It’s the middle of summer and I got nothing to do. Well…I got a lot of stuff to do but I don’t want to do them. So why not revive this dead blog for heck of it? Studying for MIT ASEs turns out to be more boring than living apparently.
SPOILERS AHEAD. PS Snape dies
Last Tuesday, I went to watch Antman and The Wasp with a few of my friends. Honestly, it’s not a terrible movie. It falls into many of the movie cliches that the other Marvel movies have, like overly extended scenes for one short joke that doesn’t actually progress the plot, but, overall, the movie did not seem overly stretched just to fill runtime.
Personally, I like the direction that Marvel is heading with its antagonists. Like Thanos, the antagonist of this movie, Ghost, has a very complex character. Gone are the black and white, good and evil archetypes of the previous movies. In Captain America, Hydra was the clear evil while Cap was the symbol of justice for all. In Black Panther, Klaus was clearly your typical antagonist with his lack of empathy and greed. On the other hand, in Infinity War, Thanos was not fueled by some evil agenda but by a stone cold desire to save the universe from ultimate destruction. One could even see him as a good guy. A savior. r/ThanosDidNothingWrong. In the same way, Ghost in Antman and The Wasp was a young adult girl whose life was ruined by a failed experiment that caused every single cell in her body to phase in and out of existence(causing her great pain), trained to be an assassin due to her phasing abilities by Shield and later discarded; due to her phasing abilities, her cells are slowly deteriorating and she will eventually die if she isn’t fixed in time. In a way, we can empathize and feel bad for her. But in the way, Thanos is painted “evil” because he is okay with killing half the universe to save it, Ghost is portrayed as the antagonist since she is willing to do anything to live, even risking killing another person. This complexity of character adds a layer of depth to the movie and that causes me to look forward to phase 4 of the MCU.
And where there are good things, there are bad. Antman and the Wasp has a lot of issues but the one that sticks out the most is how it deals with the physics of the world and the consistency of it. Look. I understand that when you create a miracle particle and device that it would be hard to align it with the physics of today but at the very least, it should be consistent throughout the movie. In Antman, the basic technique of shrinking and growing with Pym particles is that only the distance between particles and sub-atomic particles changes. The mass within a particle remains the same. This means that no matter how big or small Antman grows, he will always weigh 1 Antman weight. This was established in Antman 1. In Antman and The Wasp, however, the theory was more consistent with the fact that the mass and the size changes.
First, the movie begins with Scott carefreely playing with his daughter. After experiencing a dream in the POV of Hank Pym’s wife, he calls Hank about it and then proceeds to get kidnapped by Hope Pym, Hank’s daughter. He wakes to the inside of a car that Pym is driving and finds out that this car was being driven while drunk down to a size of a toy. What stood out was that it was going at the same speed as the other cars. Without even considering whether a shrunken down engine would be able to provide enough force to overcome the static friction due to the immense weight of the car, another problem becomes apparent. When the car shrinks down, every part of the engine shrinks down relatively while maintaining its mass. Thus, when gasoline is combusted within the engine, the resulting rotational velocity would be the same as it was unshrunken. (Is that even a word? Look I made MIT, not Harvard. English is obviously not my strong suit) But you know what changes? The radius of the wheel. Since the wheel has a smaller radius but the same rotational velocity, there is no way for a car to be traveling at the same speed. Refer to the HyperPhysics blurb about rotational motion.
Second, either everyone is super swole in MCU or something funky is up with the mass of objects that shrunk or grew by the effect of Pym particles. How does Hope just pick up a shrunken jeep as if it was just a toy car? That’s definitely a few tons of metal that a normal person wouldn’t be able to pick up. Maybe we should have a movie on Hope about her super strength instead. Near the halfway mark of the movie, Hank Pym demonstrates that he is capable of shrinking down his building to the size of a backpack. Look, I have nothing against him being able to conveniently change the building into a size more portable but I do have concerns as to how an old man is able to drag and pick up that miniature building like an average box. Hey, don’t get me wrong. Maybe, Hank has worked out all his life and is able to pick up hundreds of tons without breaking a sweat. Maybe, the whole Pym family has superpowers(which would explain how Hank’s wife was able to survive the quantum void while other were almost dying because of it). OR maybe Marvel can’t keep consistency at all. Like how easy it is to just cut out one line from the first movie and redesign Pym particles. In a similar fashion, near the end of the movie, Antman grew to a very large size to stop a ferry boat from the movie. Where did he get all those muscles from? Just because you are big doesn’t mean that you have more muscles. Unless Scott originally had superstrength, he would have been run over by the boat.
Speaking of the boat, how do Pym particles differentiate between what has to shrink and what doesn’t. When Antman grew to his big form to stop the boat, Hope became very worried that Scott will not have enough oxygen to breathe. If you think about it, the Antman suit must have its own oxygen supply or else how would Scott be able to breath when he shrinks past the atomic stage. Thus, the oxygen within the tank should have grown bigger too, relative to Scott and he would have been perfectly fine. Some of you might say, “oh but Kevin, when Antman becomes larger he has to use more oxygen”. And to that I say bs. Only the distance between particles grows so Antman should still use the same amount of oxygen and energy as if he were smaller. Moving on from the boat, in a previous scene, Antman had helped Hope and Hank escape by giving them a Pym particle disk to shrink down a wall in a jail. How does the Pym particle know to only shrink the wall? I can accept, with a lot of stretching, that the Pym particles are able to shrink the person along with the suit(because the person is in the suit) or the car because it is definitely different from the road but how would you specifically target a wall. A wall is literally part of a building. Either there was a conversation that I miss involving Hank talking directly to the Pym particles to shrink only the wall or I smell an ex machina that wasn’t really thought out.
Okay, enough complaining. Overall, I wouldn’t say Antman and the Wasp was a bad film. In fact, it was probably an above average film. It was funny, it wasn’t too stretched out, it had complex characters, and, like every other Marvel movie, a lot of fighting and suspense. If you ignore the physics of Pym particles, everything makes near to perfect sense. While I do miss, the oldie goodie film of Iron Man 1, Antman and the Wasp gives me a lot of hope for the future of Marvel.