Thoughts on Ant-Man and the Wasp

I adored Ant-Man and the Wasp.

It worked on several different levels for me.

The following text contains spoilers. The movie also came out July 6th, so I hope we're good.

The sheer charm of Paul Rudd was one factor, along with the the room that the script gave him to be a goofy and endearing father. It would be easy to get a crush on him from this film alone.

I liked the way they played with size. Stan Lee once said that a weakness in the original Ant-Man comics was that they didn't do enough sight gags to take advantage of how the shrinking. There were some great contrasts here, with some pretty clever gags. Having Scott stuck at an odd size and getting around it by posing as a child, having two people of mismatched sizes stuck in the same closet, and many pieces with buildings and vehicles changing sizes (plus one large Hello Kitty Pez dispenser) was both cool and fun.

What I ended up liking most was the caring. Every person mattered. That included cold-hearted criminals and mostly competent but somewhat insecure government agents. (Yeah, getting actors like Walton Goggins and Randall Park doesn't hurt.)

It included a very messed up villain. Ghost caused a lot of problems, and was willing to do worse. The visual effects they used to convey her being out of phase were effective, but you were also able to feel empathy for all of the loss and for the constant pain.

It would have been easy to let her character go, and it could have happened in multiple ways. She could have been taken out by other characters as they attempted to defend themselves or protect Janet. She could have gotten to Janet, started the energy absorption, and have it backfire horribly, killing her that way. She could also have had a redemptive arc, where she decided that costing someone else's life and someone else's parent was not worth it, and let herself fade away.

I really wasn't expecting her to just be okay, to be healed, and to have someone standing by her, even when arrest was likely. She was around people who understood that she mattered too, though. That's what made the difference.

Finally, I really loved the scale. No, that's not about the size jokes.

I think I remember Gail Simone once saying that she would rather read a story about someone trying to save a dog than save the world. Those big whole world stories can get exhausting, and a bit repetitive. So for me, much of the emotion came down to Hope. Hope's desperation to see her mother again, her hope that it could be possible, and fear of losing that hope again. I needed them to be reunited.

That's not that the big world movies can't have emotional impact, or even that I won't write about that tomorrow, but this was a really good film.

But for all of the many things that Ant-Man and the Wasp did right, the one that stays with me most is that lives mattered. Even ants getting eaten by sea gulls mattered (even if you laughed at Scott's cry of "Murderers!"). And when you care about life, you try and preserve it.