All These Creations: July 2015

Year: 2015

Director: Peyton Reed

Writer: Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd

Stars: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll, Michael Peña,

With a warm heart, lots of funny moments and inventive action sequences that take full advantage of the weird superhero powers, “Ant-Man” is one of the more contained Marvel movies and easily one of the best MCU titles.

Granted, if “Ant-Man” was completed by Edgar Wright, it might have been a much more distinctive film, but it’s surprising how well it turned out after all the tribulations in production. The main characters are well rounded, although the villain (despite Corey Stoll doing a great job) could have been a bit better developed.

Still, Peyton Reed provided us with a solid story that although being quite wacky has the family theme in its core, particularly the relationship between fathers and daughters, and sons. Most importantly, the film consistently sticks to it. The screenwriters of “Ant-Man” are presenting us to complex characters with believable relationships. Even the standard setup of the hero, trying to win back the acceptance of his family, has some small twists and surprises. And Scott Lang’s daughter isn’t just a plot device, she actually has some of the coolest lines and was really adorable. The other daughter in the story, Hope, is probably the best female character Marvel has introduced so far. Some actually think that she was the secret hero of the movie. She’s a strong character, arguably stronger than Scott, but also complex and emotional. And in contrast to Black Widow – not sexualized. So, needless to say, Evangeline Lilly’s performance was completely befitting.

A pleasant surprise is the big presence of Michael Douglas’ character in the movie and it’s visible that he put passion and effort in his portrayal of Dr. Hank Pym. He and Evangeline Lilly have great and sometimes emotional scenes together, which sufficiently help us understand their motivations, weaknesses and desires. Thus, the main focus of the movie is actually the importance of the relationship between parents and kids.

“Ant-man’’ is one of the funniest Marvel movies. A few jokes didn’t exactly work for me, but there are a few laugh-out-loud moments as well. Of course, Paul Rudd handles the comedy well and thankfully, he fills in the superhero shoes just as well. He clearly has enough charisma to be a leading man in the crazy Marvel Universe.

What I find to be the best utilized aspect of the film is the actual shrinking technology and the creative ways, in which it’s used to get the characters out of various situations. It is really something fresh that we haven’t seen and Marvel made it look really cool on the big screen. With great macro-photography with real ants shot for reference (they even had ant wrangler on set), the shrinking scenes can actually make you dizzy, putting you right there with Scott and the ants, where you can feel the epic scale of the surroundings. Speaking of ants, they manage to be rather adorable characters, too.

The macro-photography is a technique often used for bug documentaries and here it’s combined with motion capture, which inserts the actors into these magnified real-life environments. Of course, they use some CGI and there’s a wonderful sequence toward the end that delves deeper (literally) into the science behind the costume and represents some theories in Physics quite excitingly.

The tie-ins to the other Marvel movies were also surprising, because they felt better explained and organic, unlike what we saw in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”. And the end-credit sequences were not just cool glimpses in the future, but actually provided some essential information.