Let’s Break Down The First ‘Ant-Man’ Trailer

As we liveblogged during Agent Carter, Ant-Man finally got a full trailer yesterday, and it’s great. It’s also a bit heavier than we were expecting considering Marvel’s sense of humor about the movie and its teaser. But there’s plenty to parse here, so let’s get to it.

First off, let’s take a look at those shrinking effects, shall we?

It appears Scott Lang will be testing the Ant-Man suit in his bathtub, which… uh, well, I guess that’s as good a place as any to test what’s probably going to be an experimental rig that may or may not kill you. Also, we learn Scott’s bathtub is utterly filthy. And then, of course, he rides ants!

Probably the most interesting thing about the trailer is just how menacing Hank Pym comes off as. Seriously, everything about the guy screams “supervillain,” from his surveillance setup:

To his secret basement lair:

…To the fact that he’s more or less got Scott, our hero, in a bind and appears to want him to break into the company that carries Hank’s name, Pym is not coming off like a terribly nice guy. In fact it looks a lot like the only thing keeping Scott out of prison is Hank using him as a guinea pig. Scott, meanwhile, appears to be a crook when the movie opens. For non-nerds, a quick overview: Scott Lang was an electronics engineer who turned to crime when he couldn’t find a job to buy medicine for his sick daughter. He became Ant-Man when he stole the suit to save a surgeon his daughter desperately needed… so they’re tweaking the origin a bit here, if not the motives.

Anyway, most of the rest of the trailer is fairly standard stuff. Corey Stoll is bald and also evil:

Evangeline Lilly runs around with firearms and beats up Paul Rudd:

And, of course, there’s plenty of action set to dramatic music, as well as shots of Scott looking at his daughter. There’s an implication she gets abducted at some point, because, well, see above re: Bald and Evil.

Finally, this movie doesn’t appear to have a lot of connections to the current Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s not even a minor shoutout in the form of a Stark building in the skyline or something. So this might be a bit more self-contained, bar the obligatory mid-credits cookie.

Either that or Pym is secretly Howard Stark or something. But for now, we’ll go with the self-contained theory.

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