My Thoughts on Ant-Man: A Close-Up Look at an Enjoyable Film's Lesser Points

Spoilers. (Obvs.)

A couple of days ago I made a short text post about my reaction to Marvel's Ant-Man.

This is what it said:

If you had told me a year ago that I would like Ant-Man (with some qualifications) more than I liked Age of Ultron, I would not have believed you.

This is a sentiment that seems to have been very relatable for a lot of people—as of this writing, the post has nearly 600 notes. Consequently, I feel that I should say a bit more about the film and unpack the qualifications that I alluded to in my original post.

Ant-Man was a lot of fun. It was not the best MCU film by a wide margin, but it was definitely not its worst either. It was better than Age of Ultron, but in my considered opinion being better than Age of Ultron is not a high bar to jump (1). For me, Ultron is in the bottom three of to-date MCU films (2). In contrast to Age of Ultron, Ant-Man had a cohesive plot. It was well acted, it had several decent gags (and several very inappropriate gags), and it set things up for Civil War with an impressively deft narrative hand. That said, however, Ant-Man had some serious problems.

To begin with, the film had a massive race problem. This was one of the more diverse offerings from Marvel to date, and that fact (and its positive and negative implications) should not be ignored. Nevertheless, the film played its diverse characters like stereotypes. There were moments where you could see the filmmakers trying to play against type a bit (3), but for the most part the non-white characters were there to be played for culturally insensitive trope-dependent laughs. And also, they were all criminals. Which. That's a problem.

And no, the well-to-do African-American family who we saw for half-a-heartbeat getting their family barbecue obliterated by Ant-Man and Yellowjacket do not make up for the missteps taken with the film's prominent PoC characters.

The film also had quite a bit of a woman problem. As with the film's portrayal of PoC characters, there was a sense that the filmmakers were trying to subvert a trope (4). Obviously, the filmmakers were trying to somehow flip the Ridiculously Average Guy trope on its head by making the reason Scott Lang winds up doing the job that Hope Pym should have done that Hope is that much better than him and more important as a person generally. But first of all that's a trope of its own (see: Men Are Expendable), and second of all it only works if Hope—rather than Scott—is the person who goes off to help Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson fight a civil war and the Avengers wage an infinity war. And we all know that that is just not going to happen.

So, no filmmaker dudes. Nice try with the attempted trope inversion, but you have to stick the landing. And you did not stick that landing.

The same could be said of the film's treatment of Janet Van Dyne. Her MCU death was presented as the sort of classic comic book "death" that is easily reversible (and therefore gives Marvel a lot of room to claim that they haven't actually fridged her (5)), but until she actually comes back she's fridged. And it's a pretty safe bet that she isn't coming back anytime soon. Most likely not before Infinity War, which might just be cosmic enough in its scope to enable a return-of-Janet-from-the-quantum-dimension subplot, and that's ages away.

So, again, guys: nope. I do see what you were trying to do and what you think you were doing, but I also saw what you actually did. And you only get points for what you actually did.

But Ant-Man was better than Age of Ultron, and it had Falcon in it—and the MCU always benefits from MOAR Falcon (6). And as of now the Civil War setup is looking Bucky-centric enough to keep the ravaging fangirl in me happy. For the moment, anyway. So that's a thing. Speaking of which, can we have a Civil War teaser soon? Kthxbye.

Notes:
1) My review of Avengers: Age of Ultron can be found on this website.
2) Yes, I said bottom three, and I stand by that. Age of Ultron is better than The Incredible Hulk. It might even be better than Iron Man 2. It's not better than any of the other films Marvel has released. For those who are curious, I rank the MCU film as follows: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guaridans of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man 2, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Incredible Hulk. Interestingly, in every case except The Avengers, I think the sequel was better than the original, which is atypical for sequels.
3) Michael Peña's Luis, for example, very clearly had impeccable personal taste and a range of cultivated knowledge in spite of the fact that he was your garden variety Latino criminal caricature. Actually, I would love to know how viewers in the Latinx community felt about this representation. And indeed how PoC viewers felt about the supporting cast in general. I am not a member of those communities and do not speak for them.
4) In this case the "female supporting character who is better than the male protagonist in every conceivable way teaches him everything he needs to know to be a badass in 48-hours or less and then makes out with him upon his triumphant return" trope. There's got to be a shorter title for that one.
5) Which, as a matter of fact, they have already started doing. See Kyle Buchanan, "Spoiler Bomb: Ant-Man's Surprise Twists and Cameos, Explained," (Vulture, July 2015).
6) Of course Falcon was basically use to make the infinitely less badass white dude look good, which... I'm gonna start referring to that particular permutation of the Ridiculously Average (White) Guy trope as "pulling a John Diggle," and I'm sideeying the hell out of it, to be perfectly honest.

Sexism is the Fire in Which Jurassic World's Undisputable Queen was Forged (and Consumed)

This review contains spoilers and profanity.

First and foremost, let's get something clear right away:

Claire Dearing is a goddess, and anyone who thinks differently can fight me.

*ahem*

Okay.

I have to say that I enjoyed the heck out of Jurassic World. It wasn't the splendid perfection of Jurassic Park, of course, but I never had any expectation that it would be. It was fast-paced, well-acted, decently-scripted. It hit all the beats a summer popcorn blockbuster is supposed to hit: science gone horribly, desperately wrong; precocious children in peril, evil military/corporate goons who get their just desserts; a Drive-In Saturday romance (1). And it featured a fabulous female protagonist. (Seriously, fight me on this one.) All in all, not bad (2).

I loved the raptors; I loved the T-Rex Hail Mary in the denouement. And, oddly enough, I loved the rampant sexism.

Hear me out on this one.

As other reviews have noted, the character of Claire Dearing is subjected to piles and piles of sexism through the whole film. She's constantly under the microscope of the patriarchal gaze, judged and found wanting. She gets sexist shit from her boss, from her subordinate, from the coworker she went on one date with, from her nephews, and even from her own sister—all of whom fail in varying ways fail to respect her capabilities, her drive, her comfort levels, her intelligence, or her life choices. And I love this. I love it because it is so real. The sexism of Jurassic World is so believable, so exactly how powerful career women often are treated by their family and colleagues, that it becomes a thing of beauty—especially given that Claire consistently refuses to bend to these people's attempts to shape the person she is. In spite of everyone talking over her or telling her what to do and how to be, Claire Dearing knows that she isn't called upon to conform to another person's idea of how she should run either her personal or her professional life.

You think Claire Dearing won't get five feet in those fancy heels of hers, you smug, self-absorbed jerk? She will outrun your punk ass so fast, you won't even know what hit you. You think Claire Dearing isn't capable of empathetic care of children because she a) has a demanding job and b) doesn't want children of her own, you hypocritical, meddling older sister? She will teach your sons the true meaning of the phrase boss-ass-bitch by ensuring that they believe (on an emotional level) that she's going to get them home safe.

Claire Dearing is a motherfucking queen. Blue the Raptor, Indominus Rex? They ain't got nothing on Claire. Claire Dearing for President of Everything Ever.

Given that the film features such a powerfully-written (and powerfully-portrayed) female character, it's a real shame that Jurassic World doesn't stick the landing. And it fails to stick the landing by sending Claire Dearing off into the sunset with sexist jerk extraordinaire, Owen Grady.

I really wanted to like Owen. He's basically Star Lord—if Star Lord had a raptor squad instead of the guardians of the galaxy—but without the personal character growth. And that's why he doesn't work. (And why the relationship between him and Claire doesn't work.) It's not that I have a fundamental problem with characters who possesses unsavory personal traits. I actually appreciate those characters when the narrative appropriately calls out their behavior. But the narrative of Jurassic World doesn't do that.

Owen Grady opens with a pathetic pickup line, and he ends with a pathetic pickup line. And, for my money, nothing that he does or says in the course of the film really indicates that he's learned anything about how to treat women with the respect they deserve. Over the course of the film Claire Dearing passes the test to become one of the guys, and since he wanted to sleep with her right from the start that's very convenient for him, but there's no sense that he truly sees her or understands how his previous treatment of her was inappropriate. He never tells her that he misjudged her, and he never apologizes. Maybe it's meant to be implied, but for me—in 2015—implied just isn't good enough.

By all rights, Owen Grady should have done something to indicate that he was at last truly capable of deserving Claire, of deserving an intelligent, resourceful, and multifaceted woman. Failing that, Claire Dearing should have thanked him for his help and politely declined his offer to stick together for survival.

Of course, the second alternative—at the very least—wouldn't have been appropriate to the kind of film that Jurassic World is. (The Drive-In Saturday romance is a tried-and-true component of this sort of film, one I don't necessarily object to if it's done well.) But dammit, it would have been nice to see the filmmakers use the trope to drive home a material lesson about how sexist jerks don't get the girl in the end unless they reform.

Maybe that would have been too unrealistic.

Notes:
1) The phrase "a Drive-In Saturday romance" comes from a song by David Bowie, the lyrics of which are "She's uncertain if she likes him, but she knows she really loves him. It's a crash-course for the ravers; it's a drive-in Saturday..." I use it to refer to a particular trope of romance, where the two main characters start off detesting each other but end up in a relationship in spite of that fact. See "Drive In Saturday," Aladdin Sane (Rykodisk, 1973).
2) As is typical for a Hollywood film of this scope, the diversity was so-so. They didn't kill off the black best friend, which is something, but they also didn't have a single woman of color with a speaking role as far as I could tell.

Review - Avengers: Age of Ultron

This review contains spoilers.

In 2005, Joss Whedon gave an interview for Wizard Magazine in which he discussed his dislike of crossover events and his desire to ignore them when structuring his story arc for Astonishing X-Men volume 3—a title that he wrote for Marvel from 2005 to 2008 (1). A year later, in another feature article for Wizard, Whedon reiterated his personal dislike of crossovers and expressed frustration with being unable to work on characters that hadn’t already been defined by the efforts of other creators (2). I mention these decade-old articles because I think they speak to the fundamental problem with Whedon’s recent take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe—his inability to do his best work in the collaborative crossover environment. The majority of the film’s flaws—from the seemingly retconned characterizations to the Deus ex Machina that saved the day in the final fifteen minutes—can be traced to this core issue: that Whedon, uncomfortable with the developments that other writers/directors in the Phase Two cohort had implemented, chose to ignore the majority of those developments in favor of making a film that was a direct sequel to The Avengers, rather than a sequel to the Phase Two films as a whole.

In terms of its basic premise, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a film that could have grown out of the elements from previous films in the series. However, the film was primarily characterized by a disregard for the aspects of the franchise that Joss Whedon appears to have disliked (3). As a result, Age of Ultron did not take Tony Stark’s character development in Iron Man 3 into account. It did not in any way acknowledge the conspiracy at the heart of Thor: The Dark World. It did not incorporate the recent character development of Steve Rogers or Natasha Romanoff into its portrayal of those characters. And it made a mockery of the principle plotline of Captain America: The Winter Soldier—that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been largely dismantled and that therefore it was well-nigh impossible for Nick Fury to ride in on a massive helicarrier (that just happened to be loaded up with everything the heroes needed to evacuate a flying city that no one knew was going to be a flying city) and save the day.

These are not insurmountable flaws, of course, and character/event retconning has been the bread-and-butter of comic book franchises since their inception, but because the script did not provide any transitions between the Phase Two films and Age of Ultron, Whedon’s retcons are incredibly difficult to swallow. We never see any acknowledgement of the lessons Tony Stark took away from his battle with Aldrich Killian—that building an army of drones was not an appropriate way to maintain control over his (or anyone’s) life; any acknowledgement of the grief and guilt that Steve Rogers felt (and must have continued to feel) upon learning that he had failed to save his best friend from a fate worse than death; any acknowledgement of the immense uncertainty that Natasha must have struggled with in the aftermath of creating a world that knew both her name and her incredibly conflicted past. Even the barest of dialogue exchanges would have helped the audience to transition from these status quos to the new foundation being laid by Age of Ultron—and yet such exchanges were almost entirely absent (4). And the fact that they are absent is a major failing of the film.

These failings are, I think, attributable to the fact that Joss Whedon is at his best when he’s able to work on his own, largely free of the creative constraints that crossovers and multiple storylines present. That freedom is what made The Avengers such a good movie. Whedon was, for the most part, working on a blank canvas with a fresh palette, and with that latitude he made something great. In the post-Phase Two world, however, as the storylines got more and more out of Whedon’s control, the situation became one in which he could not do his best work. It’s unclear why no one stepped in to help Whedon overcome this struggle, or perhaps why he refused to accept their help (5), but in the end this fundamental conflict between what the MCU needed and what Whedon wanted made for an extremely muddled movie.

Age of Ultron was fun while it lasted but impossible to think about too deeply once it was over because very little about it made a lot of sense. The motivations of our heroes were largely at odds with how the characters had previously been developed, and the attempt to write them with the same basic motivations as those that they had in The Avengers complicated Whedon’s ability to handle other aspects of the film’s narrative. The mechanism by which Ultron was created and the basis for his behavior was confusing; the motivations of the twins were never adequately explained; the narrative arc of what happened to JARVIS and how he “became” the Vision was extremely incoherent; and Nick Fury showing up to pull off a Hail Mary during the film’s climax strained credulity. It’s not that the film was bad, exactly—it holds up as well as most action films of this nature do—but the high bar set by such films as Iron Man 3, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians of the Galaxy makes it difficult to settle for something that is just okay.

In many ways, Avengers: Age of Ultron was a film struggling to live up to (perhaps impossibly) high standards and find an emotional arc that really mattered (6), and it missed the mark largely on the basis of the fact that Joss Whedon—for whatever reason—just couldn’t seem to bring himself to interweave the threads of the larger crossover event into his movie. Instead of taking the rich material that he had been given in the form of the preceding Phase Two films, he stuck with the dynamics that he had established in The Avengers. The result was a film that was (in terms of its narrative beats) almost indistinguishable from its predecessor, decidedly retrograde, and a hot mess with a fundamental lack of stakes.

And that’s a great shame for everyone.

Notes:
1) “Joss Whedon’s X-Men,” Wizard: The Comics Magaine, no. 165 (July 2005). During the course of Whedon’s run, Astonishing X-Men operated without reference to such events as “House of M,” “Decimation,” and “Messiah Complex,” amongst others, and his practice of writing independently of major Marvel crossovers set the standard for the title when it passed into the hands of other creators like Warren Ellis, Greg Pak, and Marjorie Liu.
2) “The ABCs of Joss Whedon,” Wizard: The Comics Magazine, no. 180 (October 2006). This article can be read at The Ink & Code.
3) According to a BuzzFeed piece, Whedon’s post-Avengers contract with Marvel engaged him to weigh in on the creative direction of the Phase Two films—a process he enjoyed when other production teams took his advice and was frustrated with when they “missed the point entirely.” “Joss Whedon’s Astonishing, Spine-Tingling, Soul-Crushing Marvel Adventure,” BuzzFeed News (April 20, 2015).
4) Clint Barton’s characterization, while not set up in any way in the previous MCU films (and at serious odds with the 616 characterization of Clint that is so beloved), is apparently drawn from the 1610 Ultimates universe, and I’m not entirely certain what I think of it. On the one hand, I think it opens up some interesting ways to read the dynamics of the character in The Avengers—as described in this post by tumblr user Tea Berry-Blue—on the other hand, I feel that the inclusion of the traditional wife and kids family unit did very little for the narrative of Age of Ultron other than to function as a deliberate attempt to mislead the audience into thinking that it would be Clint Barton who died rather than Pietro Maximoff and to provide more weight to the implication expressed in the Natasha-Bruce romance subplot that women who cannot bear children are somehow flawed.
5) A recent article in The Playlist reveals that many of (what I consider to be) the film’s most cumbersome and tedious segments—like the plethora of dream sequences and the extended stay at Clint’s farm—were things that Marvel wanted excised from the film’s final cut and that Whedon was determined to keep in. “Joss Whedon Shot An Alternate ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Ending Where [Redacted] Doesn’t Die & Much More,” The Playlist (May 4, 2015).
6) The fact that Joss Whedon elected to try and establish an emotional arc by including a major character death was, I think, a major missed opportunity. The Avengers found its emotional arc not in the death of Agent Coulson but in the moment when Tony Stark realized that he was the sort of man who would lie down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over him—a character development that is, ironically, missing from this film. Age of Ultron was rife with the potential for a similar kind of arc, and it’s too bad that Whedon couldn’t quite find it—or couldn’t quite trust that it would be there without a major character death. (For my money, Hawkeye’s secret family life could have been put to incredibly good use in this respect. Imagine if the film’s narrative had combined the knowledge of everything Clint Barton had to lose, along with his history of mentoring Natasha Romanoff, his obvious willingness to step into that role with the twins, and an immediate feel-good return on that investment with Pietro saving Clint's life without dying himself and then going on to become Clint’s most trusted lieutenant/sidekick/etc. Now that’s an emotional arc that I could get behind.)