“Spider-Man: Homecoming”: Marvel’s universal sophomore knows his place in Queens
“Spider-Man: Homecoming”
directed by Jon Watts
written by: Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley, and Jon Watts & Christopher Ford, and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
based on the Marvel Comic Book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
acted by Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Edward Leeds, Zendaya, Jon Favreau, Jacob Batalon, Laura Harrier, Marisa Tomei, Chris Evans
released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios
rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for sci-fi action violence, some language and brief suggestive comments
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” pleases as an action adventure about growing up. In a deciding moment of self-making, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) will scale his future as a superhero. Jon Watts directs this summery PG-13 diversion based on the Marvel Comic series launched by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in August 1962. In April 1999 Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted rights for the Spider-Man character and television distribution of films to Marvel Enterprises and Sony Pictures Entertainment. A screen franchise ensued.
A newfound maturity lets Parker know himself as a 15-year-old sophomore at Midtown School of Science and Technology. Apart from his chimera arachnid characteristics, the title character is at the age to go to a homecoming dance, take a Spanish quiz and resolve a linear acceleration equation. He shows up for the academic decathlon nationals. Instead of competing alongside his teammates, however, this costumed web-spinner saves them from peril atop the Washington Monument. Full-time world-saving can come later.
Parker is on his own for guidance. Grown-ups are not around for this teen from Queens. His legal guardian is Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). She’s concerned by how much time he spends in his room. And why is he always losing his knapsacks? Five and counting. Quick changes in alleys mean Parker forgets where he cached his street clothes when changing for crime-fighting errands.
Parker looks up to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), a mostly absent mentor renowned for his exploits as Iron Man. This CEO of Stark Industries, headquartered in Manhattan, is Parker’s corporate sponsor of sorts. On their irregular get-togethers Stark brings him upgraded Spider-Man outfits. The latest beta comes with a Siri-like A.I. assistant. No one knows who Spider-Man is behind his mask. Iron Man, on the other hand, is out as an international celebrity.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” opens with Parker shooting a selfie video about jetting to Berlin. Aunt May is told he was on a Stark internship retreat. The truth is that Stark beckoned Parker to join forces with the Avengers, a consortium of adult superheroes lead by super-industrialist Stark. We do not see the battle in question detailed in “Captain America: Civil War” last year.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” presumes we saw that film, along with others in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The press notes quote director Jon Watts explaining why he and his co-writers Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers dispensed with backstory: “[W]e… didn’t have to spend any time explaining why this 16-year-old kid [Parker says he’s 15 in the film] would come up with the idea of becoming a superhero. He’s grown up in the MCU; when Peter Parker was eight years old, he saw Tony Stark say ‘I am Iron Man’ on TV.”
An Iron Man animated series aired from 1994 to 1996, but there’s no flashback to seven- or eight-year-old Peter watching reruns on television, reading comics, or playing with action figures in the 2017 film. Nor do we learn what happened to his parents. And there’s nothing about the radioactive spider bite that enhanced him with spidery powers. Aunt May is off the mark about the “changes your body is going through.”
So fanboy Parker first met Stark on the screen. Fans of Spider-Man met him there too: “Spider-Man” (2002), “Spider-Man 2” (2004), “Spider-Man 3” (2007) and “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012). Tobey Maguire played the title character in the first three films; Andrew Garfield in the fourth. Fans got to know Stark in “Iron Man” (2008), “Iron Man 2” (2010) and “Iron Man 3” (2013)– all starring Downey. For an otherwise calculated effort, Watts’ film offers no guide for unversed viewers.
The notion of guiding neophytes is teased in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Captain America (Chris Evans), a Marvel character introduced in a 1941 comic book, turns up in videos at Parker’s high school. “Hi, I’m Captain America… Today my good friend _______ , your gym teacher, …” This upstanding superhero imparts one-liners to kids in detention: “The only way to really be cool is to follow the rules.” Apparently public schools outsource both calisthenics and counseling to Captain America.
To do your homework, watch “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011), “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014), “Captain America: Civil War” (2016) and the two Avengers films without his name in their titles. When Spider-Man interrupts a crew of ATM thieves, note they’re wearing masks of various Avengers. An Identity Theft poster is on the wall.
If the 2017 screenwriters skip essentials in Spider-Man’s origin story, they introduce a new supporting character deserving more screen time, if not a spin-off of her own. Michelle (Zendaya) is a quirky academic decathlete. Off to the side, she speaks out of the corner of her mouth in her handful of scenes. Classmates wonder why she knows so much about Parker, like his dropping marching band and robotics lab. “I’m not obsessed with him, just very observant,” she deflects. She lurks in detention: “I just like coming here to sketch people in crisis.”
Parker’s best pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) marvels at a theory Parker devises to explain a local crime trend under Stark’s radar: “Whoever’s making these weapons is obviously combining alien tech with ours.” Leeds goes meta-nerd: “That is literally the coolest sentence anyone has ever said.”
The self-radicalized entrepreneur making and selling those weird weapons is Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton). His resentment against east coast elites drives the narrative of “Spider-Man: Homecoming”– not Parker’s path to Spider-Manhood. Toomes’ criminal activity furnishes Parker with a case to solve. He hopes to impress Stark and attain Avengers status.
Toomes gets a backstory in the opening scene, set eight years before the storyline of “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” His hardhat crew processes debris in a sort of ground zero in New York City. Suddenly a contingent of federal suits come on site. They brandish executive order 3960 per “exotic alien technology” that overrides his contract. This will ruin his business and put his people out of work, he pleads.
A television newscaster adds context: “A joint venture between Stark Industries and the federal government, the Department of Damage Control, oversees the collection and storage of all alien and other exotic material. Experts estimate there are over 1500 tons of exotic materials scattered throughout the tri-state area.” What you may have missed in a prior Marvel film was the Avengers defending New York City from aliens. Extraterrestial war materiel was left on the field of battle.
Stark and Washington, D.C. collude to disempower Toomes, who identifies with forgotten men and women. He makes a hard turn to a darker side: stealing alien tech and selling a new generation of hardware to criminals– and terrorists? “The world’s changing,” Toomes tells his employees. “It’s time we changed too.”
Alongside a rebooted career, the changing Toomes adapts that “exotic” tech to fashion himself a superhero-style outfit. Enter the Vulture, a villainous version of Iron Man. This befits Keaton after starring in “Batman” (1989) and “Batman Returns” (1992), and later in “Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence” (2014) where he played an over-the-hill winged action hero. A paunchy middle-aged man in a Spider-Man outfit appears briefly as a background character with no lines. In the current film a Toomes employee adopts an alien tech-enhanced persona of Shocker on sales calls.
Watts may not waste screen time with Parker’s angst of adolescence, yet Toomes takes the floor to speechify: “How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that power? Or any of his little toys? Those people, Pete, those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, you and me. They don’t care about us. We build their roads and fight their wars and everything. They don’t care about us… That’s how it is. I know you know what I’m talking about.”
That’s it for political philosophizing. Even that much talk strikes Parker as out of place. He asks the question few characters actually do ask in these circumstances: “Why are you telling me all this?” Toomes admits it’s in part to buy time to get “airborne” as Vulture. As another Keaton character once insisted, channeling his Birdman persona: “People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.” And so the fight begins: Spider-Man versus Vulture.
Earlier, Toomes schooled Parker: “You’re young. You don’t understand how the world works.” True enough, though Parker is more worldly than his sidekick who guesses that after high school this is what a boss tells an employee: “Good job on those spreadsheets. Here’s a gold coin.”
Watts’ film snarks about the Avengers franchise. The gym teacher who had to play the Captain America video cracks: “I’m pretty sure this guy’s a war criminal now but whatever.” Iron Man– Tony Stark is called “hypercapitalist” in the press notes– has drawn a heavy critique or two. Exhibit A: the 2014 Cineaction article titled “How to Read Iron Man: The Economics, Geopolitics and Ideology of an Imperial Film Commodity.” There Tanner Mirrlees proposes: “Iron Man supports the economic power of the U.S. Empire by sustaining the global market dominance of Hollywood and its cross-border trade in blockbuster films, synergistically cross-promoting itself and other U.S. commodities through itself and other derivative goods, and generating revenue for the Walt Disney Company and its U.S. ruler and owner, [CEO, Robert A.] Iger.”
A glance at the historical record yields no web so nefarious, although on March 9, 1942 the Motion Picture Daily reported a new book titled “Himmler, Nazi Spider Man.” Another wartime allusion can be spotted in Time Magazine on June 6, 1944: “The strong, fine strands of spider webs have been very helpful in the wartime manufacture of optical instruments and range finders.” Headlined “Spider Man,” the article credited “Pete” Petrunkevitch, “the world’s foremost authority on spiders,” with that very spidey innovation. Captain America and Iron Man plots foreground on U.S. research and development for overseas war efforts.
So far I found no evidence that Peter Parker owes his name to the above-mentioned Yale professor from Russia, one Alexander Ivanovich (“Pete”) Petrunkevitch. Spiderman creator Stan Lee, who has a fleeting cameo in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” originally heralded his comic book hero with no ideological baggage at all: ‘‘the world’s most amazing teen-ager– Spider-Man– the superhero who could be– you.’’
Fans– that’s “you”– identifying with Lee’s character could read the fine print, after Wikileaks posted hacked emails exchanged between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Marvel Characters, Inc. A Confidential Non-Binding Discussion Document and a Second Amended and Restated License Agreement state that Peter Parker and Spider-Man “must always strictly conform to the following Mandatory Character Traits.”
The Caucasian heterosexual male character “does not deliberately torture… deliberately kill humans other than in defense of self or others… use foul language beyond what is permitted in a PG-13 rated film… smoke tobacco… abuse alcohol… use or sell/distribute illegal drugs… engage in sexual relations before the age of 16 or with anyone below the age of 16.”
Core Powers and Abilities are specified too. “Spider-Man has the proportionate strength of a spider. This means he can lift or press approximately 10 tons. Spider-Man has the proportionate jumping ability of a spider. This means he can jump vertically approximately 5 stories (approximately 50 feet) and/or horizontally approximately the length of a city block (approximately 264 feet).” His exceptional “flexibility” exceeds that of a “contortionist.” He “can evade bullets– even from automatic weapons… His accelerated metabolism increases his tolerance to toxins.” He “can maintain his equilibrium better than an Olympic level gymnast.” Sony Pictures Entertainment “shall have the right to depict any of Spider-Man’s Approved Powers in any particular Picture at up to full strength and/or as having any lesser strength… Spider-Man’s powers apply to Spider-Man’s civilian identity, Peter Parker, as well.”
Oblivious or not to limits on his freedom, Parker ultimately makes a self-knowing choice. Spider-Man– “Queens’ own local colorful crime-stopper,” to quote an admiring local TV news talent– is staying home. He never left, really.
©2017 Bill Stamets
Fantastic Four: something green in fourth dimension empowers twentysomethings with new career options
Fantastic Four
directed by Josh Trank
written by Josh Trank, Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater
based on characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
acted by Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Reg E. Cathey, Toby Kebbell
distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
After accidental exposure to something green in the so-called fourth dimension, four twentysomethings are freakishly empowered with new career options in “Fantastic Four.”
This vintage Marvel Comic gets a screen adaptation that’s less cartoonish and self-conscious than others in Marvel’s busy franchise. No doubt by contract, director Josh Trank insinuates the obligatory sneer at the scientific-corporate-military nexus.
The adolescent-at-any-age demographic for this product may not expect its 31-year-old director to opt for a straightforward tone. Trank deliberately decelerates after the kinetic opening logo that trademarks every Marvel screen property. A truly stunning, if fleeting, special effect will come later when CGI action peaks at an inter-dimensional vortex.
Trank and co-screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater create an origin story for characters originated by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961: Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, Human Torch and the Thing. After vanquishing an evildoer who nearly did in Earth, Trank’s foursome is introduced to a secret government research center on a mountain. It’s nameless and off-the books. Their military escort tells his new employers: “Call it whatever you want.” Naming the facility after their late mentor Franklin Storm is considered.
In the film’s last minute, the four will decide on a name for themselves. Rejected are The Human Torch & the Torchettes, The Big Brain & His Neurons, and The Big Brain & Her Neurons. Two Guys, a Girl & the Thing that Nobody Wanted is a no-go. At last, the alliterative two-word title of the film you just watched appears on screen and the credits roll.
Trank’s 2012 film “Chronicle” adopted a handheld docu-diary format to observe three Seattle high school seniors getting super-powers– plus ethical problems about using them. Jung, Plato and Schopenhauer get name dropped. As in the different versions of “Fantastic Four,” that trio’s freak powers are acquired by chance. What leads the Marvel characters to their transformative exposures differs.
In the original Cold War-era comic book Susan Storm– who morphs into Invisible Girl– urges pilot Ben Grimm– the Thing-to-be– to launch their untested spaceship at once, “unless we want the Commies to beat us!” After getting dosed with cosmic radiation, Ben the Thing philosophizes: “We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?”
The Fantastic characters were not only competing with Sputnik satellite launches by the Soviets in 1957, Marvel was catching up with DC Comics that convened seven of its superheroes into the Justice League of America comic book in 1960.
In the inferior 2005 film directed by Tim Story– titled “Fantastic Four” too– the same characters (different cast) board a corporately owned & operated spaceship for a risky flight into the path of “a high energy cosmic storm.” “Exposure” like that “might have triggered the evolution of early planetary life,” theorized Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd).
The proposed payoff: “fundamentally advanc[ing] our knowledge of the human genome. Cure countless diseases, extend human life, give kids a chance to live longer, stronger, healthier…” The downside due to bad shielding: an outer space dosing of all four, plus one who turned into an antagonist aiming to annihilate Earth.
In the 2015 “re-imagining,” per industry parlance, Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, “House of Cards,” “The Wire”) extols an “inter-dimensional” expedition towards “a whole new world which can help save this world… We’ll be able to discover new resources, energy resources which will revitalize our own. This is our chance to learn more about our planet and maybe even save it.”
Lines like that bring to mind “Tomorrowland,” a film directed by Brad Bird and released by Disney in May. Saving our future is the same agenda in this dimension-leaping adventure. Both films show a serious regard for science fairs as springboards for world-changing geniuses. Both plots pair a scientist and a bright girl who notice an inventive boy at a competition in the state of New York. Despite his design for a flying machine flopping, the visitors recruit him as researcher with a future in inter-dimensionality.
The 2015 iteration of “Fantastic Four” introduces fifth-grader Reed (Owen Judge) telling his classmates his goal when he grows up is to be the first human ever teleported. His teacher chides him for failing the assignment: “pick a real career in the real world.” Reed has already built a prototype in his Long Island garage.
Four years later Reed, now played by Miles Teller (“Insurgent,” “Divergent”) attempts to demonstrate his Cymatic Matter Shuttle at the high school science fair. That’s when he encounters Dr. Franklin Storm, dean of the Baxter Institute in Manhattan, and Sue Storm (Kate Mara, “House of Cards,” “Transcendence”). She is Storm’s adopted daughter from Kosovo. And incredibly acute at “pattern recognition.” Marvel marries Reed and Sue in a 1965 comic book. They also exchange vows in the 2007 film “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” directed by Tim Story again.
Joining the quantum gate crew are Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) who used to help him sneak tech from the Grimm family junkyard; and Franklin Storm’s son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, “Fruitvale Station,” “Chronicle”), an ace mechanic and dauntless street auto racer.
A fifth member of the team is Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a bitter anti-authoritarian techie from Latveria (capital is Doomstadt, according to Marvel Comics lore) who earns the derisive nicknames “Adolph” and “Borat.” A few years ago he exiled himself from the Baxter Institute after burning its data servers, yet his mentor Franklin coaxes him back. After all, he was the first to conceive, if not construct, a teleporter. Last year in “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” Kebbell played the treasonous lieutenant ape to Caesar, the alpha primate of Muir Woods.
Before sending up astronauts, NASA performed sub-orbital and orbital trial launches with chimps in 1961. A test run in “Fantastic Four” teleports a chimp to some other dimension, aka, “the other dimension.” There is only one other one, it seems. The teleporter craft’s camera brings back video images of an uninhabited planet at undetermined coordinates in the known universe.
Reed, Ben, Sue, Johnny and Victor suit up for an unauthorized trip before the proverbial suits from NASA grab their experimental gizmo. On the nameless other-dimensional orb a living neural energy pulses underfoot. Reed, Ben, Sue and Johnny make it back to the Baxter lab– but only after out-running green fissures in the unstable surface. Victor, however, gets stranded there until rescued by a later expedition.
The returning four are fantastically transformed. “They’re not powers,” Sue scolds her stepbrother Johnny, who thinks it’s way cool to fly on fire. “They’re aggressively abnormal physical conditions.” Besides turning invisible, Sue can project force fields. “Neuropathically,” it’s explained. Reed can elongate his limbs like rubbery taffy. (The 2015 film omits a smirking inquiry about elongating his penis in the 2005 dialogue.) And Ben is a rock-clad behemoth dispatched on covert military operations.
“All these abilities come from one place, another dimension that our scientists have taken to calling Planet Zero– a planet infused with the same energy that transformed these survivors and potentially could transform our military capabilities,” states Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson, “The Incredible Hulk,” “Minority Report”). As chairman of the board of the Baxter Institute, he goes over the head of dean Storm. Allen assures the money and military interests: “We’ll have control of more than that world, we’ll have control over ours.”
As in “Avatar” (2009) and “Jupiter Ascending” (2015), the plot of “Fantastic Four” is all about exploiting resources elsewhere. To quote their respective press notes, the earthlings in James Cameron’s “Avatar” aim to plunder “Pandora, where a corporate consortium is mining a rare mineral that is the key to solving Earth’s energy crisis,” while the Wachowskis imagine “a universe in which the Earth is just one small piece of the vast machinery of galactic commerce—a prize, about to be seized and stripped of its most precious resource: humanity.”
All three films supply cautionary fables. Their plots take sides against the exploiters. But “Fantastic Four” at least entertains some dissonance. Victor distrusts the government to operate the quantum gate, cynically cracking: “We could send our political prisoners there. Waterboarding in the 4th dimension could prove very effective.”
Franklin Storm foresees a science-for-science’s-sake bonus– “That place could explain the origin of our species. The evolution of our planet.”– like the impetus for the trillion-dollar corporate spaceship christened “Prometheus” in the 2012 film “Prometheus” directed by Ridley Scott. Scott did not title his work after either of the characters named Prometheus introduced in 1968 by Marvel Comics or by DC Comics in 1986.
When Storm tries selling his inter-dimensional travelers as saviors of our world, Victor pushes back: “Not that it deserves to be saved. I mean think about it. People running the world are the same ones running into the ground so maybe it deserves what it’s got coming to it.”
A naysayer turned uber-nemesis, Victor ultimately identifies the fourth dimension as his new homeland: “It’s not enough to ruin your world. Now you want to ruin mine.” He takes on the Fantastic Four and opens a black hole for dispatching Earth “into the other dimension.”
“Humanity had its chance,” decrees the doomed one. The space-time continuum will not let him get away with it, though. Sequels transcend all quanta in perpetuity, throughout the universe, in any and all media now known or hereafter devised.
Ant-Man: dads and daughters foil 15 billion USD deal in sub-atomic dimension
Ant-Man
directed by Peyton Reed
written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd
acted by Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Abby Ryder Fortson, Wood Harris, Tip “T.I.” Harris, David Dastmalchian
presented by Marvel Studios
distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Add another entry to the Marvel Comics encyclopedia of sensitive super-heroic smart alecks: Ant-Man (Paul Rudd). And open an insectarium for his allies– the bullet ant, crazy ant, carpenter ant and fire ant.
Unversed in Marvel lore? The hyphenated title character is no chimera. Unlike the insect-human mutants in “The Fly” (1958) and “Return of the Fly” (1959), both with Vincent Price, or David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986). Nor is the “Ant-Man” of 2015 a descendant of “Mant,” the faux 1962 film shot in “Atomo Vision” that figures in the plot of Joe Dante’s “Matinee” (1993). And Ant-Man is certainly not akin to Spide-Man, with five films to his name since 2002. Same phylum, different class.
For Marvel Studios, Peyton Reed (“Yes Man,” “The Break-Up,” “Down with Love,” “Bring It On”) directs comic sci-fi action fare based on Dr. Hank Pym, a character introduced by “The Man in the Ant Hill” story that appeared in “Tales to Astonish #27” from 1962. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, “Ant-Man” profits from a topical, if toothless, critique of an American corporation. This one is named after Pym. Marvel Entertainment is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney.
Reed’s PG-13 version stars Michael Douglas as Pym. In 1987 his secret formula for “alter[ing] atomic relative distance” let him and his wife miniaturize as mini-operatives in cool outfits. They intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile launched by Soviet separatists. Sacrificing herself to complete this covert mission, she vanished into a “quantum” void.
Due to misgivings that his “game-changing” gizmo could fall into the wrong hands for “toppling governments,” Pym hides his technology for mobilizing “a soldier the size of an insect, the ultimate secret weapon.” That gets the inventor ousted from his San Francisco company. He returns years later to thwart his evil ex-protege Darren (Corey Stoll) who’s selling out to the evil consortium Hydra.
Pym recruits Scott (Paul Rudd) to re-operationalize Ant-Man. A neuro-tactical interface in his helmet lets him command an army of normal-sized ants upgraded with semi-sentience. Pym’s estranged daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is on board as an anti-Darren co-conspirator. She ends up falling for Scott.
We first meet Scott leaving San Quentin after a three-year stint for his whistle-blowing Robin Hood-style burglary of a bad Bay Area billionaire. Even with a masters degree in electrical engineering, the ex-con cannot hold down a gig at a Baskin-Robbins. He’s way behind on child support and wants visiting rights to see his daughter Cassie (a winsome Abby Ryder Fortson missing her upper front teeth).
Repairing damaged family relationships is a sentimental through-line of “Ant-Man.” Pym and Hope reconcile. Cassie can ultimately see her dad as her hero. As in “Contact” (1997) and “Interstellar” (2014), a channel of father-daughter communication will open despite inter-dimensional obstacles.
The screenplay is witty. A Pym Technologies marketing video pitches this blather: “It’s time to return to a simpler age, one when the powers of freedom can once again operate openly to protect their interests… to create a sustainable environment of well-being around the world.”
Rudd– credited as a screenwriter along with Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Adam McKay– gets four scenes where his character comments on his own and others’ dialogue to create comic discomfort. These self-referential lines are less insidery than usual for a franchise keen on meta-quips. Cue a whistling of “It’s a Small World” and one tune by Adam & the Ants.
In contrast to the 14 earlier Marvel vehicles for Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and Thor, “Ant-Man” is aptly scaled much smaller. Its action sequences in micro-landscapes and sub-atomic interstices are nonetheless spectacular. And there’s the usual teasing warmth, high-tech dazzle, and moralizing on international justice. Advertised as “a high-stakes, tension-filled adventure,” “Ant-Man” is more like an anti-corporate comedy about dads, daughters and the distance between atoms.
by Bill Stamets 
leave a comment