[MCU] Phase Two Retrospective
Click to viewYouTuber Clark Zhu created this video looking back at the MCU's various Phase Two films, to set the stage for Civil War's release next week. I thought it was worth sharing.
After watching it, and realizing Ant Man was going to be in Civil War, I finally got around to seeing Ant Man. I'm glad I didn't bother to see it in theatres. It makes an almost perfect meta-commentary on Hollywood's "white men's stories only" problem. How I wish it could possibly have been on purpose.
Think of the movie we might have gotten instead, where Hope is the main character. She's ready, willing and able to do the job, but held back by her father because he's doing the classic overprotective parent thing. The scene we actually got in the middle of the credits would have been the climax of act two, with act three being where Hope finally puts on the suit and sallies forth to take down the villain.
That's exactly the movie Hollywood would have made...if Hank Pym had a son instead of a daughter.
Instead, despite time being of the essence, Pym goes to the trouble of finding, evaluating, recruiting and training―not to mention trusting―a total stranger. Pym's inabiltiy to let go, admit his kid is an adult now and let her make her own choices, instead of being an obstacle the protagonist must overcome, are allowed to stand. To prevent her from even being the protagonist. Because she's a girrrl. Gah!
It often seems like the filmmakers were aware, on some subconscious lizard-hindbrain level, what a gaping sexist plot hole this is, because the movie is extra-defensive about why it can't be Hope who wears the suit. And even finally surrenders and admits it should be her...in the mid-credits sequence when the movie is safely over and doesn't have to actually do anything.
Not to mention having Hope and Scott hook up at the end. Or the way no one ever calls out Pym on the way he frames the original Wasp's career as something he "let" her do, and could have said no to. Celestia give me strength.
ETA: That said, as a solid S.H.I.E.L.D. fangirl I did enjoy the prologue set back in the 1980s, with the Triskelion under construction and a graying Peggy Carter still in charge.