How was 'Ant-Man'?

Pretty good. The movie had a sense of fun and humor, appropriate for a character whose powers are shrinking and communicating with ants. I liked the scenes with Ant-Man shrinking as normal household objects became threats, especially when he was hanging onto the grooves of a spinning record for dear life.

Ant-Man was obviously not a movie that would have worked with the bleak tones of The Dark Knight. Ant-Man has an A-list pedigree in the Marvel Universe — first appearing in 1962 as an original Lee/Kirby creation, founder of the Avengers — but I don’t know that he’s ever really been A-list. Hank Pym’s heroic legacy, as Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath and Yellowjacket, has been overshadowed by his failures, such as creating Ultron and slapping his wife. As I read recently, the thing with Hank is that he overcomes his darker side to be a hero.

The movie does play on that flawed hero aspect, with Pym and Scott Lang. In the comics, Lang was similarly a reformed criminal with a daughter. He kind of hung around on the margins of the Avengers for years and was friends with Hank and Jan. Jack of Hearts killed Lang during the chaos of the Avengers Disassembled story but he later was resurrected. His daughter Cassie became the size-changing hero Stature but I think she died.

Pym’s movie story is as reasonably close to the comic story as could be expected. The one thing they didn’t get into was the mental breakdowns and sense of inferiority that Pym had. It’s a shame there was no room for that since the psychology was fascinating. The movie had an echo of the comic origin, in which Hank’s first wife Maria, a former political prisoner in communist Hungary, got murdered on their honeymoon. 

In the movie, though, it’s wife Janet Van Dyne who died in the past. I was disappointed to hear this rumor before I saw the movie. I think the Avengers need her bubbly personality to balance out the seriousness of people like Thor and Captain America. It was a shame to cut a woman out of the Marvel Universe, let alone a founding member of the Avengers, since she was an important, progressive female character. Like the Invisible Woman, the Wasp had a power that made her seem to disappear back in the ‘60s, when women were still damsels in distress. Over the years, writers developed both women into confident leaders and boosted their powers. It’s a shame they couldn’t include Jan in some way.

All is not lost, of course, since her daughter Hope will become the new Wasp (she has the haircut but her personality is more hard-edged than her mother’s). Also (spoiler) I’m pretty sure Jan is still alive after shrinking into that microverse. In comics, you never believe a character is dead unless you see a body. And even then.

With the addition of Ant-Man and the Wasp, regardless of who is behind the masks, and the upcoming introduction of the Black Panther, the classic cast of ‘60s Avengers will be set. Now all we need are Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), Wonder Man, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), the Black Knight and a bunch of others and we’ll be fine. Make that happen, Marvel, would you?