Ant-Man

Ant-Man is ostensibly the Marvel Cinematic Universe spoofing itself. But then, while not specifically comedies, all Marvel films up to this point have been marked by a terrific sense of humor (the humor being the only redeeming element in some cases). In fact, I’d argue it’s an integral part of the company’s appeal. So Ant-Man isn’t so much a parody of Marvel as the company just upping the comedy factor.

The mantle of Ant-Man is worn by Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a paroled thief who, during a robbery, finds a suit that shrinks its wearing to the size of an ant. It turns out he was set up to find the suit by scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), the original Ant-Man. The two of them, as well Pym’s daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), must then work together to prevent Pym’s former prodigy Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from developing similar shrinking technology to sell to the highest bidder.

The movie was set to be directed by Edgar Wright of Three Flavours Cornetto fame for a long time until his sudden and much-publicized departure just before filming. Wright remains credited as a writer, but as for how much of his touch remains in the picture, it’s mixed. Missing is his the director’s kinetic style which mocks flashy rapid editing techniques by using them on humorously mundane activities. Also, one thing about Wright’s work is that his parodies are made with such skill and love that they’re legitimately good entries in whichever genre they’re spoofing (Shaun of the Dead, while a parody on the surface, is better than most zombie fare that plays it straight).

Well, that’s not the case in Ant-Man, in which the origin story and villain arc are pretty standard. In fact, some of the exposition would be downright excruciating if the tone were serious. But it’s not, and that works in the comedy’s favor. Whenever the picture is venturing into cliché or bad character drama, it knows it, and comically tears apart the scene. Applying the same attitude to a better story could have made important character and plot developments feel insubstantial (such was the case in Avengers: Age of Ultron, which overall seems rather slight two-and-a-half months later). And most importantly, Rudd’s usual lovable smart aleck everyman fits right into the role, and the rest of the cast plays well to the comedy, whether it’s the aforementioned leads chewing the typical superhero scenery, or simple comic relief from Michael Peña, T.I., and Bobby Cannavale.

What most definitely bears Wright’s fingerprints are the action scenes, which, like the violence in his Cornetto trilogy, are expertly choreographed pieces of physical comedy. Here, though, the comedic gore is traded for all the top-notch effects at the disposal of Marvel Studios. The movie takes full advantage, too. Each fight scene or special effects sequence is an imaginative trove of sight gags and slapstick, with tiny household products becoming projectiles and machines of death to the shrunken combatants. Particularly amusing are a setup involving an iPhone and another that’s so utterly predictable, and yet the absence of which would have rendered the filmmakers remiss.

I tried to focus only on the Ant-Man we got and its merits, but as a big fan of Wright’s work, I can’t help but imagine what his film might have been like. But ultimately, the movie didn’t need him in the director’s chair. It’s easily the lightest, most detached Marvel picture so far (the connections to the Avengers storyline is limited to a cameo and the standard post-credits scene), but that’s not a bad thing. With Comic-Con just reminding us the superhero film world is about to get even more dense and expansive (for both Marvel and rival DC), it’s refreshing to see a comic flick that’s less about complicated franchise-building than just fun.

Terminator Genisys

Rebooting a series that’s grown stale or been dormant for a while is one thing. There’s a whiff of arrogance, however, to the recent trend of selective sequels that pick and choose which previous entries they want to follow, as if saying to certain films and the people who made them that they’re not good enough to even be acknowledged. Such hubris is risky, for if a movie can just pretend like predecessors it deems lesser never happened, it’s certainly fair to think that it, too, will be forgotten if it’s anything less than a worthy successor to the franchise’s best efforts. 

Terminator Genisys, the fifth Terminator movie but acting as a direct sequel to Terminator 2, surprisingly pulls it off. It doesn’t measure up to the skill, imagination, and pure thrills of James Cameron’s first two installments, and we’ll have to wait and see if its box office intake gives it staying power in the franchise going forward. But solely on its merits, it’s a solidly fun and entertaining follow-up, more so than any other entries in the series in the nearly quarter-century since T2 (though I still contend that Terminator Salvation, the last attempt at a reboot from 2009, was not bad).

The original Terminator ended with an interesting time-travel twist, but every successive entry made a bigger and bigger mess of continuity. Each new sequel pushed the apocalyptic future a few years later and later, and seemed to just hope the audience wouldn’t notice. Since we’re now well past the initial dates the films predicted the Terminators would take over, Genisys makes the wise move of resetting the whole timeline, à la X-Men: Days of Future Past. It still leaves some things unexplained (some of them deliberately, planting seeds for more sequels), but it works for the most part, and is not too complicated and confusing to just enjoy the flick.

The film opens with John Connor (Jason Clarke) leading the human forces to victory against the machines of the evil Skynet in the year 2029. Afterward, as in the original 1984 picture, soldier Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent back in time to protect John’s mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from a Terminator sent back to kill her. Upon arriving in 1984, however, Reese finds that the timeline has changed, and Sarah is not a damsel in distress but a warrior fully aware of her destiny. Also, her closest ally is an aged Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who was sent back in time to protect her as a child. The new mission is for the three to travel into this new future (a 2017 that looks little different from right now) and stop Skynet’s latest plan for world domination.

One might recall that in T2, in addition to making a sequel, James Cameron took the opportunity to recreate parts of the first film with the blockbuster budget he didn’t have the first time around, from the overall plot to specific sequences and lines of dialogue. Genisys takes the same approach. The opening finally gives us the big final battle between man and machine Cameron envisioned but never produced. Also, since the visual effects T2 introduced have long since become commonplace, the main villain is similar to the liquid metal T-1000, only several steps ahead in terms of CGI (a seperate T-1000 is also thrown in the mix, with Lee Byung-hun taking over the role from Robert Patrick). One could dismiss it as derivative, repetitive, or unimaginative, but then, what reboot or sequel isn’t?

The problem actually isn’t the things that stayed the same, but that the film tries new things. Mostly, it’s the villains. I won’t reveal much about the main bad guy (though—SPOILER!—the trailers already did), just that their subplot and characterization, which aim to add a new element, are merely superfluous. The secondary antagonist, a personification of a malevolent computer program played by Matt Smith, is exhaustively chatty instead of threatening. Neither are as effective as the icy, stone-faced baddies of Terminators past. Also, recent Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons is randomly inserted as comic relief and really doesn’t fit. He’s funny, to be sure, but he only seems there as a way to plug holes in the plot, to bail out the screenwriters where they wrote the script into a dead end.

The main protagonists do their jobs better. Courtney, a reliable action movie role-player, is convincingly soldierly, and Clarke more than respectably carries the torch for Linda Hamilton. But, even though the character dynamics try to relegate him to a secondary wisecracking old man role, Schwarzenegger is still the one who makes the movie. Even at his age, he sells it well, brandishing a shotgun and wearing sunglasses, dropping terse, hilarious one-liners, and even taking part in some grueling combat. After a series of flops since he left the Governor’s mansion, it’s great to see him back in top form, and he reminds us to have fun even if the picture’s stretching our limits of believability.

Most importantly, the one element where no Terminator product has ever disappointed is the action department, and Genisys has some great chases, shootouts, and explosions. It all makes for a good time at the movies, even if towards the end it gets a little muddled in CGI. The best sequences are the ones early on, which recreate and alter specific scenes from the very first film. It’s here that this somewhat kid-friendly PG-13 picture comes closest to recreating the intense R-rated suspense from the Terminators of old. In fact, one foot chase through a dark sewer probably contains the most tension the series has had since Schwarzenegger played the bad guy 31 years ago.

Inside Out

Pixar introduced the world to computer animation with the classic film Toy Story (a film I still love to this day). 20 years later, long after computer animation has become standard over hand-drawn cartoon features, the studio still does it better than everyone else. It’s not just the breathtaking visual quality of their work, but the giant heart underneath it. Pixar at its best tells wonderful, emotional stories with fantastic characters, often with a stronger pathos than some of the best live-action drama. So it’s very apt for them to tackle the subject of emotions directly with Inside Out.

Specifically, personified emotions, who onscreen occupy a sort of command center inside the mind of the young girl Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), controlling her behavior and stockpiling memories. For much of Riley’s childhood, Joy (Amy Poehler) has been the dominant emotion, while the other four—Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling)—are only engaged sporadically. But when Riley reaches her tweens and moves to a new place with her family, Joy’s dominance starts to come to an end, and a desperate attempt to salvage happy memories takes her and Sadness on a trek through all corners of Riley’s mind.

Not entirely original, for quite a few pieces of entertainment have explored such a concept (and in one instance it rips a name from a certain R-Rated cartoon). But as with apparently everything, in Pixar’s hands it’s a step above the rest. The film’s depiction of the psyche as an industrious world is quite inventive, and more expansive on the idea than any work before it. It’s so vast and detailed that it feels like we’re seeing only part of an intricately constructed universe, with much more territory to explore should there be any sequels, or spinoff shorts like the Cars and Toy Story Toons (something I’d definitely be on board with).

And as with all things Pixar, this world is brought to life with stunning animation (it’s probably the studio’s most lush, beautiful effort since Finding Nemo), a masterful grasp of humor and feeling, and absolutely spot-on casting. It’s hard to think of a more perfect set of leads, so adept at comedy and yet more than capable of a range of emotions (in addition to the five mains, credit is due to Ricard Kind in a touching role I won’t spoil). This might also be the studio’s funniest picture, for the jokes are hilarious and keep landing even during emotional moments that could make some viewers’ eyes water (which is kind of the point, actually). 

Inside Out is Pixar at its most Pixar. In a sense, it’s almost like a look inside the mind of Pixar, and how they’re able to spin a clever story, effective comedy, and deep feeling into a masterpiece. In that respect, the film is smarter and more sophisticated than the average toon feature, offering a lot of ideas for the viewer to chew on. But that’s not even the most appealing part for adults watching. No, it actually offers something much rarer and more precious: the chance to feel at least a bit little like a child again, not in the overused metaphorical sense but for real. The movie’s imagination can only be described as childlike, so unbeholden is it to any overused tropes of film or TV, and so unspoiled and unburdened by grownup gripes about realism or cynical attitudes Watching the picture not only offers a very funny and colorful peek inside the mind of a kid, but also gives the audience a pure, wonderful feeling of regaining the limitless imagination of a child, something most people lose simply by growing up.