Good morning, everyone! Or, well, good whatever-time-of-day-it-is-where-you-are. Today I'm debuting the first in what will hopefully be an extended category of blog posts, sorta similar to my History Recaps. Movie Fights is a series where I put my classical education to work in the real world and write out a comparison of two movies. Today I'll be talking about a pair of action movies. One features a guy who uses a super-suit to shrink down to an inch tall, and the other is about giant robots slugging it out with giant alien monsters.
As you can see, I'm taking my classical education very seriously.
On the surface, Ant-Man and Pacific Rim don't seem that similar. One is a superhero movie, and the other is more of a general sci-fi action movie. Of course, they're both popcorn summer flicks that you wouldn't think to put a lot of thought into the first time you saw them. To be fair, I have only seen Ant-Man once, but if you've read my review you know I put a lot of thought into it. I've seen Pacific Rim like... four times? So I've had time to analyze it.
So today I'm going to compare the two. Specifically, I'm planning to look at how these two films handled their female characters and characters of color.
Let's start with Ant-Man.
Ant-Man tells the
tale of Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd), a down-on-his-luck thief with a cause
who, now that he’s out of jail, is having trouble finding employment. Luckily
he’s able to crash with some friends, but he doesn’t quite have the money to
pay child support, which means he’s mostly cut off from his young daughter.
That’s the initial setup of the movie. It’s Scott Lang’s
story, first and foremost. He’s the main character. He’s a good main character,
and Paul Rudd plays the part very
well, but he’s nothing new. Nothing groundbreaking. Hollywood loves their white
male protagonists, and Marvel especially loves their white male protagonists.
Playing opposite Rudd is Evangeline Lilly as Hope Pym, the high-powered
corporate executive estranged-from-her-father daughter of Hank Pym.
I like what Evangeline Lilly did with this role. Like most
of the actors in this film, she exceeded my expectations and breathed life into
a character that wasn’t all that original. My problem is with the way this
character was written, because while Hope Pym has a lot of cool character
traits, she’s not really a complete character. In the end, she only really
exists to prop up the stories of Scott and Hank. Scott and Hank both have their
own story arcs; Scott’s is most prominent, seeing as he’s the main character,
but Hank has a progression too, and weirdly enough, both Scott’s and Hank’s
arcs are very closely tied to Hope’s character. Yet Hope is the only main
character, aside from the villain, who doesn’t have her own story arc. Yes, she
does reconcile with her father towards the end of the movie, but overall it
feels like that’s more for Hank’s benefit than for Hope’s character growth.
I’d like to contrast this with the way Pacific Rim treated its protagonists. At first glance, the main
character of Pacific Rim is Raleigh
Becket, played by Charlie Hunnam. For the most part, Raleigh seems like your
average white male action movie protagonist. He’s a somewhat world-weary
veteran Jaeger pilot, who, due to the traumatic loss of his brother in a
battle, is not eager to get back to piloting. But he has to, in order to save
the world, so he comes back to the world of Jaeger piloting. That’s where he
meets Mako Mori, a hopeful pilot.
On the surface, Mako Mori seems to have a similar narrative
purpose to Hope Pym. She’s a very integral part of Raleigh’s story, and for
about the first half of the movie you assume that that’s it, that it’s Raleigh’s
story, not Mako’s.
But as the story progresses, we learn more and more about
Mako and her adoptive father, who happens to be a former Jaeger pilot and
Raleigh’s commanding officer. We learn Mako’s backstory, we learn what drives
her and why she’s so eager to become a real pilot, and by the end of the movie,
it’s Mako Mori who has achieved her goals and become a full-fledged character
in her own right. It’s Mako Mori who has a concrete story arc and really
blossoms by the end of it.
(Raleigh appears to have his own arc—overcoming his hang-ups
and trauma about getting back in a Jaeger—but that doesn’t really develop.
Actually, once he meets Mako and forms a relationship with her, he seems to
settle into his old career with a new ferocity. It’s an interesting dynamic.)
Ant-Man seems to
be attempting to tell a father-daughter story with Hank and Hope, but because Pacific Rim allows to Mako Mori to be her own character, and really
develops the bad and the good of her relationship with her father, it tells a
much better story. That’s the crux of the matter, I think: Pacific Rim allows its heroine to be her own person, her own
character, with a backstory and motivations outside of her relationship with
Raleigh Becket. Oh, Raleigh and Mako are close, and I love how their
relationship develops, but Mako is never forced to sacrifice any part of her
character to advance Raleigh’s story. She’s her own person, and she’s treated
as such.
Ant-Man… well, as
I said, the actors did a lot with what they were given, but the writing isn’t
anything to crow about. And Hope Pym? She’s written as a side character meant
to be a part of Scott’s story. She’s not given her own arc or her own impetus. On
one level, that’s fine. Every story needs supporting characters. Not every
character in a story can have their own arc. On another level, though, the
treatment of Hope Pym is disappointing, because it’s almost always a female
character that receives this type of sidelining in action movies. (The Lego
Movie did this too. I love it to pieces, but The Lego Movie did this exact
thing with Wyldstyle.)
Women are less likely to be the hero in a contemporarily written
story than men are. Women of color are a lot
less likely to be the hero, or even be included in the story in the first
place. In my opinion, this is (one of the reasons) why Pacific Rim is better-written and more well-rounded movie than Ant-Man is. Pacific Rim gives us Mako Mori, a Japanese woman who is allowed to
be the hero of her own story, a Japanese woman who is allowed to be a fully
fleshed-out character just like her co-lead. I liked Ant-Man, but it didn’t do this. It stuck to the old formula of using
a female character to support and prop up a male hero, just the way many Marvel
films so far have. For this reason, I firmly believe that of these two movies, Pacific Rim is the better story.
(Postscript: Ask me about my other, more minor, compare/contrasts
of these two movies. I was going to talk about other stuff, but this issue is
near and dear to my heart, so it took the forefront. Oh well.)
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