in the movie, especially the ones positioned at moments which are supposed to be intense or emotional, more often than not undermines the seriousness of the situation in a negative way, and therefore, bear a high risk of making the movie fail to suspend the audience's disbelief.

There are three main groups of people out to get Scotty and Co.: the FBI, the high-tech-parts-selling/greedy/murderous/morally-fucked/we're-doing-bad-things-because-we're-bad gang, and Ghost and Bill Foster. The FBI is keeping a keen eye on Scott because of his direct involvement in the Civil War fight and they're after Hope and Hank because it was their tech that Scott used in the fight in Civil War and any association with any person that's affiliated with Team Cap is against the Sokovia Accords and is considered to be against international law. There's this whole expositional soliloquy that the Special Agent in charge of Scott's case gives to his kid during the first fifteen minutes of the movie that's passed off to be a humorous moment so if you don't get it now, you'll get it when you see the movie… I guess. Then there's the high-tech-parts-selling/greedy/murderous/morally-fucked/we're-doing-bad-things-because-we're-bad gang (we'll just call them the HTPS/G/M/MF/WDBTBWB gang from now on) who is out to get them because they want their shrinkable lab because $$$ and. Well. The HTPS/G/M/MF/WDBTBWB gang is pretty self-explanatory. They're the filler villains used as a plot device so we can have dangerous action scenes and kill them off without feeling like we have a moral obligation to feel bad for them. It's a win-win situation, you see.

Then, we have Ghost (aka Ava, played by Hannah John-Kamen) and Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne) who are also after Scott and Co. for their lab. You see, the lab in question is used as more or less of a MacMuffin in the movie and if you think about it too much, the logic behind it will start to unravel. Shit like "How did the HTPS/G/M/MF/WDBTBWB gang know that Hank and Hope had the lab to begin with? Sure, they had an inside informer in the FBI but if the FBI had already known that Hank and Hope had such a lab, you'd think that they'd have somehow figured out a way to track it down. Or, you know, issued out a warning to people that should they see a fucking SHRINKING BUILDING or a building that's suddenly enlarged SEVERAL THOUSAND TIMES ITS ORIGINAL SIZE or an abnormal indent on the ground that looked like something really big and heavy with a flat bottom had been pressed down onto it and disappeared, they should contact law enforcements immediately" will start to surface in your mind and you'll go fucking crazy. So just don't think about it.

The motives that drives Ghost and Bill are, to some extent, understandable. Back when Hank was still working for S.H.I.E.L.D., he and Ghost's dad were working on a research project together that ended up in an explosion which killed both of Ghost's parents and fucked her up. So now, her molecules are always tearing themselves apart and stitching themselves back together over and over again. It's supposedly a very painful thing to have to endure but we don't really feel or see that pain because the actress makes Ghost seem like low-rent Bellatrix Lestrange. In regards to Bill Foster, he just happened to encounter her when she was a little kid in a chance meeting and decided that he wanted to help her. He also happens to hate Hank because they were once partners and Hank was supposedly a dick yada yada yada. We also got a shot of Bill stating seemingly innocuously that he hates Hank that's meant to serve as a sort of foreshadowing to the revelation of him being the one who's been helping Ghost all this time but it falls short in my opinion. The directing is just off and I think that's why a lot of the emotional undertones of the scenes in the movie completely flew over my head.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. Despite their rather well-established backstories, I have a lot of problems with the Ghost and Bill's storylines and their execution. Things like: how the fuck would the extraction of quantum energy from Janet (Hope's mother, played by Michelle Pfeiffer) help Ghost to repair her molecules in any way? Yes, she's been in there long enough that you can posit that she's absorbed a good amount of “quantum energy” (whatever the fuck that is), but how the fuck is one supposed to extract such a thing from a living, breathing person? Is it like extract essence from a living organism? How the fuck do you go about it? How did Ghost and Bill come up with this hypothesis? Why did they decide to steal the lab and the last part that's needed to get the Quantum Tunnel working at the same time? Why not just, I don't know, fucking wait until they've finished building the tunnel then attack them while their guard is down? In addition, at first when Hank and Hope responded to their (insane) plan of extracting quantum energy from Janet with: "No! Are you crazy, you could kill her!," Bill shouted back: "You don't know that!" (These are not direct quotes, guys.) And he was right, they didn’t. But then the movie just moves on to treating the plan as if it would actually kill Janet no matter what anyways? Um, excuse me? You can throw a bunch of physics lingo around in the movie and expect the audience to just take it to mean that the characters are smart but not show the characters contemplating the viability of Ghost and Bill's plans like the smart, rational scientists that they all supposedly are before scratching it off as being impossible and them being the evil ones? Well, here are some pretty useful science-y lingo for you, too: "margin of error," "confidence interval," "the normal distribution," "risk calculation and management," "statistics." Seriously, they're fucking scientists. Don't just rule out a hypothesis without having done a proper null hypothesis test.

I don't want to keep hating on this movie because Marvel movies are one of the few sources that I have left through which I can get my dopamine production pumping, okay? That being said, both Bill and Ghost’s character development sucks balls, man. I don't want to go too deep into it but the characters' beliefs and stances keep flip-flopping back and forth. Bill's on Ghost's side but when she threatens to do some vague, harmful thing to either Hank's and Scott's daughter (I can't remember which one she threatened), Bill turns on her and tells her that he can tolerate a lot of the things she does but not that. And honestly, I'm like???????? What have you tolerated? Can you please expound? What has she done that's made you uncomfortable but because you feel a bond to her, you just let it go? Why don't you want Ghost to do the vague, unspoken thing that she threatened to do even though you've been able to tolerate most of the things she's been doing? Is it because that's just one step toward the darker end of the morally grey area that you don't want to make? But didn't you hesitate to give Hank the medicine he supposedly needed for his illness or else he was going to die even though you obviously needed him to be alive in order to execute your plan? I'm not sure but I think Bill also threatened kill someone if they didn't do what he said.

On top of all of that, we never really see the bond between Bill and Ghost. They're not friends or whatever kind of deeper relationship the movie is trying to push. They're more like acquaintances helping each other out because they're after the same goal which severely weighs the movie down in terms of getting the audience to develop any kind of attachment to these characters and their relationships with each other. This aloofness impacts the movie pretty poorly in terms of attempting to establish an emotional connection with the audience but it helps with the logic of the movie's plot development in the sense that maybe it's because Bill isn't as committed to his initial goal and to Ghost that he does a pretty half-assed job in trying to achieve that goal for the rest of the movie. I'm not sure if I meant that as a compliment or a criticism. Maybe a little bit of both? But then if you think about it in terms of character development where a character undergoes changes in their beliefs and perspective then if the movie did intend on Bill not having that strong of an attachment to Ghost and their goal from the start as opposed to Bill having had a change of heart mid-movie then… the writing of his character is pretty shitty. Moreover, even if they did intend on writing his character to have a slight change of heart after the stunt Ghost tries to pull, then the writing and execution of his character is still shitty because we have no build-up to Bill being fed up with Ghost's antics and he still goes on to help her anyway up until the end of the movie where he just… gives up? Honestly, Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure has better character development than this; and we haven't even touched Ghost's character development yet.

Okay. So. I don't get what the fuck Ghost's character is supposed to be. I don't mean that in terms of what her character is supposed to be doing as a function in the movie or what her character on paper actually is. I'm talking about who Ghost is supposed to be as a person. What's she feeling? What's her motivation? Her trend of thoughts? At the beginning of the movie, I see an unknown entity kicking ass. Cool. Then, when she's revealed to be not all that and is actually struggling, I see a person whose life force is leaking from her existence and is, therefore, understandably doing the good guys wrong because she's afraid she's going to die. Great! She sounds like such an exciting and intriguing character. Fast forward and we see her staring at Scott like a fucking lunatic after having knocked out and bound Scott and Co. up. I wasn't kidding when I said John-Kamen's portrayal of the character is the low-rent version of Bellatrix Lestrange. Right then, I thought… okay… she's a little kooky but that could work…? Spoiler alert: no, it fucking doesn't. Why? Because any sympathy I've started to develop for this character gets thrown out the window when the following dialogue insinuates that one of the reasons why Ghost and Bill are doing what they are doing is because Hank Pym fucked them up and so, they're spiteful and are more or less seeking revenge. Oy, vey. After Scott and Co. escapes with the lab, Ghost proposes that she goes after [insert correct name here because R.I.P. my memory]'s daughter which further clues the audience in on the lengths that she is willing to go to achieve her goal. Therefore, it further paints her as being more of a ruthlessly vindictive antagonist rather than a sympathetic one. The movie rides this coat of paint for her character all the way to the end when Janet and Hank returns from the Quantum Realm and Janet heals Ghost with her quantum healing powers (don't worry, we'll get to that in a bit). Then, Ghost tears up and becomes meek and fragile and docile.

Look.

I know what tone that they were striving for in regards to Ghost. I do. They're trying to make her into a desperate character who's doing all of these terrible things because she's not in her right mind—remember, she is supposed to be under a lot of pain all the time. However, the script doesn't convey this well at all and John-Kamen's terrible performance doesn’t help. We can't feel her pain, we can't sympathize with her or her partner Bill. In addition, Ghost's motivations for doing the things she did falls apart when you consider the fact that she once made a deal with S.H.I.E.L.D. in order to have herself killed because the pain was too unbearable. Despite that fact, the movie proceeds to tell you that she's going through all of this trouble and attacking all of these people because she knows she's going to fade away in a couple of weeks and die. If she wanted to die, why didn't she just wait it out? Her actions throughout the movie points to the answer: she doesn't want to die, either because she's scared of the notion or because she sees an alternative solution to her situation. So, she’s fighting for her survival—which makes sense. However, because she's barreling through all of these people and is willing to go to extreme lengths ensure her mortality, the line of logic just turns back to pointing toward the conclusion that she's a ruthlessly vindictive cunt. Of course, you can use the loose argument that maybe the movie is creating a character that's more realistic in the way that her decisions and thoughts and personality is complicated and shit. Because, you know,

But, here's the thing.

This is a movie and a movie needs to character narratives and plots and shit like that because

Prime example: Boyhood (2016) dir. Richard Linklater.

IT JUST DOESN’T. OKAY?

Gifs originally posted by: crazyexedits

Lastly, if the decision which the character makes is a random one that's an anomaly given the context of their decision making history, then sure, it can be overlooked. But when most of the decisions which the character makes are based on the same logic and are in the same vein as each other, then it's a pattern and a pattern always reveal something about the character no matter what. Therefore, once again, I posit that the movie just fails spectacularly in trying to make Ghost a more fleshed out villain. However, at the end of the day, it's just sad to watch it unravel on screen because goddamn it, my precious dopamines.

Talking about things unravelling, I can't not mention my fucking suspension of disbelief. Guys, I've bought into almost every single Marvel movie out there, okay? I don't have a problem with turning my brain off in exchange for a good time. But when the logic is so glaringly bad that it impacts my commitment to getting those dopamines zipping through my brain, then we've got a problem.

Fucking quantum healing powers. I'm sorry, I just can't. You don't just mix hard Ant-Man science with Dr. Strange voodoo magic. Sure, nobody thought that a talking tree and a raccoon would end up making people big bucks, but there are some lines that you just don't cross. You can't tout your movie as being science-y and make your characters spout all of these physics lingo then have one of your characters possess healing powers. I don't care if they're quantum healing powers, and I don't care how much you've pushed the narrative that "she's been there so long she was able to soak in all of that quantum energy goodness" throughout the movie. It just shits on every ounce of effort I was putting into trying to keep myself engaged in the movie because my suspension of disbelief up until then had already been mauled by watching over-ten-stories-tall buildings without any foundation shrinking and enlarging and badly written dialogues that could have easily been put into literally any other action/thriller movie and try-hard jokes.

Also, y'all need to stop putting "quantum" in front of everything.

Hey, I fucking took Marvel's bait for Dr. Strange like it was nobody's business so don't go telling me that I'm a no-fun motherfucker who doesn't know how to just chill and enjoy a movie. And don't say that it's just a stupid movie made for kids, just let it go, because I've praised Marvel for their attention to detail and meticulousness when it comes to producing a movie that not only does well in the box office but is also technically good. Of course, the quality of their movies vary from movie to movie but I've always held Marvel in relatively high regards in terms of their technical execution of their material. Therefore, to have experienced Ant-Man and the Wasp and found it subpar to most of Marvel Studios's previous projects, I'm mostly just saddened (and somewhat enraged) by the missed potential for this movie.

Lastly, there are two end-credit scenes. Stay for the middle one. Leave before the last one unless you really like enlarged ants playing drums.

Final verdict: 2.5/5

Sidenote: No fucking wonder the script is fucking lackluster. Five different people worked on it, jesus fucking christ.

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