Friday, 17 February 2023

Ant-Man 3 - Feb 7

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us move onto the ‘Quantumania’ movie instead.

…Then again, things do not appear to be improving, as the reviews of it are mixed, almost as bad as the ‘Eternals’ movie had been. However…

…However, whereas the latter was an experiment of Disney/MCU in movie genres, ‘Ant-Man 3’ is a standard slash typical Marvel film; actually, it is a standard superhero film.

Work with me, here how ‘Ant-Man 3’ goes. The hero is a hero. They become complacent and too comfortable in their heroism. A villain comes along and gets the best of the hero via their complacency. The hero has to work twice as hard now to succeed, (because they have no other choice, duh). They succeed and the villain dies. The end. Pause.

Now, if that sort of scenario sounds familiar, that is because it is. For examples, both the second ‘Puss’ film and one of the final episodes of ‘PJ Masks’ S7 (I think, how many seasons does the effing series have?), have similar scripts, with the main difference from ‘Ant-Man 3’ being that the villains, (not all the villains), don’t die there.

Now, Tom Holland’s 3rd ‘Spider-Man’ film, (‘No Way Home’), has the same thing – the Spider-Trio actually manage to redeem/cure, (in a manner of speaking, but still), their villains, while ‘Ant-Man 3’ doesn’t.

…Oh, wait, there is the new M.O.D.O.K., aka the old Darren Cross/Yellowjacket, who got revived and remade by Kang – and who turned on him; wait, evil always turns upon itself. Never mind. At least the now-cancelled M.O.D.O.K. of team Hulu had been authentically original and entertaining – that is probably why it got cancelled.

On a more serious note, though is MCU’s multiverse. So far, the only real successful Marvel movie/other creation that had involved the multiverse was the aforementioned ‘No Way Home’, as it actually showed it in action – and it worked. Everything else, though – not so much. ‘What if?’ S1 was really a variant Avengers series without anything truly new, (but with plenty window dressing), while the ‘DS2’ film was a live-action version of one of the ‘What if?’ plotlines, and this brings us to ‘Ant-Man 3’.

‘Ant-Man 3’, again, does not bring anything new to MCU: the plotline is typical of the other MCU movies, except for the fact that if previously team MCU killed-off its’ villains in every film and so forth, quickly running out of them… now it can do the same, just with the confirmation that it can also – when it wants to, or needs to – pull out a new Kang/Scarlet Witch/Thanos/Ultron/etc. out of the multiverse, since it has done this to Kang two times in a row now, and neither Kang was the actual Kang, apparently. Fancy that!

As for MCU Phase 5, in general… listen. MCU’s Phase 4 was about transitions, and we have talked about that at length. Contrastingly, ‘Ant-Man 3’ didn’t have too many transitions; what it had were resolutions, something that the first phases of MCU were, and are, well known for; whatever MCU was doing, and was going for, in its’ Phase 4, appears to be over, and what we are left with?

Same old that we had before Phase 4, it seems. Phase 4 of MCU actually experimented with different genres, sometimes successfully – i.e. ‘Spider Man: No Way Home’, and sometimes not – i.e. ‘The Eternals’ – but experiment it did. Now, it seems time for cinematographic experiments is over, and MCU returned to where it had started, with tried and tested true, old-school, done by the book, works. The details might be different, but the underlined idea is the same… save that now MCU can access the multiverse, bringing the same villain in different incarnations over and over again, diminishing itself, and the success of its’ heroes, even further than compared to the level that the ‘Kamala Khan’ and ‘She-Hulk’ series have brought MCU to – and that might be part of the reason as to why Mr. Feige seems to be cutting down on the number of MCU TV series since MCU’s Phase 4 – but that is another story.

As for ‘Ant-Man 3’… it is an entertaining movie, but little more; once you look past all the sound, the color and the furious noise, this film doesn’t appear to be living up to the hype that it’d generated, and the critics have realised it, hence why they appear to hate it… at least some of them have. Guess we will just have to wait and see as to what MCU will do next.

For now, though, this is it. See you all soon!

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