Excuse, tumblr!Dad, but what’s the big fuss over Ant-Man? Why do people hate it so?
Well, the movie is the nexus of a lot of super problematic shit Marvel has pulled for decades, so there’s a lot to hate.
One: Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, is a domestic abuser. There’s really no way around it. There was an arc in the comics in the…sixties? I’d have to check, I have it in my files, but sixties or seventies, where he was about to be thrown off the Avengers. He invented a robot to attack the Avengers so that he could charge in and save them. His wife Jan found out and tried to stop him, and he beat her. This was unequivocal in the comics: he hit her, and everyone acknowledged that he hit her, and she divorced him explicitly for being an abusive spouse, which carries with it an implication that this may not have been the first time. (In Ults, he’s a straight-up habitual abuser, and nearly murders her before she leaves him.) For a comic book, in the mid-20th century, for a woman to leave her husband because he abused her was AFUCKINGMAZING. But we don’t get that movie – we get the movie about the abuser, instead.
This is tangled up in another problematic aspect, which is that in order to retcon a lot of Hank’s super erratic behavior, he was written as having undiagnosed bipolar disorder in the (I think) late 90s/early 2000s. This is not only a sort of weird retcon apologia, like it’s somehow okay that he hit Jan because he was mentally ill, but also plays into the trope that people with mental illness are abusive and violent, when it’s actually the case that people with mental illnesses are HUGELY more likely to be abuse survivors than abusers.
So Ant Man, conceptually, is an incredibly inappropriate character to get his own film to begin with.
Two: All of this is only semi-relevant since Hank Pym isn’t the Ant-Man of the film; he’s an older man in the film, and he’s presumably mentoring Scott Lang, the second Ant-Man of the comics who has a more sympathetic arc in that he was a thief who became a superhero. Scott Lang is the current Ant-Man in the Ant-Man comics, which are appalling for unrelated reasons. But here’s the upshot: Ant-Man was announced at a time when fans were campaigning really hard for a) a Black Widow movie and b) ANY MOVIE, EVER, WITH A LEAD WHO WASN’T A STRAIGHT WHITE GUY. ANY MOVIE AT ALL, MARVEL. COME ON WORK WITH US HERE.
Three: To add insult to injury, the ONE GROWN WOMAN in the usual Ant-Man story, Jan van Dyne, a fantastic multiracial fashion designing diva superhero, is dead before the movie even starts. Her entire role, forever, in the Marvel Universe, will be as the retired hero’s dead wife. And that’s fucking pathetic. Jan is one of the best female heroes to come out of the classic Marvel pantheon, she’s cheery and feminine and perky and still kicks ass, she is one of the original Avengers, SHE NAMED THE AVENGERS TEAM, she divorced an abusive husband and became leader of the Avengers, she dated Tony Stark and dumped him for lying to her, and she’s dead. Before she’s even in any movie at all. Leaving Scott’s daughter Cassie Lang as the only woman with any apparent presence so far in the film. Cassie Lang is a child.
So you know, fuck Ant-Man.
Four: Edgar Wright, of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, is an amazing director, and he walked off the project. Do you know how fucked up this movie probably had to be to get Edgar Wright to walk away from it? PRETTY FUCKED UP.
Five: Of the many stupid comic book hero concepts to come out of Marvel, “Ant-Man” is widely considered one of the stupidest. I’m not sure I’d 100% agree with this in theory, but it’s a reason many people dislike the film. Because it’s a guy who talks to ants and can make himself really small.
And I’m not gonna lie, a lot of the footage I’ve seen so far looks very “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”.
So, that’s five reasons people hate Ant-Man.
I would just like to point out that Copperbadge is factually wrong about Hank Pym’s character history in almost every way. During 1960s canon, Hank and Jan were romantically involved but not yet married, and their relationship was generally depicted as fluffy and cute, with the main relationship problems being Hank’s clueless obliviousness in the face of Jan’s really obvious attempts to flirt with him and Jan’s tendancy to try and provoke Hank into hopefully getting a clue by attempting to make him jealous (he always got jealous; he rarely got a clue – perhaps the more serious problems that would come later didn’t come completely out of nowhere).
The storyline where Hank hits Jan and she leaves him occured in Avengers v1 issues #212 – 214, which were published in the early eighties, not in the sixties or seventies. The writer for those issues, Jim Shooter, said later that he’d actually intended Hank to hit Jan accidentally (basically, for him to fling out his arm in her direction during an angry argument and accidentally hit her in the face) but the artwork for the issue made the scene look more violent and brutal than he’d initially envisioned and so he ran with that and had characters react accordingly (refreshingly, every character present takes Hank hitting her seriously and sides with Jan, which is depressingly unusual for one of Marvel’s ‘a female character gets treated terribly’ storylines). Hank’s mental illness was a part of that storyline from the beginning, in that he’s shown having a nervous breakdown shortly afterward (he’d also had a major disassociative episode in 70s canon after being placed under mind control by Ultron – Hank being crazy is not a 90s retcon). He’s not specifically identified as bipolar until the 90s, yes, but his behavior during that infamous 80s storyline is not entirely inconsistant with the diagnosis. He does a lot more than just yell at and hit his wife. He’s paranoid, over-reacts to things, makes grandious plans that backfire horribly (he’s not thrown off the Avengers just for hitting Jan – he’s thrown off the Avengers for making a series of impulsive and dangrous decisions in super-villain-fighting situations culminating in an attempt to get back into the team’s good graces by building an “evil” robot that would pretend to attack them and that he could then “save” everyone from, because nothing could possibly go horribly wrong with that plan – Jan reveals what he’s done to her at a “the fuck are we going to do about Hank, guys?” meeting the team has already called), and is generally Not Acting Like a Mentally Stable Person. In a later 80s storyline, he’s shown being depressed and suicidal.
As someone who has cyclothymia, which is on the same spectrum as bipolar disorder, and who has a close relative who is bipolar I, I felt the later 90s storyline that made Hank canonically bipolar was actually pretty well done (well, well done for a superhero comics storyline involving mental illness. The bar is sadly not set very high in this area considering how often comics characters with mental illnesses are cackling supervillains). Kurt Busiek, who was the writer at that point, clearly did some actual amount of research on biolar disorder, because elements of Hank’s behavior in that storyline were painfully familiar. Rather than finding Hank’s diagnosis offensive because “mentally ill people are abusive and violent,” I appreciated it because of how strongly some elements in it resonated with me, and because I appreciate that characters like Tony Stark (chronic depression), Hank Pym, and Matt Murdock (who’s never been officially given a diagnosis in canon but who’s frequently written acting an awful lot like a person with some form of mood disorder) exist who suffer from some of the same issues I do and often visibly struggle with them, but who at the end of the day are still superheroes. It probably doesn’t hurt that, as someone with a mood disorder whose significant other also has a (different, non-bipolar spectrum) mood disorder, I’ve been on both sides of the “my significant other is having a mental/emotional breakdown” situation, though thankfully in the context of a relationship a lot healthier than Hank and Jan’s.
Obviously many people react very differently, and a lot of fans consider Hank totally irrideemable because of his treatment of Jan and just flat-out hate him as a character. There are valid reasons for people who actually know what decade his abuse of Jan occurred in to hate him. All of the above is not, however, the main reason why the Ant-Man movie is going to suck.
The Ant-Man movie is, after all, supposedly going to be primarily about Scott Lang, devoted single father withno mental illneses whonever hit anybody (except supervillains) duringany decade, not Hank Pym. But given that even Edgar Wright, who is the main person who originally wanted Marvel to make an Ant-Man movie in the first place because he wanted to direct it, has bailed on the project, my advice is to run fast and far from it unless you really, really like watching terrible movies.
The one thing the original post is correct about (other than the movie’s inevitable suckage) is that Jan not being included is bullshit. In additional to being a superheroine and leading the Avengers, Jan, who is a fashion designer in her a day job, also designed a lot of the female Avengers’ costumes. She’s the Marvel universe’s version of Edna Mode (literally – Edna Mode was based on a combination of Jan and the real-life fashion designer Edith Head), and old-lady fashion-diva Jan telling Scott Lang that he can’t have a cape would have been awesome.Which brings me to another, much more minor, inaccuracy: Jan is only canonically multiracial in the Ultimates verse (where she is neither cheery nor perky, is born with powers rather than making an active choice to acquire them, never leads the Avengers, and is murdered by a supervillain who then eats her corpse, because Ultimates is a piece of OOC grimdark shit). The main comics universe (616), the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes cartoon, and the Marvel Adventures comics never specifically say that she’s not multiracial, though, so you can easly head-canon her that way if you want to.