6/23/2023 0 Comments Pandora randomly pausesSometimes he'll pause forever between words in a line while staring ahead, or look up, or to the side, as if the next thought might be lurking there. He seems to be channeling post-1970s Marlon Brando performances where Brando was being fed lines through an earpiece or reading them off notecards taped to other actors' costumes. The film doesn't have the nerve (or perhaps the studio's permission?) to wipe the smile off the audience's face in the manner of, say, the last act of " Avengers: Infinity War" or the middle hour of " Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." There's a brief scene where Kang convinces Scott to use his thief abilities to steal this movie's equivalent of the Ring of Power or Infinity Stone or Mother Box by threatening to murder Cassie in front of him, then make Scott re-experience her death for all eternity. But we know it’s not the sort of movie where that could ever happen, nor one where any major character we care about will suffer too greatly.Īnd so Kang's menace is conveyed through an uncharacteristically hammy performance by Majors. Kang is a poorly written character-he's bad, he's mad, he's a genius, he wants to escape the Quantum Realm, and that's pretty much it. There's only so much that the cast or filmmakers can do to make him seem terrifying. But they still managed to give Michael Douglas plenty of good bits.) (Narratively, of course, she's been eclipsed by Cassie: the last one was more the Pyms' movie, and this one's mainly about Scott and Cassie, who is now a teen with her own super-suit, and played by Kathryn Newton. She's present and involved, but doesn't make much of an impression. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Evangeline Lilly's Hope, aka The Wasp, just seems to kind of be there. Pfeiffer, at least, gets a lot to do in pushing the plot forward and papering over cracks in the storytelling. But this is a comic-book movie, so you have to roll with it. The answer is not persuasive, despite Pfeiffer selling the heck out of it. But they also have to explain why Janet van Dyne ( Michelle Pfeiffer), former wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym ( Michael Douglas), who was trapped in the Quantum Realm for 30 years, never mentioned Kang to anybody. There's not much for a cinematographer (or director-even Ryan Coogler has seemed tamped down by Marvel) to do to show individual personality on these projects when so much of the running time is pre-visualized by effects companies and when Marvel studios boss Kevin Feige, who seems determined to keep art to a minimum for fear of gumming up the content machine, wields an aesthetic veto pen.Īs for Kang: he's what genre buffs call a " ret-con." The filmmakers need him to be a fearsome and all-powerful villain (he's essentially Thanos in a new wrapper: a genocidal madman) and to be introduced in this movie so that he could quickly be positioned as the Big Bad for the next Avengers team-up. Bill Pope, who shot the "Matrix" films and multiple Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies, is the cinematographer here, but not so you'd notice. Too bad that, for all its amusing jokes, the world onscreen mostly looks like a Marvel screen-saver. It's like something a kid threw together for a science fair, hoping that sheer charm would compensate for not having any actual science content. That the designers have grouped these microscopic and subatomic things because they're "small" is part of the fun. They're all seemingly modeled on photos of "small worlds" of varying magnification levels. There are also gelatinous bugs and other critters, shrubs and trees modeled on fungi and lichens, and a mitochondrial thing scaled like Godzilla. Instead of elephants, there are houses that look as if Fred Flintstone's home mated with the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and that are alive and can walk and defend themselves in war. Here, the tribe includes a guy with a flashlight for a head and one with a transparent, gelatinous body who is obsessed with how many "holes" humans have (the comedic peak of Rudd's performance is the pause he takes while Scott counts in his head), and a telepath ( William Jackson Harper) who is cursed to constantly hear the bizarre and/or filthy thoughts that race through others' minds. Returning director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jeff Loveness let the characters wander around the Quantum Realm, which is like a psychedelic sci-fi cartoon version of those jungles in 1930s serials where a clueless Western explorer would misinterpret a gesture and anger a local tribe, or get dunked in a river by an elephant, or be grossed out by the prospect of eating snake meat until they had a bite and realized it tastes kinda like chicken. Is it a must-see? No-the middle hour is fun in that patented easygoing "Ant-Man" way.
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