Back in 2015, Ant-Man was a small hero, with little expectation on his shoulders. Based on one of the sillier-sounding characters from the comics (“I thought they had run out of characters and now they were making them up,” said Evangeline Lilly when first offered the script), it also suffered production problems as original director Edgar Wright departed, replaced at the 11th hour by Peyton Reed.
You’d have been forgiven for going in with microscopic hopes. But the film turned out to be one of Marvel’s most fun origin stories, with a perfect hangdog (ant-y)hero in Paul Rudd’s criminal turned, well, criminal (but with cool tech and a righteous mission), Scott Lang.
The scaled-down action brought a new flavour to screen superpowers. Ant-Man has since featured in Civil War, where he made a BIG impact on the side of his idol Captain America, but he was nowhere to be seen in this year’s apocalyptic epic, Avengers: Infinity War, apparently on house arrest for involvement in the Sokovia Accords-contravening dust-up in Germany. Ant-Man And The Wasp is here to show what Scott was up to during that time, and also to offer something of a respite after the heaviosity of the game-changingly ambitious Infinity War, acting as a reminder of just how fun a light, lean standalone MCU movie can be.
This story is from the August 2018 edition of Total Film.
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This story is from the August 2018 edition of Total Film.
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