Overview
“Ant-Man” is a 2015 American superhero film based on the characters who had appeared in Marvel Comics: Scott Lang and Hank Pym. It is the 12th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
It tells a story of a former thief, who becomes an insect-sized hero Ant-Man, wearing a body-shrinking suit, and fights against the enemy trying to make military use of shrinking technology. It is mainly set in San Francisco, California.
Directed by Peyton Reed. 117 minutes.
Plot
Scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) had been on classified missions as an agent of counterterrorism and intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D., wearing a body-shrinking suit that he developed and becoming “Ant-Man”.
After months of the Battle of Sokovia depicted in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015), Pym has forced by his former protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) to be out of his company Pym Technologies because he had kept the information about his shrinking technology secret, being afraid that it would be abused.
Cross is close to perfecting a body-shrinking suit of his own, the Yellowjacket, and he has planned to sell it as a weapon.
To disrupt Cross’ plan, Pym plans to steal the Yellowjacket and to destroy the data in the server at Pym Technologies. He fixes on a man as the practitioner of his plan.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who is a former system engineer and is good at electrotechnology and safecracking, comes out of prison after serving three years for theft.
He gets a job at ice cream parlor Baskin-Robbins, but he is fired because his previous conviction is found out.
Scott goes to the house of his divorced wife Maggie (Judy Greer) to see his beloved daughter Cassie, but Maggie forbids him from seeing Cassie because he doesn’t pay child support.
Pym asks Scott to become Ant-Man to infiltrate Pym Technologies and to steal the Yellowjacket. Scott decides to take part in Pym’s project to start his life again and to see his daughter Cassie again.
After getting intensive training under the mentorship of Pym and Pym’s daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Scott infiltrates Pym Technologies as Ant-Man with a swarm of flying ants, and plants explosives, but he has no choice but to shrink to subatomic size and disappears into the quantum realm while fighting Cross wearing the Yellowjacket.
Commentary
“Ant-Man” is an entertaining film for all ages, and it can be enjoyed as a comical science fiction/action adventure film.
The film is characterized by its settling of the main character as an unheroic hero, and self-deprecating humor as shown in the scenes in which Ant-Man’s desperate battle is nothing more than a little thing like an ant fight when seen from the human-sized perspective objectively.
In the latter half of the film, there is a scene in which Ant-Man fights Yellowjacket on a diorama of the model railroad of “Thomas & Friends”.
The 2018 film “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is the sequel to this film.
