Ant-Man

If you’re reading this, I’ve got some bad news: someday you will die. I don’t mean that reading this will cause your death, that’s exceptionally unlikely, but eventually your body will stop working. Few of us know when that will happen, most of us prefer not to think about it. All we’ve got is an ever-shrinking, Ant-Man-like, window in which we try to experience whatever we can.

So why waste your time doing something a second time? Or twelve times? It seems kind of hedonistic, doesn’t it? If you’ve already eaten that cheeseburger, listened to that album, watched that movie, smoked that drug, played on that beach, hiked that trail, or whatever, why would you want to do it again? There are songs I’ve listened to so many times I know them by heart, so why do I still listen to them? Haven’t I gone to Dick’s in Seattle enough yet? What have I got to gain? I’m dying. We all are.

But don’t deny human nature. I think the truth is that a lot of people, like myself, aren’t actually trying to get the most out of life. We are not trying to have done the most with our lives, we are trying to have enjoyed most of what we’ve done. Instead of a life full of peaks and valleys, we settle for a steady plateau. We may not see the world from atop Everest, but at least we’re not drowning in the Marianas Trench either.

Disney knows the Marvel Cinematic Universe will one day die too. The whole narrative of Phase Two was about when the super hero bubble will burst. We still don’t know when. Marvel’s planned out another half decade worth of movies, they plan to live at least that much longer. They’re overconfident, and a little bit scared.

Sometime in your life you will face a fork in the road and not know which way to go. It will feel like you’ve just as much reason to travel down one path as you do the other. Maybe you’ve already had that experience. Eventually, you’ll make your choice and even if everything works out perfectly, you’ll still wonder what could have been. And you’ll never get to know; that’s life.

Edgar Wright’s life was leading him to making an Ant-Man movie. He had spent decades developing as a writer and a director, establishing himself as someone who could do a genre movie, someone who could deliver on laughs and action, someone who could adapt a comic. Supposedly he was working on an Ant-Man script as far back as 2006, before Disney owned Marvel or the first Iron Man had come out. He eventually got the job, wrote what was called the best script Marvel ever had, hired an awesome cast, and then walked away from the project at the last minute.

Edgar Wright faced a fork in the road: he could give up some of his creative control or walk away, knowing that for the rest of his life, he would be haunted by Ant-Man regardless. He walked and Marvel hired a yes man, Yes Man director Peyton Reed, to take his place. Reed, stuck in a shitty situation, did his best to make a fun, inventive movie using the scraps Wright left behind. The cast was still great, the overall idea of the story was still fun, and, per Marvel’s orders, there were several large references to the MCU. I’m ashamed to admit I enjoyed those nods and cameos.

Is that enough? Is this hodgepodge of four creative visions – Edgar Wright’s original script, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd’s rewrite, and Peyton Reed’s direction – worth your precious time? That’s up to you. For me, the answer is yes, and probably always was going to be yes. As a comedy/heist movie, Ant-Man is different and clever enough that I was happy to have seen it and rank it in the middle of all the MCU movies.

That’s me though. My time, my life. I still eat at Dick’s because you need to eat to live and sometimes you don’t want to worry about where to go and a deluxe tastes really good. It’s not really profound, but not everything has to be. I’m just out here trying to fill my dwindling time with all the things and people that I love. I hope you’re doing the same.

Jurassic World

Recently, I’ve heard a lot of people around my age say something to the effect of “Jurassic Park was my Star Wars.” This is an odd thing to say, since we had Star Wars, it was right there, they even put out in theaters again and then made new ones that we were dumb enough to like. But the point, I guess, is that for a bunch of twenty-somethings out there, Jurassic Park is a big fuckin’ deal.

We’re not unique in growing up as dinosaur nerds, but we did get this one movie that seemed like the coolest thing ever. More importantly, it was one we could continue to appreciate as we got older and the debates about ethics and progress started to make more sense to us. It’s for that reason Jurassic Park has remained one of my favorite movies to this day, I get what Malcolm and Grant are so worried about. I understand their passion… I still watch documentary series about dinosaurs of my own free will.

Jurassic World has a lot of affection for Jurassic Park, but it doesn’t understand it the same way I do. It thinks I want to see the T. rex come back and kick ass or see raptors team up with humans, when all I really want are the first 20 minutes or so of this movie. In the beginning we’re shown a working, modern version of the park and it’s everything I ever dreamed! There’s a petting zoo where you can ride around on baby triceratops! That first part is so amazingly realized it’s a real bummer to see how much stupid lies beyond it.

It’s hard to say where Jurassic World takes place in the franchise – we know it’s been years since the first movie but the events of the second and third films aren’t ever addressed, so they may or may not have happened anymore. Anyway, Isla Nublar has reopened as a working theme park/zoo, and apparently has been fully functional for such a long time that people are bored. Bored! Bored of taking a cruise to island, going on rides, and spending time with living dinosaurs. It’s hard to believe and even harder to portray, apparently, because all we see of the island are thousands of happy tourists thrilled to be around dinosaurs. Indeed, the only reason we have to believe anyone is unhappy is because the park’s manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), tells us so.

To remedy this, Claire had Dr. Wu (B.D. Wong, the only returning character) splice together a new breed of dinosaur by combining all the most dangerous dinosaurs, and some modern beasts, into one. This profoundly stupid idea is made more idiotic by the fact that only Wu, for some reason, knows exactly what went into this new creature, dubbed the Indominus rex. So when the I. rex inevitably breaks out, no one really knows what they’re dealing with and chaos, as always, ensues.

Along for the ride is Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), a super over-the-top, Mister-I’m-always-right action hero. He’s an ex-Navy SEAL who is somehow also the most qualified man in the world to train velociraptors. He works alongside Omar Sy, who is given nothing to do is this movie, and Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), who somehow thinks raptors could someday be used in the military to replace drones. I don’t need to go into this, do I? This is dumb as hell. Military raptors is something everyone should laugh at every time it’s brought up, even a legend like Vincent D’Onofrio can’t make it work.

None of the first three Jurassic Park movies are about killing dinosaurs. All three of those movies respect the fact that these giant lizards are just doing what comes naturally to them, and they wouldn’t be a threat to humans if we didn’t keep fucking with their shit. This is the core idea behind this franchise: the villains aren’t the dinosaurs, it’s always human arrogance. The arrogance that leads us to believe we’re not a part of nature, that we can play god, that we’re better. Jurassic World is the first departure from that, as the plot is literally a monster escaped and we have to kill it. And that makes me uncomfortable.

Yes, the I. rex isn’t technically part of nature in the same way as the other dinosaurs, but it’s still a living creature that the movie wants you to hope gets killed. There’s some other gratuitous violence in this movie that irked me too. One character suffers a truly horrific death, perhaps the most violent in the series, without doing anything to deserve it. When Gennaro suffered his grisly fate in the first movie, we knew he was an asshole lawyer who just abandoned children to try to save himself, this character in Jurassic World didn’t do anything like that.

Ultimately, even if I could let slide my moral objections to Jurassic World, I just couldn’t get over all the painfully moronic parts of this story. It’s a huge letdown from a franchise that has disappointed more with every sequel it’s gotten. Based on the massive opening weekend, I’m guessing this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of this universe. It’s too bad only now am I realizing how much I think that might be a bad idea. Hopefully the new one will have a cleaner production cycle, with a script that doesn’t have to pass through half a dozen writers over a decade. If not, well, at least we’ve still got Star Wars.