Ant-man and the Wasp
Mar. 5th, 2019 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI 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.
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.
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Date: 2019-03-05 03:28 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2019-03-06 02:50 am (UTC)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.