Best Of

Vigo was a man too. And the two in the courtroom were guys, I forget their name though.

But that librarian ghost was definitely female and scary as shit too!

True, though I was only talking about the first one. I don't remember the second one well enough to remember the ghosts in it.

Was Vigo a ghost? Or a possessed person, like Dana and Louis in the first one?

I think a bit of both. Or maybe more mind control over Peter MacNicols character.

Got it. And I forgot that Vigo was the name of the ghost inside McNichols' character. So that one was male. A dead, specific person from the past.

Although, in the first one it seemed like Louis, as the Keymaster, wasn't possessed by a specific ghost, that I remember. He didn't have Zhuul in him, like Dana, he seemed to just have ghosty energy in him that made him a sort of thrall with an important role to play in the ritual. So I actually wouldn't count whatever was in him as a male ghost, like Vigo.

Louis was possessed by Vince Clortho - key master and opposite to Dana's Zhuul (note the Freudian imagery)

I'm glad you guys kicked things off in a positive direction, as I imagine (or hope) I am in the minority for really not enjoying it.

I felt like there were, and I think this is apropos of the two separate different writing teams, two different movies, each with their own tones, poorly smashed together. Each of those movies, if fully committed to on their own, would have been ones I would enjoy. But what I saw felt like a mess. With fun in it, sure. But just too much dumb in it for me to feel like I could go along for the ride and enjoy it. And too many thin justifications for various set pieces.

I think they should have EITHER stuck with the original, long-term (and Wright-directed) plan of letting it just be its own thing. I think part of what made Guardians so successful in feeling fresh and distinct from the Marvel movies is that it was so separate, and so different in tone from the MCU that had come before. (And they were helped by being, I don't know, millions of light years and many narrative years away from the influence the Avengers were having on Earth.

OR they should have scrapped more of what I assume to be the original stand-alone ideas and made all of this fully a movie about a down-on-his-luck guy suddenly finding himself in the superhero game, in a world where the superheroes are very, very different people than he is, and he has to figure out how he matches up. It could still have a lighter tone than the rest of the MCU. But I think they could have found story driven ways to mark that territory. To basically have 'We are not here to be Avengers/ We are disruptors to the Avengers market' be more of a driving idea, coming from Pym.

The potential was there for this-- his mentor, Pym, was a Cold War espionage guy in an age before the Avengers. Maybe he doesn't like what SHIELD has become, how they have consolidated power. Maybe he finds the ascendence of the Avengers very troubling.

I think some of these ideas, these connections, were tilted at (which felt like late additions to the script they already have-- a throw away line about Stark here, some random suit wearers getting called Hydra there. But the idea that this was a world that has public, capital-S Superheroes in it should have affected every time a person saw someone in one of those suits. There should have been some talk about whether putting on a supersuit in this world means that SHIELD comes and immediately shuts you down. Things like that. So much of this movie still felt like story beats from a script where (to borrow a Del Close term) Ant-Man is the one and only Unusual Thing. But put him in a world that already has so many unusual things happening in it recently, and then different things have to be true to that world.

Heck, when Lang got into that vault, he basically should have thought, 'Wait. Is this guy an Avenger or something?' because that is the world he lives in.

Deciding to still be in his daughter's life in a world where you KNOW what happened in the Battle of New York, and when a city in Eastern Europe got lifted into the sky, etc. You're in a world where you have to think about that getting near your family. (And, earlier this summer, we see a plotline about a hero keeping their family off the grid and far away for exactly that reason.)

And, no, I don't need an Ant-Man movie to be as dark and heavy as other Avengers ones. I would love it to be its own thing, but they didn't go that way. And I think the half-measures of trying to shoehorn years of prepping one movie into being this other kind of movie just didn't end up coming together. At least, not for me. You could see them straining at it.

Oh well. I wasn't big on Avengers: Age of Ultron either, so for Marvel movies this wasn't my summer. But so it goes.

TLDR Version: I wish they committed to one movie or the other. They tried to make both, and it asks for too many leaps from the audience. Too much dumb.