ANT-MAN

What need is there for a soldier the size of an insect when the Avengers are already in town? After all, can’t the Hulk smash into Pym Technologies, which has been taken over by the sadistic Dr. Cross (Corey Stoll), before the formula can be sold to disgraced former S.H.I.E.L.D agents? Indeed, that is a question Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has for Dr. Pym (Michael Douglas) when the repentant inventor first recruits him to don the shrinking suit and stop Cross from bringing disaster to the world with the technology Pym created almost thirty years earlier with better intentions.

            Well, as it turns out there is use for Ant-Man. The Avengers, for all their power, cannot go undetected. And just as there is a need for the tiny hero Scott will become so there is an excuse, as if one were needed for a good time, for the existence of one of Marvel’s funnest movies.

Corey Stoll, who plays Dr. Cross, the mad genius who will become Yellowjacket, half-jokingly describes the advantage of a tiny hero over the Avengers.

            “That seems like being the opposite of a superhero, but when you actually think about all the things you could do if you were that small, and you retained your full-size strength, you would be sort of unbeatable,” he said. “Like, I think the Ant-Man could beat the Hulk. He could shrink down and go up his nose, and you know, crush his brain. How is the Hulk gonna beat the Ant-Man? He'd be chasing him around."

            “I think a lot of it is based on what story we want to tell ,” Marvel Studios President Kevin said. “In this one, it goes back to the first pitch we got from in two-thousand-whatever-it-was, which was this history of Pym, independent of The Avengers, independent of a lot of his comic backstory, and having a mentor-to-mentee relationship. It was unique then -- it was a cool idea -- and it's even more unique now, because we've made movies, and none of them feature that kind of relationship. None of them have the passing of the mantle, which is much of what this movie is about. There's a lot of backstory to get across in this movie and what Hank did in his past. We see some of it; we hear about a lot of it. But it's not about the trial and error of inventing the Pym Particle. The Pym Particle's invented. He has been on adventures as Ant-Man, as we'll see in this movie, beforehand. Frankly, we can focus more on the character stuff instead of the science stuff, to focus on this criminal, this smart guy, this good guy: Scott Lang."

            Early in the movie, before we can see the effect of the armor, an educational video played at the revamped Pym lab explains the premise of the ant-man suit as a return to the simpler warfare of hands-on combat. In its own way, Ant-Man the movie is a return to a simpler time of sci-fi adventures when the size shifting hero first appeared on the pages of “Tales to Astonish”. Astute viewers, in fact, will catch a nod to the original comics, implying that if the comics are acknowledged in the film, the legend harks back farther than the time span of the film. The comics themselves even work into the film canon since Pym, according to the comics, first developed the suit in a 1963 issue of the series. In the movie it’s made clear he’s had the formula for a while by the time of the fatal accident in 1987.

            In its finest moments, however, Ant-Man shares more in common with The Incredible Shrinking Man than Marvel Comics. As in Jack Arnold’s 1957 cult classic imagination is given full control of the special effects and not the other way around as is sadly often the case. The highlight of the film is a thrill ride and a visual creative freeway.

            Stealing the secret suit in a staged burglary, the unsuspecting Scott slips into what appears to be an ordinary jumpsuit and shrinks to the size of a bug, finding himself inside a giant water dam that a moment ago was his bathtub. After a cascade of water washes him down the drain he ends up in the discotheque below, spinning atop a revolving record and frantically avoiding being stepped on by dancers. He is then sucked into a vacuum cleaner and, once dispensed, finds himself face to face with a giant predator; a rat, in a scene reminiscent of 1995’s The Indian in the Cupboard.

            This is sheer unadulterated sci-fi fun of the kind that has now been eclipsed by computer graphic overkill. In an era when computers can create new worlds, it’s something of a return to imagination when special effects are used to make familiar objects unfamiliar (enlarging them). Elsewhere, Ant-Man treads more familiar ground. Scott is a recently released convict imprisoned for being something of a Robin Hood, stealing from a crooked corporation (the modern Big Bad of the movies) and returned it to the public. While in the slammer his wife leaves him and his daughter gets a stepfather. His chance at redemption comes from Dr. Pym, who has a similar story of his own.

            “These two guys are birds of a feather in many regards,” Paul Rudd said. “If Scott is experiencing some of these things with his daughter, Hank can be maybe a few steps ahead of the game, but have the same kind of dynamic. It just seemed like interesting parallel stories to focus on, this idea of struggles that parents and kids have.”

Back in 1987 while fighting a Soviet offensive, he lost his wife to his invention. In disarming a missile she was forced to go subatomic (as the movie explains the process, she entered a vortex of perpetual shrinking from which there is no return). In turn he estranged his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who now works for Dr. Cross. We have, then, two variations of the old dysfunctional family backdrop with the chance for redemption, but Paul Rudd plays Scott so earnestly and with such a relaxed regard for the character, never elevating the backstory to kitschy melodrama, that it takes some willing effort to notice how ordinary the material is.

To his credit, director Peyton Reed did as much as he could with Scott’s backstory, explaining, “He's a guy who I think gets adrenalized by the idea of a heist or job or something like that. So he's conflicted about that, and it's led him to make some really terrible life choices that he's trying to change, and he's struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. I like the idea that he's a conflicted person and also that he doesn't inherently have superpowers. It's the suit, it's the particle technology, and he's very, very reluctantly pulled into this situation."

“We meet him as he's leaving prison, as he's getting released from prison for the first time,” added Feige. “We figure he's been in for four or five years. His daughter is six, so he doesn't have much of a relationship with her, and he very much wants a relationship with her. But he can't hold down a job, and he can't pay child support, and his wife has married a police officer who just makes it all worse for him. And he begrudgingly -- and he's very upset about it -- returns to a life of crime to get enough money to pay his child support, to be able to see his daughter. Ultimately, that's what Hank sort of plays off of to try to pull him into his scheme."

Michael Douglas also brought what he could to the reserved role of Hank Pym.

“He's sort of a Northern California, formal guy,” he explained. “"He's lost control of his company. He lives in sort of a time warp. He was always a bit of a tinkerer. He's got a lab, plus a lot of other stuff, in his basement that we find out about. He's certainly bitter about what happened with his company and deeply scared of what the future might hold -- because he himself, after having gotten small so many times, it's difficult. He looks and tries to find a guy that he can work with and has the right characteristics.”

            Corey Stoll, for his part, makes a great comic book villain. Cross’s turbulent backstory is wisely condensed to past tense dialogue, but we gather that he idolized Dr. Pym and was then turned away by him. Rising to power, Cross took over Pym’s institute and revived interest in Pym’s shrinking formula, eclipsing his predecessor’s breakthrough in the field. Now he is a corrupted evil genius attracting the attention and dollars of renegade government figures. The movie is unclear about where Cross exactly went off the rail. Pym remembers he was never the most stable person but his sociopathic tendencies have been magnified by power. On the other hand, there is an unexplored mention of the damage done to the mind by the armor if not worn with a helmet. Be that as it may, Stoll’s talent for villainy is supplemented by clever camera angles highlighting his monstrous nature, the best one being an enlarged shot of his face peering down on the tiny hero he has trapped in his lab.

            Stoll explained his role in a nutshell, “I was this child prodigy that Michael Douglas’ character Hank Pym discovered at an early age. He nurtured me and I was part of his technology company. I started to become aware of these rumors of this fabled technology that can shrink people to half an inch while keeping their full-size strength. And I became very obsessed with it and demanded that we move forward. But Pym had sort of buried it for ethical, moral reasons. Now, I’ve discovered my own version of that technology and I’m using it for militaristic purposes. I’ve even started to use the technology myself, which as a sort of psychotic effect on people if they use it too much. I can’t get into the details of all the goodies of the Yellowjacket suit but it’s several generations advanced from what Ant-Man has. And then I put it on—and then I am Yellowjacket!”

            He then added, “He is not a villain in the vein of Thanos or Loki, who are villains that know it. He is a guy who is not that dissimilar from Michael Douglas' character, Hank Pym. A brilliant scientist, who is not ethically pure. I think a great thing about the whole movie is that everybody in this movie is in those shades of gray a little bit."

            Most everyone has fun here, especially Michael Peña as Scott’s pal Luis, a chatty but well-meaning thief. His inability to tell a concise story provides Ant-Man with one of the most amusing running gags ever in an action hero movie. Bobby Cannavale plays the new husband and stepfather to Scott’s daughter without the negative strokes such a figure is usually painted in, though being a cop does make him an obstacle for Scott, though he harbors no ill-will. Cannavale is instead used more for the sort of comic action typical to this sort of film.

            By far, though, the real delights of Ant-Man are the oversized terrors we recognize as items we see every day. A Thomas the Tank Engine train set, for instance, becomes the setting for an action atop a speeding locomotive and the inside of a briefcase becomes a whirlwind of gadgets and Life Savers where villain and hero fight it out. There is also a training montage in which Scott becomes acquainted with his insect army. In turn, one of his ant friends grows to be a good size for a child’s pet, bringing back memories of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.  

            “There are cameras and lenses that make small areas look like the most epic landscapes,” said co-producer Brad Winderbaum. “Then we’re shooting motion capture with Paul to insert Ant-Man into those environments.”

            In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Feige said of this return to basics, “When you've had aliens pouring into Manhattan, artificial intelligence robots lifting cities out of the ground to annihilate mankind, super soldiers, Norse gods and dark elves, there's a lot of action going on. So the notion of shrinking down, to have an arena that is not another city or an entire planet or a fictional place like Asgard but is a bathtub, or is a rug, or is a little girl's play set – that felt like a great opportunity to deliver Marvel's thrills and action in a totally different way.”

            The idea for an Ant-Man movie was being kicked around for over a decade and Edgar Wright had completed a screenplay with colleague Joe Cornish as early as 2003. In 2006 the team struck a deal with Marvel Studios to finally film their Ant-Man screenplay.

Wright had his own set of ideas that tied in closely to the comics.

            “Well, the thing is that what we want to do, the idea that we have for the adaptation is to actually involve both [heroes],” he said.  “Is to have a film that basically is about Henry Pym and Scott Lang, so you actually do a prologue where you see Pym as Ant-Man in action in the 60’s, in sort of “Tales to Astonish” mode basically, and then the contemporary, sort of flash-forward, is Scott Lang’s story, and how he comes to acquire the suit, how he crosses paths with Henry Pym, and then, in an interesting sort of Machiavellian way, teams up with him. So it’s like an interesting thing, like the “Marvel Premiere” one that I read which is Scott Lang’s origin, it’s very brief like a lot of those origin comics are, and in a way, the details that are skipped through in the panels and the kind of thing we’d spend half an hour on.”

            By early 2007, though Wright and Cornish began seeing some difficulty bringing a script together. In an interview, the writer-director team confessed, “Ant Man is in a bit of a holding pattern. We're figuring things out with the script and we haven't initiated casting. We still have quite a bit to do. I expect I'll have more to say about it in a few months. I'm also going to be working with Bryan Lee O'Malley on Scott Pilgrim. It's incredibly exciting because I'm such an admirer of his work. We haven't really started on this yet. We've traded some ideas, so again it's very much all in an early formative stage.”

            A year passed with hardly a mention of the film. Then, in March of 2008, Wright disclosed that he was working on a second draft.

            “It’s written and we’re doing a second draft of it,” he told Empire. ““It’s going to be less overtly comedic than anything else I’ve ever done. It’s more of a full-on action adventure sci-fi film but with a comedic element – in the same spirit of a lot of escapist fare like that. It’s certainly not a superhero spoof or pastiche and it certainly isn’t a sort of Honey I Shrunk The Kids endeavor at all.”

            Then production entered a two year sleep and the project was all but forgotten, even fans assumed that plans had been scrapped. There was little evidence to suggest otherwise until early 2010 when Wright confirmed the project was pushing forward, but was still uncertain about the direction of his already revised screenplay. A year later, he announced that a third draft of the long-awaited screenplay had been delivered. Little did Wright, Cornish, or overjoyed fans know that the story was far from over.

            Marvel Studios had made a $65 million bonanza on the opening weekend of Captain America: The First Avenger that year and they were being very careful nothing went wrong with the following spring’s Avengers.  Everything had to go right, including the movies surrounding it which, in the Marvel Universe, indirectly affect each other. Wright’s eccentric nutty style was bound to clash with Marvel’s tightly woven interconnecting web sooner or later, but it’s likely the first bump came right around this time when his direction for the script became irreconcilable with Marvel’s need for self-reference, as made evident by Wright’s statement, “The way we wrote the script is for it to be a standalone genre film, create an ’in’ for people so you don’t have to know 50 years of Avengers history to enjoy the movie.”

            More telling was this statement, “I talked to Kevin Feige about that a while back where we just discussed about whether he would be in The Avengers. The thing is, the script that I’ve written, you know, whether it’s next or not I don’t know, the chronology of it or the way it works wouldn’t really fit in with what they do. And my film is very much an introduction to that character, and so it wasn’t something where it felt right to introduce him in that film. Maybe if I do the solo Ant-Man film and maybe there’s a later Avengers then they could draft him in later. But it didn’t work with the kind of the angle that we were going to do with the origin that I’d written.”

            Nonetheless, the production persisted and even made it to the stage of test footage (featuring a more naturalistic rendition of the hero appearing as he did in the Silver Age, fighting two gun wielding guards) which was shown to a mesmerized audience at the San Diego Comic –Con in the summer of 2012. From there it all sounded like good news and the movie had a release date set for November of 2015 (Disney later bumped it up to the summer of that year). As promised, casting was done by the end of 2013, when Paul Rudd was announced as the lead.

Then, in May of 2014, all came to a sudden stop when Wright left the production. By all accounts he could not bring it to terms with Marvel Studios. Fans of Wright’s work were disappointed but Feige stressed that it was a mutual understanding.

            “Well, we've done that before, and sometimes that can work, and sometimes it's more difficult. But with Edgar, it was mutual,” he said. “People said, "You guys have been working together for 10 years; why did you only figure it out a couple of months before you started filming?" But that's really not true. We'd been working on it for about nine months, maybe a year at most. And it became apparent to him and to us that the best thing to do was to move on. But because Edgar has a fan base and Marvel has a fan base, there's good and bad that comes with that high profile. And one of the bads is that internal decisions and shuffles get headlines.”

            Additionally, Feige assured fans that the movie would still be released as planned in July of 2015.

            “Ant-Man is still going to come out on 17 July,” he said. “We start filming this August. Edgar Wright, who I've known for many years, who wrote the draft with Joe Cornish - much of the movie will still be based very much on that draft and the DNA of what Edgar has created up to this point, but Peyton Reed has stepped in.”

            At that point, Rudd and director Adam McKay, better known for comedies, jumped in to rewrite the screenplay.

            “We added some new action beats,” McKay explained.  “I grew up on Marvel Comics so the geek in me was in heaven that I got to add a giant action sequence to the movie; I was so excited.  So we did, we added some cool new action.  There’s a lot that’s already in there from what Edgar did, there’s a lot of dialogue and character still in there.”

            Not much after, Peyton Reed came on board, replacing Wright as director. The choice was an unexpected one. Reed’s resume is a short list of mediocre comedies, but Feige showed little hesitation.

            “When I was a lowly man on the Marvel totem pole many years ago, he was attached to direct a version of Fantastic Four at 20th Century Fox. That version of the movie didn't end up going forward,” the President recalled. “Peyton came very, very close to doing Guardians of the Galaxy for us. So when this came together, he ended up coming in and was 50 percent very enthusiastic to do a movie with us and 50 percent skeptical, but he read all the drafts and heard some of the new ideas we were already talking about with Paul and with Adam. Thankfully, he signed up.”

            Once on board Reed brought his own ideas to the new script, personalizing the movie.

            “When I read the different drafts, I definitely had a strong point of view of what I felt worked really, really well and what I felt didn't work so well,” he said. “Obviously there was a lot of fantastic conceptual and character stuff that was there, but for me a lot of it just needed to be moved in a different direction. Script-wise, the stuff that Edgar and Joe did, that's the spine of the movie: it's a heist movie, and it's sort of the passing of the torch from Hank to Scott. But the treatment of it, tonally, I think is one of the things that changed. In terms of the visualization, there were obviously months and months of stuff done. One of my big concerns about coming in on such short notice was, 'How much am I going to be able to put myself into the movie?' And I've been really pleased with the process."

            One of Reed’s personal touches was adding a sacrificial move for Ant-Man in the finale while still retaining the ultimate showdown in the little girl’s bedroom as Wright and Cornish intended.

            “Well, I came on about the same time that Adam McKay and Rudd were doing rewrites,” he recalled. “And I’ve known McKay for some time and we talked on the phone and we were both really jazzed about the idea of, in the third act, in a movie in which we will have seen shrinking a bunch, let’s take it even further in the third act and introduce what, in the comics, was the microverse, in what we call the quantum realm. Creating this moment of self-sacrifice where he has to go into the quantum realm to save his daughter that was something that was never in those drafts that Adam and I brought to it. It owes a little bit to 2001, and then there’s a The Twilight Zone episode that Richard Matheson wrote called “Little Girl Lost,” where a little girl sort of falls into the wall. Something opens up and she’s in this whole other dimension. And it freaked me out as a kid, and I love the idea, so we did an inverse version of that where the dad is now in there and the daughter is back in reality. So, I love that as a science fiction concept and, of course, Richard Matheson wrote The Incredible Shrinking Man, so I love the Richard Matheson aspect of Ant Man. And Adam came up with the idea that in every heist movie, there’s a trial by fire and they’ve got everything in line for the heist, but we need this one thing. Adam pitched that idea of sending Scott on a mission for which he’s not quite prepared and he comes up against another Marvel character. That blew my mind, and particularity with that specific character.”

            Besides aesthetics, the addition of the quantum realm in the movie also serves as a possible hook for the future of the franchise.

            “We thought, ‘There's gonna be a lot of shrinking in this movie. What if we got to the third act and we took it even further?’” the director explained. “We found a way to work that into the story with the self-sacrifice that Scott makes to save his daughter, but it also leaves Hank Pym with this realization that Scott got out of the quantum realm, something he didn't think was possible. If we're fortunate enough to do another one, what's Hank going to do about that? Is he going to try to find her? It's deeply romantic.”

            And so, Peyton Reed may have sealed his future in action comedies. How much of Edgar Wright’s and Joe Cornish’s work, if any, remained is uncertain but if anything was leftover, Reed seems to have integrated it well into his own style. Ant-Man delivers.

Even though the ties into the Avengers, Ant-Man is simpler and more straightforward than other Marvel movies. But that leaves so much room for pure old-fashioned creative fun that it comes as a pleasant surprise.