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: 2019-03-06 06:23 am (UTC)(Spider-Man: Homecoming was delightful and charming and funny, though!)
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Date: 2019-03-06 01:33 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2019-03-07 06:04 pm (UTC)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.