Ant-Man

With Antman, Marvel has decided to take the plunge into the truly ridiculous. At this point it seems like they’re trying to see how far they can push it.”Lets make a movie where the superhero shrinks and hangs out with ants!” And does their hubris payoff? Surprisingly yes.

Paul Rudd was a great casting choice for the lead of Antman as Scott Lang, the burglar chosen by legendary Marvel scientist Hank Pym to take up the Antman suit and stop his technology from going global. The story is pretty basic, lets face it. The reason this movie exists is because the hero Antman actually has a unique set of powers he haven’t really seen yet in our current swath of comic book films: he can shrink down to insect size.

The key to success for a movie like this is whether they can take that premise and utilize it well. So do they? Absolutely. They went all out with the shrinking scenes, showing us a variety of different locations for him to be small in, like a bathtub, a night club, a pipeline, and a child’s room. There’s even a cool fight scene that takes place entirely inside a suitcase. These were the scenes that make this movie cool and sets it apart from the rest.

I do have to admit however that the CGI was a little iffy. The challenge here was to create these “giant” environments and to have many ants at the same scale as Scott himself. But honestly, the animation felt rushed and while there was detail, it seemed glossy and not entirely grounded. The ants especially. There’s a scene where he gets really small that I liked and wished I was able to see things in more detail. Until the end of that scene where it became weirdly like 2001.

Antman is another notch in Marvel’s repertoire, and one which I liked. Its not amazing; the villain is again rather bland and predictable, the story is a very basic “becoming a hero, stopping a global threat’ variation. The obligatory Avengers cameo felt really tacked on too.  But the fun of this film is made up through the cool shrinking action scenes and the great humour throughout, provided mostly by Rudd and co-star Michael Pena. So somehow, Marvel pulled off this ridiculous premise and made another exciting entry in their filmography.

8/10