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Greetings, Hive!

After the grandiloquence that the Marvel Cinematic Universe became from the first Avengers movie onwards with its world-scale battles, gods, space travels, homicidal artificial intelligences, universal conflicts involving artifacts from creation itself, it was hard to bring it all back to a much smaller scale, and yet that was exactly what Marvel did... Literally. Debuting as the twelfth film and the last of the second phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, arrives Ant-Man, a film with a lot of heart that felt like a breath of fresh air and one that I particularly remember with a lot of fondness, however, will it have aged as well as I remember it? It's time to find out with this review.

So without any further ado, let's start!

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^{Scott Lang / Ant-Man}

The production of this film dates back to 2006 when Marvel Studios decided to hire Edgar Wright to be in charge of the script; however the movie wasn’t a so important project for Marvel due to the relatively low popularity of the character outside comics, so it was decided to work under a free agenda. After submitting 3 drafts of his script, Wright had to abandon the project in 2014 due to creative differences with Marvel executives, however much of his work remained in the final product. In June of that same year it was announced that Peyton Reed would direct the film.

^{Hope Van Dyne}

The cast stars Paul Rudd (who incidentally also had a hand in writing the script) in the lead role of Scott Lang / Ant-Man, Evangeline Lilly as Hope Van Dyne, Corey Stoll as Darren Cross / Yellowjacket, Michael Peña as Luis, and finally Michael Douglas as Hank Pym / the original Ant-Man. The film's world premiere took place on June 25, 2015 while it was released in the United States on July 15, 2015. Critical reception was generally favorable from both specialists and general audiences, noting its humor, Paul Rudd's performance, special effects, and the much smaller scale it has in relation to the rest of the MCU.

The plot opens with a flashback to 1989, specifically during a meeting of the secret agency S.H.I.E.L.D involving Hank Pym, Howard Stark (Tony Stark's father), Peggy Carter and Mitchell Carson. This meeting is taking place due to the agency’s efforts to duplicate Hank Pym’s shrinking technology, who by then was working under the alias of Ant-Man using a suit and subatomic particles that allowed him to shrink to the size of an ant, however Hank thought this technology was too dangerous to be shared with the world, so after realizing S.H.I.E.L.D’s attempts to replicate it he decides to quit from the agency. Back in the present (specifically after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron) we meet Scott Lang, a recently released from prison thief who is trying to rebuild his life with all the complications that come with being in prison; he can't get a job, he hasn't been able to pay child support or have custody to spend time with his daughter, and everyone remembers him as a thief.

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^{Hank Pym}

Despite this, his former cellmate Luis offers him one last chance for a robbery that promises to fix all his problems: robbing the abandoned house of an eccentric old millionaire, an easy job, and although Lang doesn't accept at first, he eventually decides to do it. Upon arriving at the house and managing to break down the door to the main vault, all Lang finds is what he describes as "an old biker suit," with no idea that it's Ant-Man's suit or that the robbery was a test set up by Hank Pym himself to gauge his abilities to eventually inherit the Ant-Man mantle from him.

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^{Darren Cross / Yellowjacket}

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As I've said a couple of times, one of the great successes of this film is to return the focus to something much more "casual" so to speak, leaving a little aside the global/spatial conflicts because while the plot revolves around a possible threat on a global scale, we know it's not even close to what we see in the Avengers movies. This, and its humor, makes Ant-Man sometimes feel like a point and apart from the UCM which to be honest is quite nice as it moves away from pretentious approaches that can become tiresome, and speaking about its humor.... By this point we are already more than used to the humor led by Tony Stark’s flamboyant personality or something much more American when the character played by Robert Downey Jr doesn’t appears.

^Luis

However in Ant-Man’s case the humor feels a little different, it doesn’t get to be visceral or crude but it is definitely more satirical, which is quite appreciated because apart from giving a break from the usual it also gives it an identity of its own. By freeing itself from the weight of an overly complex plot it can allow itself to move very well between moments of comedy, seriousness, tension, or action, although of course we must remember that we are talking about a Marvel movie (and also one with a strong load of humor), so it is more than logical not to expect a spy thriller or something, despite that, the moments in which the film takes itself seriously doesn’t feel forced or coming out of nowhere and are congruent with the overall tone. I also think the pacing is just right, at no point did I find it tedious or feel like anything was happening too fast. Honorable mention to Luis, Scott Lang's friend, he steals the scene every time he appears.