Ant Man

How do you do an origin story without doing an origin story? Marvel promised us no more origin stories, but this sure resembled one - without being the boring story you already know the ending of that so many origin stories are. Sure, it told us the origin of the current generation's Ant Man. It also gave us a yellow jacket and a wasp that are sure to make appearances in the next edition of this story.

The movie starts out on Scott Lang's (Paul Rudd) last day in prison for a burglary; we start out uncertain who exactly the good guy and who the bad guy is. It soon becomes clear in a scene where Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) and Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) are trying to invent a new shrinking suit using cute baby lambs as test subjects. She comments, "weren't we using mice?" and he asks, "what's the difference?" indicating that he has long since lost any qualities that were moral that he may have had in the beginning of their research.

We get plenty of action, starting from a prison fight and ending in a knock-down-drag-out brawl between Ant Man and Yellow Jacket, who clearly has the superior suit. Ant Man can get small, but he has no weapons other than super-strength, which makes him more relatable, and less like the monster that his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) assumes Yellow Jacket is. It also means he has to rely on his wits, not his suit, in my mind making him more enjoyable than Iron Man.

Although it is not a comedy, the movie is laugh-out-loud funny. I can't even begin to count the number of times the entire theater erupted into laughter. My favorite of these was when Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) pulls out his keychain tank and tells his daughter, "it's not a keychain," before riding a tank through the wall of the building.

The movie plays with our notions of good and evil. In the end, criminal Scott Lang is clearly the good guy, but what about Hank Pym? He was determined to keep the suit out of the hands of the highest bidder, in this case Hydra. This is certainly a good cause. But at the same time, when his wife died, he sent his daughter off to boarding school, and he abandoned his protege, both major failings as a person. In addition, he picked a thief and escaped convict to wear his suit, essentially picking someone society and he felt was expendable. If the mission went south, he wouldn't care about the person who he killed.

Also I was so excited for the second stinger, I think I literally squeed. Stay through the whole credits. It's worth it.

This movie is a contender for my favorite movie of the year. I give it an A+.