I love Marvel Cinematic Universe. I prefer the comics though for all the minute detail, drama and personality the coloured panels carry in about 30 pages. After several issues of reading over a period of time we get so invested in the characters that anything bad happening to them hurts somewhere deep inside. When it comes to movies though, we cannot care about the character enough in two hours. Some exceptional movies do that successfully. Now don’t expect me to say that this is one such movie because I’m still conflicted on how I feel about the movie. Let me elaborate-
Marvel studios did something really good. They made movies dedicatedly chronicling important characters and then brought them together in a super-huge delicious cocktail that was Avengers (something DC is trying to achieve through shortcut bringing everyone in with a single movie). This made the character loveable because we knew their backstory. Then Ant-man decided to show up suddenly and say- “Hey guys! Can I play with you?”
“Wait! Who’re you?”
“I’m Ant-man.”
“Ok… so… who’re you?”
“Come one guys! I’ve been a superhero for a long time.”
“Really? We’ve never seen you before.”
“Duh! That’s because I was the size of an ant.”
For some reason I don’t like this logic. If they really wanted to make an Ant-man movie they should’ve made an Ant-man movie. With the real Ant-man! Instead, we see the guy ‘Hank Pym’ who invented the shrinking technology as an old guy too scared to wear his own suit. I really like Hank Pym from the comics. He is super smart, someone who can easily beat Ironman in intellect. Hank developed the technology to shrink a human and became Ant-man. He then reversed the effect and became Giant-man. I don’t know if it cost him much to change his trademark seeing that he only needed to add ‘Gi’ before his old name. Did I mention he is also a founding member of the Avengers and actually created Ultron?
I can go on about his importance, and if you want to know how vital he is read the Marvel comics event “Age of Ultron” where his absence from the timeline completely alters the present and Avengers are instead founded as The Defenders. But since he was not present in the Cinematic Universe earlier we just see an old man who used to do undercover operations but is tired of being Ant-man anymore. His whole past life is a big secret, unknown to the public and Ant-man is just an urban legend. That is until the need arises and Hank has to find a suitable guy who can don the suit again.
Here’s a life-size picture of Ant-man wearing the suit.
Of course ‘life-size’ is relative here 
Paul Rudd has done a really great job playing the role of Scott Lang, a robber, I mean a burglar who is called in for this special task by Hank Pym. My anger about not getting to see the original Ant-man in action was mollified a great deal by Paul’s acting which showed a humbled man who knows that he is not the best fit for this super-hero costume. The first time he shrinks to the size of rice and the way he stumbles around the place is joyful to watch. The story is good, the special effects are gorgeous and the CGI ants are cute, and in a lot of scenes reminded me of “Honey I shrunk the kids”. It even tries to make you care about the ants like the aforementioned movie. Can ants really be friendly?
All in all, the movie was a fun watch despite my prejudices, and if you’re not a comic book fan but you like Marvel movies you will enjoy it even more. It has lot of humour (since Paul Rudd is also a comedian his comedic timing is great) which I found similar to the Guardians of the Galaxy. But although being light years away from earth the Guardians of the Galaxy had a feeling of being in the same Marvel universe, while this movie has a stand-off-ish feeling to it even though it tries really hard to show that it is in the same timeline as the Avengers in a lot of ways. You even get to see Avengers building and the Avengers theme music (which I’m pretty sure Captain America plays in the headquarters for motivation) can be heard.
Coming back to the first question- Did this movie make me like the character? I think so. I’m not sure if it’s because of the story-writing that purposely add dialogs to show their struggle, the protagonist’s endearing helplessness throughout the movie or the fact that they repeatedly tell you why he’s doing it. Hank literally says the same line twice in the movie- “Are you going to stay a criminal or are you going to be a hero that your daughter already thinks you are?” (or something like that)
Despite all the good stuff I still can’t believe the real Ant-man is retired. I really hope we get separate origin movie showing us the Ant-man and his wife, the Wasp. I won’t be surprised to know that Ant-man fought with the Avengers’ in the battle against the Chitauri army in the first movie. We just couldn’t see him.
