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Cinema Trips - 'Ant-Man and the Wasp'

A Review of the Sequel to 'Ant-Man'

By BoblobV2Published 6 years ago 3 min read
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Ant-Man and the Wasp is the sequel to 2015’s Ant-man, and is the twentieth film in the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe narrative, taking place after the events of Captain America: Civil War, and just before the events of Avengers: Infinity War.

The story revolves around Scott Lang reuniting with Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne to save her mother from the quantum realm, while Scott is a couple of days away from parole.

The first Ant-man was a film I thoroughly enjoyed and thus was glad to find that by the end of this film, I found it to be superior to the first film. The film has two antagonistic characters: Ghost and Sonny, played by Walton Goggins, both of whom had more character to them in their first couple of scenes than Yellow Jacket in the entirety of the first film (the name I had to look up before writing this as I found him to be so forgettable despite being in a film I really like).

This is a film that is so much smaller in scale when compared to Marvel’s previous three outings with the likes of Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and Avengers: Infinity War. In this film, we are going back to the friendly neighborhood level. The stakes are personal, without the threat of global annihilation on the balance, and is a pleasant change of pace. In many ways, this is more of a story of a father and a daughter on three different fronts.

The story manages to stay inside of its own narrative bubble, feeling extremely fun and enjoyable throughout. It's a true standalone with only minor references that requires one not to have seen any prior Marvel film to know exactly what is going on, if they were to jump in with this film. The only thing that really connects the film to the larger narrative is the post credit scene which manages to still punch you hard emotionally when you watch it.

The film travels at a brisk pace, yet it does not forget to stop and allow the viewer to take in a breath and spend some time with the characters actually interacting. This allowed for the characters to be interesting with a decent amount of character progression with regards to existing characters, and character development with the newcomers to the cast—thanks to a collective of solid performances all around driving home the characters wants and desires as that much more believable. The relationship between Scott and his daughter being, in particular, quite charming and one of the best parts of the film.

As it is evident with each new Marvel film we get, the CGI work stands out as simply exceptional, in particular the facial reconstructions of Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Laurence Fishbourne when they appear in the film as their younger selves. It has gotten to such a high quality that it is indistinguishable and I found myself marveling at the standard that it has reached. In addition, the motion effect of Ghost is something I found very enjoyable to watch, and at times it reminded me of Colm Feore from The Chronicles of Riddick as the Lord Marshall.

Ultimately one of the main reasons why I was excited for the film was to see the inevitable rant that we are going to get from Luis. It does not disappoint.

There were no major detractors that prevented me from enjoying the film. If there was a nit pick that did grate on me, it is the fact that it seemed there was one too many instances of conflict that may not have needed to be there. I say nit pick because thankfully they are almost instantly resolved so that the film can carry on its merry way.

I would recommend audience members watch it as it is a nice change of pace from the previous Marvel films, and I personally found it to be a vast improvement over the first.

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About the Creator

BoblobV2

Writing about anime, and anything else I find interesting.

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