Despite enjoying the film, I feel like it’s with complaining about a few of the major flaws with it.
Overall, I enjoy any Marvel superhero movie where they don’t seem to be constrained by a need to introduce characters and plot points for other movies or, simply, because the studio wants to be able to sell the rights to more toy figurines. So, I do appreciate that this movie keeps it tight. They have their one story and they stick to it and the smallest possible cast necessary to make it happen.
But, it must be pointed out that “& the Wasp” is not a reasonable description of this film. I don’t believe that Evangeline Lily has any notable lines in this film beyond establishing that she’s angry with Scott Lang and then I’m love with him again. And, notably, there’s no actual transition between those two, not catalyst for the change. The angry part sufficed for all the jokes the writers had to offer on the subject, so they crank Lily around and turn her into romance mode so hard that you can see the puppet strings.
That said, I wouldn’t say that any character had any appreciable character development in this film. Ant-Man’s daughter seems to be the only real human in the whole thing, and everyone else is just a cardboard cutout to hang some one liners on.
The first third of the film feels strongly like the writers were told to use the same general setup as the first film. Pym and van Dynne (Evangeline Lily) are angry and distrusting of him, Rudd is an unreliable idiot of a man that is very dedicated to everyone and has a super ability to accomplish any task set to him (e.g., the unreliable part is only there for a few throwaway lines), and despite that van Dynne falls in love with him anyways and Pym grudgingly approves.
While the movie does follow that structure through the whole thing, like I said it’s just the first third that feels forced. Why are they angry at him? Because he saved Earth at the request of Captain Freaking America. If we’re supposed to buy that the Pyms would be angry at Lang for that, then we basically have to assume that they’re horrible people. And yet…they’re the heroes of the film? It just feels like they needed an excuse to make the two of them angry, to match the structure of the first film from start to finish.
But doing that means that van Dynne’s role hasn’t changed from the first movie. She’s just “the love interest” all over again, and in all the same ways as the first film. So even accepting that there were no roles of depth in the film, the writers still do more to try and develop the character of Ghost into a real boy (I mean girl) than they do with one of the characters that the movie is titled after.
And with Ghost, they largely turn her into a Daddy’s girl who can’t refuse her father figure anything. So, yeah, joy.
The whole movie felt like the writers and producers were trying to respond to the Bechdel test by introducing Ghost and Mrs. Pym into the series and putting Wasp in the title, but none of it works. There’s a scene where the characters are standing behind a classroom of physics students and we’re zoomed in on the three sitting in the back, just in front of the main characters. All three of the extras are women (yay!) But then you have two male scientists, two sets of comedy relief characters (Michael Pena’s team and Walton Goggin’s) who are all male, all the police and FBI chasing them are all male, and the only two real female characters, Ghost and van Dynne, are completely subservient to their fathers and don’t seem to have any life beyond that.
Scott and Morpheus have a nice little meaningless conversation about who can get bigger and how tiring it is, as a setup for the big moment when Ant-Man becomes huge and saves the day later. He had this cool idea to distract the police by inflating his suit and setting it up against a wall. When does the Wasp ever do anything spectacular or clever? At the best, she has a car chase scene showing off how amazing she is, but then Michael Pena’s copies all of her moves and he’s just some dumbass with access to all the same toys.
So, yeah, not too surprised by the number of women’s names here:
Directed by
Peyton Reed
Produced by
Kevin Feige
Stephen Broussard
Written by
Chris McKenna
Erik Sommers
Paul Rudd
Andrew Barrer
Gabriel Ferrari
Cinematography
Dante Spinotti
Edited by
Dan Lebental
Craig Wood
And my final complaint is Michelle Pfeiffer. I mean she was fine. But her presentation in the movie left the sci-fi setting off the film and went straight into magic. How will she heal Ghost? Magic. How does she control Scott’s mind? Magic.
Like, sure, magic does exist in the MCU, but everything we see in this film and given that we’re dealing with tardigrades and quantum life and such, one would hope for better techno-babble than “quantum means magic, everyone!” I mean c’mon people, it’s not that hard.
“If you suck all of the quantum energy out of her she might die!”
That’s TV show level writing, right there. This is a multi-hundred million dollar Hollywood mega-production. You can do better than that.
As for Pfeiffer herself, I hope we see more of her. She was always a good actor. It’s been a shame that she hasn’t been in more films (hopefully not due to Weinstein).
