Ant-man and the Wasp

[osprey_archer]

I have watched Ant-Man and the Wasp! Which means… I am not actually caught up with the MCU, because I haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War or Spiderman: Homecoming or Dr. Strange... okay, it may be time to admit to myself that I’m no longer even trying to keep up with the MCU. There’s too much of it. I just can’t see “and then Thanos turned a bunch of people into drifting piles of ash” as anything but a colossally disappointing plot twist.

BUT ANYWAY, setting all that aside for a moment, Ant-Man and the Wasp is a pleasant popcorn movie: lots of fun action sequences, plenty of things shrinking or enlarging to hilarious effect, an underdeveloped romance (par for the course in this sort of movie), an engagingly sympathetic villain.

I hope we’ll see more of Ghost in future movies. Her backstory has only strengthened my belief that SHIELD is the true big bad of the MCU and probably ultimately a destructive force despite the fact that they clearly want to be protective. The road to hell etc. etc.

As sad as I was when Agent Carter got canceled, it’s probably just as well that they didn’t have enough seasons to attempt a SHIELD-founding plotline, because there’s no way that would have been anything but monumentally disappointing. How could they make the story of SHIELD’s founding seem like anything but a tragedy when it has so many problems? It was infiltrated by Hydra almost from day one. It pretends to destroy alien tech and then hoards it. It imprisons people with powers or uses them as assassins, as per Ghost, whom they controlled with the promise that they might eventually cure her incredibly painful condition.

Either Agent Carter would have had to sweep it all under the rug, which is disappointing on the face of it, or they would have tried to grapple with it all - and maybe argue that SHIELD wasn’t so bad at the start, that the worst abuses came later on, after Howard died & Peggy retired? I think that’s the only approach that could have worked. But still it’s probably better that they didn’t try.

Comments

[kara_mckay]

I started watching Agents of Shield about a month ago, and my perception is that the things that make a lot of viewers uncomfortable are quite intentional. It seems like they spent a lot of time in the early seasons shoving the parallels between SHIELD and HYDRA in viewers faces, and they've been consistent all the way along about presenting most SHIELD agents as uncritically accepting their actions as necessarily good for no reason other than that they are the good guys acting upon bad guys. Hell, the agents on Criminal Minds feel more empathetic toward serial killers than SHIELD agents feel toward most people who aren't them if they see those people as being in their way.

Of course, I have to admit that I also used to occasionally suspect Stargate: Atlantis writers of knowing what they were doing, and that turned out not to be the case, so it's perfectly possible the AoS writers really think they're doing a helluva good job of representing made-for-TV heroism.

[osprey_archer]

I've gone back and forth about whether the AOS writers are aware of what they're doing, or perhaps more accurately to what extent they're aware. It's clear that some of the stuff - particularly in season one - is meant to be creepy, so that when the Winter Soldier reveal happened, AoS viewers could go "OH YEAH, 'trust the system' really is a disturbing catchphrase!"

And other times they've done things that seemed so obvious to me that it's hard to believe it could be unintentional. Like how they made such a big deal about how "if you cut off one head of Hydra, two more grow in its place"... and then in season two, SHIELD had been decapitated, but then TWO NEW SHIELDS happened (and started duking it out, because of course they did). They had to have noticed that! Right?

But then they would do things like the season two ending where Skye and Coulson team up to mindwipe Skye's dad and the show presents this as totally hunky-dory and then it's like "Well maybe none of this is intentional and they think they ARE writing Big Damn Heroes."

But then season 4 happened and they created an alternate reality where Fitz & May are Hydra big shots, which might suggest that the creators realize the characters are at least somewhat morally compromised, so... IDK.

I think they believe they're writing morally gray heroes when actually they've long since stumbled into anti-hero territory.

[anelith]

You're right, it would have been a real downer to see the founding of SHIELD knowing what we do. Especially because I believe the story would trend toward "SHIELD is a big improvement over the SSR!" since Peggy was always treated so badly as a woman agent in the SSR. If the show had chosen to go there anyway, it would have been a brave move but still, rather depressing!

[osprey_archer]

Yes, knowing SHIELD's ignominious end would really undermine any pleasure in watching its founding. Even if they tried to show it as an improvement over the SSR because less sexism, there would be this undercurrent of "Well that's great, but maybe you should spend more time checking your ranks for crypto-Nazis?"

[carmarthen]

I enjoyed Ant-Man and the Wasp (still haven't seen the first Ant-Man movie, noped out of Dr. Strange after 5 minutes), but Infinity Wars does not exist to me and that's fine, I'll just be over here rewatching Ragnarok and Black Panther and a couple of the others.

(Spider-Man: Homecoming was delightful and charming and funny, though!)

[osprey_archer]

I may just ignore the big ensemble movies from here on out. Everything I've heard about infinity wars just makes it sound like a grim slog to me, and once they've brought their giant cast back to life, I don't see how any one movie can contain that many characters and give any of them anything like a satisfying character arc.

Maybe the entire Thanos plotline came about because the MCU writers realized they had allowed their cast to grow way too big to cope with and panicked.

[carmarthen]

I suspect some of them will end up dead for good, but I'm just bitter that Ragnarok ended up a perfect note for Thor and Loki and then they went and ruined it. Nope, lala, not listening.

I suspect panic was a major motivator, yes. And it seems lazy - there are so many other ways to retire characters to make room for new ones.