Eventually the same type of Marvelnoise

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2015)

I realize that lambasting Marvel is getting to be like ripping into MacDonald's for the pre-processed slop they serve. It would be coy to feign surprise that there's no lobster on the menu and people going in would have it no other way at this point, at any rate that's what the place is, you either go in for the big mac they make or steer clear.
But this one seemed like it would be different, if only in a small measure. It looked like it might be an opportunity to see the same landscape a different way, a way that diminishes its histrionic tiresomeness perhaps or points at its plasticity. He shrinks and all that.
No dice, folks. There may have been a more selfaware script in the early stages or not, anemic traces of which you'll see perhaps in the way the average joe plucked off the street tries to blend in the improbable mission. Even that seems ordinary to think of. But what we have up there on the screen is the same pre-processed Marvel, more of the same cookie-cutter missionmaking to retrieve gadgets and avert doom, storynoise where we constantly need to have things explained to us.
I mean, this is a film where our hero has to infiltrate a company's HQ in time before the snarling bad guy sells the all-important thingamajig to shady agencies. 15 years ago that would have been par the course so to see the very same cartoon now that doesn't point at it but actually is that cartoon? Lazy.
What's left is the shrinking action and what way it paves for internal mechanics, how it transforms reality to give us views and imagination that a Mission Impossible film or Avengers won't. An early piece where he plummets through different floors shows the possibility. But we're never far off from I Shrunk the Kids territory, which was at least wholly invested in this transformation of familiar reality.
The climax takes place in kid's playground, we get some whimsy with small and huge toytrains. But with Fury Road and Lone Ranger in mind (as exemplars of imaginative flow) how little they achieve and what ordinary imagination. It seems the only thing the execs in control of these things care about is making sure the product is streamlined to be what customers would expect to find. Corporate.