Fun Like a 1950's Pop-Sci-Fi Fantasy

Rating: 8/10 (25 July 2015)

Given the fact that I'm quite sick of superhero movies, I was surprised to find how thoroughly l enjoyed "Ant-Man." This is the most fun I've had at a superhero film since probably the first "Avengers." In fact, I may have liked it better than "Avengers." I might even call it my favorite of all of the Marvel films.
There are quite a few reasons I found Ant-Man so appealing. For starters, I liked the fact that it tells a small-scale story, centered mostly around a guy, a heist, and his training to perform the heist in a desperate effort to win back visitation rights to see his daughter.
I also liked the fact that the stakes are relatively small, at least on Marvel's terms. At some point in the film's chain of logic, the fate of the world would indeed be at stake, but the biggest threat that presents itself in the film is a dude who just happens to have a suit very similar to Ant-Man's suit. Likewise, the most meaningful thing at stake isn't the safety of the world, but a father's relationship with his daughter.
This is a Marvel film that puts a lot of emphasis on the characters. That it does so without lacking in action, comedy, suspense, or the expected trappings of a Marvel film, is quite a nifty trick.
Another nifty trick is how the film turns its absurd premise -- "A dude can shrink but maintain his normal strength, AND he can control ants!" -- into a playground of fun, knowingly ridiculous moments and situations. The film doesn't try to excuse its own ridiculousness, or shy away from it. It just presents itself as ridiculous, and has a lot of fun doing things that way.
I really admired the effects-work in this film. While many Marvel films appear to be saturated with wall-to-wall CGI, the effects in Ant-Man have a tangible quality about them. I have no doubt that a great amount of CGI was used in this film, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they used practical effects wherever possible; the film has that kind of visual "weight." It looks like real things are really happening. I can't honestly say that about most of the Marvel films; even though Marvel often does a bang-up job with CGI, and even though the results are usually pleasing to look at, they often don't feel "real." That might be by design. These are, after all, comic-book films. But I much prefer the visual effects in Ant-Man to any of its Marvel predecessors.
The effects involving Ant-Man's interaction with ants -- especially when he's shrunken to their size -- are especially great! All odds would point to these scenes being extremely unconvincing. However, director Peyton Reed, however improbably, makes these sequences SING. Watching one of these scenes, with Ant-Man infiltrating an anthill and trying to make psychic contact with its denizens, I put the plot and the context of the scene out of my mind for a moment, and just watched action on screen, in purely compositional terms. It was a fantastic blend of 1950's pulp-SciFi book-jacket art, and Salvador Dali-esque surrealist spectacle. It's hard not to wonder what the film's original director, Edgar Wright, might have done with material like this. Wright, who is known for his impeccable visual stylings and clockwork-tight filmmaking, might have made something even better out of such stuff! But Reed, or his filmmaking team, definitely had a strong vision for these scenes. What could have easily been the film's weakest element, in their hands, becomes one of its greatest strengths.
I also enjoyed the sheer fun the film has exploring common household topography from an ant's perspective. The "shrinking man" film trope dates back to the 1950's, I think, and there's always a bit of kitch involved whenever Hollywood decides to recycle it. How long has it been since there was a successful movie about "shrinking" people? Was it as far back as "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids?" At any rate, the "shrinkdown" effect is particularly well-imagined here, giving us a sense of how Ant- Man finds himself suddenly swallowed-up by empty space every time he shrinks, how in the matter of an instant, the bottom of a bathtub impossibly expands to become a vast, desolate flatland.
There's a sequence later in the film when Ant-Man must "go subatomic," which is a no-no akin to "crossing the streams" in "Ghostbusters." The visuals accompanying his subatomic trek are the purest kind of cinematic joy. Imagine the "zooming through the Monolith" sequence in 2001, updated for today's audiences, and done really well. My only complaint was that this sequence was too short. I could have gone on watching it for several minutes!
I caught the film in its "RealD" Digital-3D presentation. I don't usually prefer 3D; usually I avoid it. But here, I was surprised by how effectively the film uses the third dimension to express the scale of Ant-Man's surroundings. Visually, this movie is all about "scale." When the film is in action-mode (which is much of the time), its every shot is designed as a way of contrasting the size of one thing with the size of another. The film's use of 3D in assisting with that effect is fantastic. I don't usually recommend a film's 3D presentation, but if you don't mind wearing those silly glasses, Ant-Man uses 3D very, very well.
It should go without saying that Marvel films always contain "extra scenes" during and after the credits. This one contains two such scenes, and you'll definitely want to stick around for them.