The most startling moment in Civil War was when Ant-Man amplified himself into giant size. The shocking moment in this one is when Ant-Man acts in a take-control manner (it's not the display of knowledge that startles, but the simple matter of his being assured and assertive--where did THAT come from?), and this owes to him being temporarily the puppet of an old woman: size, same; sex and age, different. He only gets to see his daughter on weekends, and when he does all he does is spoil her silly... so there is other cueing, but his daughter giving him the best grandma trophy was probably a hint on her part that he might actually become the best dad she needs if he took note of what sex is permitted to be no-nonsense and take-charge in her world (Ant-Man finally does get a turn at taking others aback while his own self, but those he makes feel compromised are designated easy-prey--male cops--everyone's empowered in a wish-fulfillment film to make feel silly: like at least having a kid when his incel friends haven't even that, it just shows you're not entirely bottom-rung, not that you're special), and what age-group is shown as most free of debilitating trauma and of being debilitated by trauma (the emphasis on the film is on how 20 yrs apart would be death for a father-daughter relationship, and she, the "grandma," the older woman, goes 30 yrs without seeing anyone and comes out, not only as if never gone away from husband and daughter, but improved), and imagined walking around in her shoes. Being that woman means being able to heal, yo, tap vast powers--and what's the future of a child of divorced parents who's biological father is constantly going to be yanked into Avengers battles where, we know, if his fate is left THERE, in that serious part of the Marvel Universe, could be the despondent prison cell and Thaddeus Ross, not comfy house-arrest and captain let-me-apologize-for-myself, Jimmy Woo? Hers are powers to harness.
He's an older woman for a short while, but play is mostly made of him being almost entirely infantile--though born out of suit-malfunction not Tony Starkish suit-improvement, the new trick we see from his Ant-Man powers in this film is his shrinking moderately... into the size of a child. There is talk of Baba Yaga in this film, a witch who emerges out of the forest to steal children from households, and, indeed, it is he, not in infant-size mode but revelling, as he spends his days goofing around, in infantile persona, who gets abducted, by that most unwelcome intruder of domiciles everywhere, the Wasp, who poisons him to make him go unconscious, and coldly rebuts his insistence that she in her action has left a child abandoned for perhaps twenty years, by insisting their business will be done in a few short hours, tops, and that in the meantime a simulacrum she's made of him will serve perfectly well to fool monitors--by being, that is, a presuming, thwarting, preying witch in a figurative and in a literal sense.
The ostensible witch in this film, the ostensible Baba Yaga, the Ghost, is actually a terribly forlorn young person--she's this film's Winter Soldier: someone who has remarkably similar abilities and powers to the main heroes, but who in comparison to relatively healthy, jovial them, is cursed with a terribly sad and abusive backstory which has made them barely recoverable as entirely good human beings, and who'll never become such without the staunch assistance by those who could if they chose, simply concerned themselves with abandoning them like all the rest. The primary function of the character is, perhaps, primarily to connect the recovery of the mother in the film--the recovery of the Wasp's mother from the quantum universe--with someone whose needs match her own superpower ability to dress them. Since neither her husband nor her daughter are entirely forlorn owing to her absence, but rather in some sense have gotten along nicely, it is her, the Ghost, that she seems to have emerged back into the regular world to help address: incredible recovery from a magically supplying quantum world, matching unbearable distress, emerged from a world of absence. Since the film involves keeping within a context of play a number of characters whose real-life counterparts are, after all, ex-cons, who can't at the best of times be expected to get decent jobs, and who have to try to do so in a world where even those with clean backgrounds are losing out as the world strips itself its need for them, it's possible that these two function in the film to keep the rest "light." Too much joy for a comedy to handle, and also too much sadness, keep themselves entwined with one-another, bit at one-another's tale, and so in a world where increasingly things are becoming very, very deep-stakes, of miracle emergences (socialism!) and horrifying developments (need we discuss...), the fact of this can still get recognized, be allowed to spread and permeate, but not without leaving most of the space, still, for simple fun. And so San Fransisco as a theme-park city of zig-zaging streets, not of those who can afford nice places and those who can't--which is brought up, suggested, in Pym's ostensible despondent office building, but recovered very quickly as just another way in which Ant-Man can make overtures at being, the provisioning man, but who'll have to remain, outclassed. And so little cars becoming giant weapons, isn't terrorist use of small devices for big terror, just matchbox fun. And so giants in the aqueous blue around you, beelining towards your structure, isn't 9/11, but confidently can be played as if whales.
The ants aren't really used for many unusual applications in this film. Despite the fun idea of using one of them to mimic Ant-Man's daily routines, and the use of them to impose the sorts of direction-signals we'd expect in google maps literally in the sky, what the film plays with, isn't really them, for though they have other other uses--they unplug electronic devices, and cover cameras--basically the default is either huge and threatening guardians, or mundane transport (he mentions some by name at the end, as they get picked off by birds, and we're reminded that once before, their having distinct personalities was actually a thing). We get the pleasure in seeing how, when made to seem gigantic rather than small, objects we identify one way are utilized differently: a knife blade we usually think of as sharp and pointy becomes mostly a long straight running venue, when you're the size of an ant. But how things are when you're ant-sized isn't much explored either--becoming ant-sized is mostly used to show people apparently disappearing, only to reappear, when battle circumstances are more fortuitous to them; that is, as an invisibility device--and so the marked similarity to the Ghost, who has no ability to go minute and "animal" but who can vanish, be not there.
The angle, then, is on how you as huge and you as minute, appear to others, not so much on what life is like when you're small and when you're ginormous (indeed, even when he's huge and using a truck as basically a skateboard he peddles, the emphasis is on how this would appear to onlookers, not on how he's experiencing his new reality). You'd be thought to have gone invisible, and you'd be mistook for a whale. Partaking in a magician's delight, in making confused a more mundane reality for something more spectacular, this is getting a boost from how you affect others, from your affect on them, not from how a world that becomes new owing to your new size can be experienced and used.
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