Things are a little tenuous in the Marvel universe right now, aren’t they? Avengers: Infinity War basically put continuity as we know it on hold for a year, with the two features between Avengers forced to carve out their own space around it as we recover from Thanos’s galaxy-devastating snap.
March’s Captain Marvel will ignore the whole thing by taking place in the 90s, letting Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers have her own origin story and leave her in a position to (hopefully) save the day when Avengers 4 opens a few weeks later. Earlier this summer, Ant-Man And The Wasp – which just arrived on disc and digital – found a different way to deal with the Thanos question: by ignoring it entirely.
Though director Peyton Reed’s charming sequel to his 2015 Ant-Man takes place roughly in the same time frame as Infinity War, playing out in the days just before Thanos’s advance guard arrives on Earth, it only glancingly interacts with the galaxy-spanning storyline at the very end, in the requisite mid-credits stinger.
And sure, that’s partly because Marvel’s master plotters clearly expect to bring Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang/Ant-Man in for Avengers 4 – along with Clint Barton’s Hawkeye, the other hero conspicuously absent from Infinity War – but I suspect it’s also because Reed, Rudd and company understand the Ant-Man movies work best when their tiny hero bounces along on his own adventures.
That’s why Ant-Man And The Wasp is such a pleasant rewatch now that it’s on disc. After two and a half hours of high-stakes combat in Infinity War, it’s awfully nice to hang out and watch Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas bicker about the quantum realm again. The new players are fun, with Hannah John-Kamen, Laurence Fishburne, Walton Goggins, Randall Park and Michelle Pfeiffer(!) joining a charming bench of character actors that already includes Michael Peña, Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, T.I and David Dastmalchian. The plot, which revolves around the attempts to retrieve Janet Van Dyne from sub-atomic oblivion, is unapologetically comic-booky in the best way.
There are mysterious transmissions, valuable devices, super-assassins who can walk through walls and giant ants who play the drums – it’s all very busy and very entertaining. The audio commentary that opens with director/co-writer Reed promising to read the Avengers 4 script is a fun one, though the rest of the extras on Disney’s Blu-ray and DVD editions feel kind of thin. It boils down to a few featurettes, a couple of deleted scenes and a gag reel that isn’t nearly long enough, given the talent assembled and their facility with comedy. Unless they kept the best stuff in the movie, of course.
Speaking of stories that exist in a pre-Thanos universe, the latest season of Daredevil – dropping on Netflix this Friday, and reviewed by me here, gets around that by taking place immediately after the Defenders team-up last year, well before the events of Infinity War. We can assume by the time the show’s fourth season gets underway, Avengers 4 will have figured everything out.
And the Iron Fist showrunners won’t be dealing with it at all, I guess, since Netflix has announced it won’t be returning for a third season. Hopefully this doesn’t preclude Jessica Henwick and Simone Missick getting the Colleen Wing-Misty Knight Daughters Of The Dragon spinoff. Iron Fist was still struggling with some major issues in that second season, but the Colleen and Misty relationship was a bright spot. Hopefully Colleen can go hang out with Misty over on Luke Cage. That guy could definitely use her energy.
Read previous Superhero Nonsense columns here.
