"Hi, I'm Scott."

"Did he just say, 'Hi, I'm Scott?"

Hope van Dyne, Ant-Man

Karli's away with her sisters for a Father-Daughter weekend, what to do, what to do*... how about a movie? Well, I'm not going to waste my time on the Fantastic Four movie, enough other people have made that mistake to keep me from following suit...

Wait, is Ant-Man still in circulation?

As it turns out, yes, Marvel's second foray into the B-List of superheroes is still in commercial release.  I had heard positive reviews when it first hit the streets, but I've been busy enough that seeing it didn't seem to be a priority.

I may do Ant-Man a bit of an injustice in referring to the character as a B-List hero.  In the comics, he's a founding member of the original 1963 Avengers, and Ultron, the cybernetic nemesis who appeared in the second Avengers film, is originally a product of Ant-Man's genius rather than Tony Stark's.

Regardless, the character has never quite achieved the prominence that Iron Man, the Hulk or Thor have in the Marvel Comics Universe, and as such he's an interesting choice as an addition to the MCU movie lineup.

Oddly enough, Ant-Man doesn't in the least play like a superhero movie, at least not a superhero movie like the Avengers or Captain America films.  Ant-Man is Marvel Comic's take on one of the standard Hollywood plotlines - the underdog who makes good.

Paul Rudd takes the role of Scott Lang, thief with a conscience, who is determined to go straight now that he's paid his debt to society for his moralistic crime against an oppressive corporate villain. His ex-wife has an intimidating new boyfriend who happens to be a cop, and without a steady job Lang can't handle the child support payments he needs to make in order to see his beloved daughter.  Having been turned down for work by even Baskin-Robbins, he succumbs to the temptation of just one more burglary to get the money he needs.

The crime in question involves cracking a mysterious safe at the home of Dr. Henry Pym, but to Lang's intense disappointment, the safe contains only a strange suit and helmet.  When he tries on his unusual loot, he discovers to his shock and dismay that it gives him the ability to shrink to the size of, well, an ant.**

It turns out that Pym has staged the entire crime in order to recruit Lang to wear the suit and help prevent his shrinking technology from falling into the wrong hands.  Lang reluctantly agrees, and the plot instantly becomes every underdog story you've ever seen.

Pym is the curmudgeonly mentor with a heart of gold and a secret heart-breaking backstory, his daughter is the love interest who is initially disdainful of Lang but soon grows to appreciate him, and Lang goes from bumbling student to successful hero as soon as he seizes on his need to see his daughter as the happy thought that will allow him to communicate with his ant allies.

Of course, the bad guy is Pym's scientific protegé gone bad, Lang has three comedy-relief criminal associates that might as well have been drawn by Disney animators, and the final battle between hero and villain is to save Lang's daughter, not the world - in fact, the world may still be in peril at the end of the movie.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed Ant-Man quite a bit.  It was an unexpectedly well-scripted and clever take on the whole superhero meme, and all the actors do good work with their characters - Paul Rudd deserves particular recognition for his portrayal of reluctant heroism. The effects are wonderful, the scaled shots of the world from an ant's perspective work beautifully, but ultimately, Scott Lang could have been training to race stock cars and the movie's plot would have been very similar.

All that aside, I do have one strong criticism.  It's made clear from the onset that Pym's suit functions by shrinking the gaps between molecules, which means that Lang maintains his full-sized weight when miniaturized.  This allows him to hit the bad guys like a 180-pound bullet - so how is he able to ride a flying ant?

- Sid

* Other than blogging - I don't normally explain gaps in my blogging schedule here, this is a hobby not a job, but this DOES offer a convenient opportunity to catch up on a lot of backlog - or backblog, perhaps.

** I'm reasonably confident that this isn't a spoiler - I think that the movie's title sort of gives this one away going in.

Fail.

I recently had the dubious pleasure of watching Lavalantula, a film which combines giant lava-spitting spiders with a partial reunion of the Police Academy cast.  Lavalantula, like Sharknado or Megashark versus Crocosaurus, is one of those Syfy™ movies that we're not intended to take seriously, which supposedly fall into the category of "so bad that they're good."

What a bizarre concept for the entertainment industry to have developed, and how sad that they've chosen to apply it to science fiction.* 

I own several thousand science fiction novels, and, to be brutally honest, they're not all perfect.  There are books from the early days of the genre** that are poorly written, books that are stilted and cumbersome, books that are light years (pun intended) away from the artistry and craft of more talented authors who would follow in their footsteps.

But those books were written in earnest - they represent an author's best attempt to express a concept or an idea that captured their imagination, something that they desperately wanted to show to the world.  None of them chose to do work that was deliberately shoddy, they did the best they could with the tools that they had, and the results, although flawed in some cases, introduced concepts and ideas that helped to build the foundations of the science fiction genre.

I admire these authors for their creativity, eagerness, and enthusiasm, and forgive them their clumsiness - their intentions were all for the best.

Lavalantula and its companion films, on the other hand, represent a decision that I can't admire.  People, if you're going to decide that deliberately cliche-ridden dialogue, stupid, shoddy plotlines and poor acting*** are your actual goal, you need to take a long look at what you're doing with your lives.  Maybe you should set your sights higher - why not aim for the stars?

- Sid

* It embarrasses me to call these travesties science fiction, but unfortunately, the shoe fits.

** And a few that are a lot more recent, to be fair.

*** Credit where credit is due:  there's a young actor named Noah Hunt in Lavalantula who really does do his best with what he's been given. 

Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

Mark Watney, The Martian

Until I saw the trailer for The Martian, I was completely unaware of the best-selling self-published 2011 novel by Andy Weir that provided the original story for the movie. Intrigued by the concept, I took the book with me as vacation reading on a long weekend getaway, and found myself completely caught up in the trials and tribulations of American astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after a piece of debris knocks him out and disables his suit telemetry during the evacuation of his mission team due to a dangerous dust storm.

When Watney regains consciousness, he finds himself alone and stranded, faced with the very basic challenge of staying alive, followed by the longer term project of contacting Earth in hopes of being rescued before he runs out of food. Watney's first person mission logs detail his ingenious solutions to the obstacles that he needs to overcome in order to successfully meet these two challenges.

Weir stacks the deck in Watney's favour in a couple of ways.*  First, the marooned astronaut is an engineer/botanist, the perfect combination for the situation – there might well have been a completely different outcome if the stranded crew member had been a psychiatrist/pilot.  Second, NASA has conveniently provided a few raw potatoes for the crew’s Thanksgiving dinner, which gives Watney immediate access to something that he can cultivate in the mission's habitat in order to extend his food supplies.

I found it to be a fun, entertaining read, although not terribly deep (any book which relies heavily on jokes about 70s television shows is not going to challenge Crime and Punishment in terms of psychological depth) and completely enjoyed it.  Oddly enough, I'm not sure I’d recommend the book to everyone, although I suspect it’s going to work very well as a movie, especially with Matt Damon providing the voice - and face - for Watney's narrative.

Why wouldn’t I recommend the book to all and sundry?  The plot of The Martian is made up of an extended series of scientific solutions to the problems of survival, solutions that are heavily based in math, chemistry and physics.**  Weir does an excellent job of making the science comprehensible, but even so, there's an awful lot of discussion of caloric units, wattage, surface areas, molecular composition and so on.

I've always been more interested in the more scientific side of science fiction, and as such I found Watney's solutions to be ingenious and interesting, but I know a few people who would blink a few times and then abandon the book in favour of less technical narrative.

However, the real question that The Martian raises is one that we have yet to face in our limited exploration of space:  how far would we go to rescue an astronaut marooned in space?  Space travel relies on a limited supply of resources and hardware which are incredibly expensive and time-consuming to assemble and construct.  Would we spend millions of dollars and jeopardize other missions in order to stage a rescue effort which might not even succeed?

Regardless of the manner in which that question is answered in The Martian***, I'd like to think that we would.  In my mind, there's an unspoken covenant between humanity and the people that have chosen to be our pathfinders into the universe, a covenant that says that if they find themselves in peril, we will do everything in our power to rescue them - it would be a betrayal of their dedication and courage to do anything less. 

- Sid

* This is surprisingly common in castaway stories. The original Robinson Crusoe has an entire sailing ship full of supplies to draw upon:  guns, gunpowder, tools, wood, clothing, canvas, and so on. The astronaut in the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars miraculously (and improbably) discovers open water, edible aquatic plants, rocks that release oxygen when heated, and an alien man Friday.  Tom Hanks gets the contents of random FedEx™ packages – including a volleyball.

** I spent about thirty minutes looking for an official name for the physics trick involving lateral pressure on a taut cable that Watney uses to get a flipped Mars rover upright again, without ever finding the right search terms to get the results I wanted. If anyone finds out what it's called, please leave a comment!

*** No spoilers here, Dorothy.