Hacker Cinema
Ant-Man
2015 · Film · 117 min
Part of Ant-Man Collection
Directed by Peyton Reed
Science FictionAdventureAction
Armed with the astonishing ability to shrink in scale but increase in strength, master thief Scott Lang must embrace his inner-hero and help his mentor, Doctor Hank Pym, protect the secret behind his spectacular Ant-Man suit from a new generation of towering threats. Against seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Pym and Lang must plan and pull off a heist that will save the world.
6 positive4 negative13 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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23 comments on Hacker News
A lot of the best Marvel movies are really other genres wearing a marvel skin
Look at Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a pulpy world war 2 film, really. If you took Captain America out it would still be a fun film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a spy thriller
Ant Man is a heist movie, like Oceans 11. Guardians is a sci fi comedy.
After a while they started to all just become "Marvel Movies" and that's the point they stopped being nearly as fun imo
If there is a disagreement between the director and the studio, they will negotiate with each other about which changes to make. But the director is never cut completely out of the process.
There are a lot of directors who would disagree with you on that...
Disney is notorious for this; off the top of my head, Ant Man, Rogue One, Solo, and Brave changed directors because of disagreements with the studio in post-production. With the Marvels, it is widely known that the director did not have final cut of the film. Bryan Singer and Steven Soderbergh have been replaced on movies due to disagreements with studios after filming had started (and in both cases, the films at issue went on to be multiple-Oscar nominees). Cary Joji Fukunaga was replaced on It due to disagreements with the studio (but retained writing credit) right before filming started; and he replaced Danny Boyle on No Time to Die after Boyle was let go due to disagreements with the studio.
If the studio tries to take creative control completely away from the director, the director can petition the DGA to have his or her name removed from the film.
The director always is consulted during the edit, and in most cases works very closely with the editor. The studio may or may not insist on changes later, but there is just no universe where the editor makes changes alone with no input from the director at all. The DGA would have a fit if that happened.
This is just incorrect. Indeed, what you suggest is at odds with over a 100 years of film history...
The DGA does not have a fit over stuff like this because a director is not entitled to "complete creative control" or to "final cut" unless they negotiate for it, get themselves hired as editor on the film they direct (which would also involve them being a producer), or work with a studio that embraces the auteur school of filmmaking (in which the released film represents the director's vision of the film).
It's one thing to support the auteur school since it usually results in better films (counterpoint: most Netflix films), but it is objectively not the way most films are made.
I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.
The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind.
(Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.)
The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.)
My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
Mando and Andor finally got it. Or, more accurately, they knew what the rest of us did, that the purpose of the medium - any medium - is to tell a story. The finbros and Disney people, not being normal humans, are (hopefully, were) trying to deliver a Star Wars experience. Yeah, whatever the hell that means (anytime my job description has the word "Experience" in it, that's almost always a red flag).
Did MCU not teach you anything, Disney? "Hey, I got a great idea for a Western . ." bam! Logan. "Do you know, what if we had like a cold war paranoia spy movie and . ." bam! Winter Solider. "Dang, so if you have a heist movie, but the twist is we have a shrink ray and . . "bam! Ant-Man. Tie all of 'em up with a McGuffin, a Big Bad, and, ding, instant cinematic universe. See what we did there? We made stories first. It's also, incidentally, what the great Star Wars video games did as well. Even the not-so-great; the elite storm trooper who loses her faith is frickin' amazing (damn, Finn got robbed, screenplay-wise . . also, again, his character does not need to exist . . goddammit, stop wasting my time, Finbro Disney People!).
Probably "Don't Waste Anyone's Time" is a good one sentence screenwriting lesson.
Anyhoosit. Enough grousing from this old fart.
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
> SpiderMan is involved in dark assassinations and then gets married, Ant-Man abuses his wife, etc etc
Maybe I'm behind on the MCU movies but I don't remember those things happening in the cinematic material!
Avengers Endgame was just ok. I never saw ant man. Thor Love and Thunder was an affront to film making, and potentially a crime against humanity.
So we can agree to disagree.
I guess I'll go to bat for the multi-billion dollar megacorp since nobody else is doing it
Avengers: Endgame was great. They did a heist through time that was basically a speed run of all the other movies. Ant-Man preserved the "F You" energy from Hank Pym while keeping things just grounded enough to be fun. Thor: Love and Thunder was basically an action-packed version of a "Flight of the Conchords" episode and they ended up solving their problems by talking instead of just smashing heads in.
So far as big budget movies go, these are the best I've ever seen
I make music for film, and I edit video in relation to that work often.
I can recall several years of having to learn how to do things in so many different applications that dictated the end product because the applications were very complex to use, and quite time consuming. I couldn't understand how friends were paid less than application developers (Around 60k annually) to do some of the most impressive VFX things I've observed in commercials and movies, and it was very hard for them to find work even when they had great portfolios.
Fast forward to now, there are mobile apps that can edit videos, and add effects, color grading, etc to videos. I can literally run a video editing session in my car that outputs better product far more quickly than I used to be able to do with $2k software... Even mobile software that can work with object files... Making the process of creation easier will likely be the best field for innovation moving forward. Making things more simple will also save studios and VFX editors tons of money, time and grief.
TikTok formats are dominating the entertainment world right now, VFX movies are beginning to look disingenuous because they either overdo effects, or they cut corners and make things low quality, relying too much on the power of celebrity to push the movie forward... Viewers are also worn out by actors trying to take cues on green screen sets, it comes across often as far too staged, or far too busy visually.
Movies where the VFX trump everything else end up being weak on writing and emotional composition in my opinion. Movies that rely on celebrity become very weak on VFX... I think good movies come from a great script that can be used to plan everything that comes thereafter, and then the quality of the final product depends on the vision of the director and execution of the team involved.
Movies like Blade, Hancock, Ant Man, and even more recent work like "The Boys" are some of my personal favorites because VFX are not the primary hitch to the stories... Avatar completely lost me, even though far more money was spent to make it. VFX is a support tool to great films, when it becomes the primary aspect, the script suffers and budgets balloon, and the worst part is that movies take 5 years to make instead of just taking one.
I would comment as follows.
Iron Man - sort novel for setting marvel tone but mostly banal action movie
Iron Man 2 - banal action movie
Thor - banal action movie
Captain America: The First Avenger - particularly banal action movie
Marvel's The Avengers - banal action movie
Iron Man 3 - banal action movie, sort of interesting to see protagonist suffering PTSD anxiety from being a superhero
Thor: The Dark World - banal action movie
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - first interesting take. Patriotism is not the same as government obedience. Real fight choreography approaching a soft john wick.
Guardians of the Galaxy - Early rock and roll aesthetic pretty interesting
Avengers: Age of Ultron - banal action movie, perhaps mcu lowpoint
Ant-Man - superhero heist movie, literally deconstructs larger than life superhero tropes. I think thumbs up
Captain America: Civil War - by this point doing the mcu's own thing, which is novel, but probably not interesting outside
Doctor Strange - banal action movie
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - aesthetic still feels mostly fresh.
Spider-Man: Homecoming - super down to earth high school drama, frustrated working class villains suffering the fallout of superheroes, seems interesting to me
Thor: Ragnarok - great film, very genre savvy. Rare achievement to make godly strength brutes feel really engaging to watch. Taika Waititi is a genius.
Black Panther - pretty good. interesting aesthetic. directly addressing racial tensions.
Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame - Mostly fan service and not too surprising but honestly still novel.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ehhh I really don't remember
Captain Marvel - Beginning had some great hard sci fi imo. Thought the ending message of newly apotheosizied female not needing to prove herself to her evil male mentor was a solid take, whereas a classic "mano a mano" kind of showdown would be so typical of the genre
Spider-Man: Far From Home - Villain emphasizing themes of the power of deceptive media? heck yeah.
Wandavision - Really bizarre and interesting start. Unfortunately non-self-aware conclusion
Falcon and Winter Soldier - Active discussions of race and the problematic nature of superheroes being supremacists? Very good.
Loki - kind of a super cliche topic (time cops) that is also somehow really rare? eh.
honorable mentions for Logan and Deadpool for being just great; and the Amazing Spiderman for its excellent aesthetics despite terrible writing.
The real secret sauce: Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, and his team including the top-tier casting director Sarah Halley Finn.
Kevin Feige prevented Marvel movies from getting stale by completely switching the genre every single movie: eg, Winter Soldier (political thriller), Ant-Man (heist movie), Spider-Man Homecoming (high-school drama movie), Thor Ragnarok (Australia/New Zealand comedy), Shang-Chi (mythical Chinese martial arts movie).
Feige has said if a character is ever successful enough to have a third movie, they will always take a very different approach from the prior two movies. Thor Ragnarok is the best example of this: a soft reboot of the personality of a previously dull Shakespearean character into a fan favorite. The success of that soft reboot was enough to give that C-level character his fourth solo movie -- something Marvel has not done before.
None of Marvel's competitors have any producer of Kevin Feige's caliber. Not Warner Bros (DC comics), not Sony (Spiderman-villains universe) and not even Disney's LucasFilm (Star Wars).
Kevin Feige is 48 years old and it's not clear whether he'll retire after the X-Men and Fantastic Four are integrated in the MCU.
His magic touch and keen understanding of the characters have been a key part of the Marvel Studio's success, and it's not at all clear whether it will survive when he leaves.
Marvel Studios could become like LucasFilm after George Lucas sold it. It's a shell of its former self that can barely produce anything passable: Mandalorian and Rogue One just make the cut as being acceptable Star Wars, but very little else.
Short answer is willingness to take risks and good taste.
For risks:
1) Casting unknown or washed up actors in leading roles
2) Switching up the genre with every movie. Iron Man was a classic super hero movie, Thor was fish out of water, Captain America was a spy movie, Ant Man was a heist movie, Guardians a space comedy, etc.
3) Forcing people to watch past movies to understand new ones. Accepted wisdom before Marvel was no one would do that so you have to dumb it down.
Something I've noticed in recent superhero movies is the idea that:
* For all the talk about "heart", superheroes are extraordinary by some aspect the rest of us can't expect to get
* Yet supervillains are often just normal people who got too pissed off. The villains in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Spider Man: Far From Home, Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man, etc are just people that got ticked off.
We have to count on others to be superheroes, but we're all one bad day from becoming supervillains.
And let's not forget that Thomas the Train appeared in a marvel movie (Ant Man): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cq8EXbY3xXk
There's something to be said for the juxtapositioning of Thomas' face in darker settings.
Nature is so awesome. The best part is when we learn something and use it in our live based on analyzing their behavior. It's called natural engineering as I remember.
Also I hope Marvel studious is watching and planning on using this in the next Ant Man movies.
Yeah, the Atlanta area is home to a lot of movies and TV shows at this point. There's even a huge movie studio built south of Atlanta (Pinewood, opened in 2014).
Most of the recent Marvell movies were shot here.
Recent films shot in Georgia include: Godzilla: King of Monsters, the Ant Man movies, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Pitch Perfect 3, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Some television shows shot here: Stranger Things, Ozark, The Walking Dead, MacGuyver and Atlanta.
There's definitely a booming production industry in the Atlanta area.
Most comments here just seem to generally crap on all video game movies to date (correct) and surmise that it's a losing concept (wrong).
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
The proposal: "Premium video rental", at $30 - $50. Right. When VHS first came out, the movie industry thought that a video rental should cost about as much as a theater show for a family of 4, including popcorn. That didn't work, although the reason was the First Sale Doctrine, which allowed video rental without payments to studios and forced prices down. That doesn't apply online, and all the players are now huge near-monopolies. They can push prices up, but can't make people watch.
3D was supposed to save theaters. It didn't. (Incidentally, while "Ghost in the Shell" is reasonably good, don't see it in 3D. The director likes blurry backgrounds. 3D has negative value for blurry backgrounds.)
Lack of originality remains a big problem. "Four of the top 10 highest grossing films last year were based on Marvel or DC Comics characters." In theaters now, the Lego Batman movie. There are currently 69 more comic book movies in the pipeline.[1] Even the duds, such as Ant-Man, are getting sequels. Variety says consumers may be getting tired of comic book movies.
Some original ideas do make big money. Last year, "The Secret Life of Pets" — $875.4 million, "Zootopia" — $1.023 billion, "Finding Dory" — $1.027 billion, were in the top 10. They're all animated. Not one of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2016 was a live-action non-sequel/remake. Maybe originality now requires a longer format than the one-off film. Consider Game of Thrones.
Meanwhile, I'm watching Korean drama and Japanese anime.
[1] http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/comic-book-adaptations/32829/69-upcoming-comic-book-movies-and-when-to-expect-them
The Marvel movies are already formulaic.
The reasonable success of Ant Man and The Guardians of the Galaxy sort of points to them having a good formula.
That's interesting, but we (as far as I know) weren't talking about game development, but about TV/movie production.
Most people don't realize it, but many recent high-budget movies were filmed in Georgia, e.g. Fast Five, Vacation, Ant-Man, all three Hunger Games movies, one of the recent X-Men movies, Flight, etc. After 2008, there was an abundance of empty warehouse space here available at deep discounts, not far from the highest volume airport in the world.
As the economy rebounded, momentum in that industry seems to have remained even though there aren't many empty/cheap warehouses here anymore. A few developers are even working on purpose-built movie studios around town now.
It has been interesting to watch, and certainly could parallel what could happen in the bay area if an exodus to somewhere like Austin began in earnest.
Today copyright protection is in fact much longer than 75 years in the US.
For personal works, it's life of author + 70 years. So if you write a poem today and live another 60 years, your poem will enter public domain in the year 2145.
For "works made for hire" (which includes most commercial works), the term of copyright is either 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
So the movie "Ant Man" will enter public domain in 2110... Assuming that the US Congress doesn't extend the deadline indefinitely (which the Supreme Court has permitted).
Law text: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302
Well, for one, they could stop doing origin stories on well established characters. For example, the next Spider-Man movie will supposedly be a non-origin story as it is rebooted to be part of Marvel's cinematic universe. If they wish to start a new actor as a character it doesn't necessarily mean a reboot of the character. But issuing new actors over-and-over with reboots and origin stories for these characters would be the boring part.
I, for one, like seeing the new heroes being introduced into the mix such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. Marvel has a large number of characters to rely on that haven't been introduced into the cinematic universe. Just because they are relatively unknown doesn't mean it won't work. Guardians was considered a risk because most people had no idea what they were, yet it did big numbers at the box office.
These stories can be told endlessly if they are done correctly. Not all of Marvel's characters are super-powered beings and some of the normal characters have interesting stories to tell. Daredevil on Netflix is a good example of this. It didn't even feel like a typical Marvel enterprise until the suit came into play. Up to that point it was an interesting drama with occasional action pieces. Agents of Shield is another; stories about mostly ordinary people dealing with living in this new world of super-beings and gods.
Where comic book movies/shows go wrong is when they are created to be commercials for selling toys and the story comes second. So far, Marvel has avoided this. Hopefully DC can do the same. If telling the story is always the most important aspect, then these things can last a long time before they get boring.