Paul Rudd became a welcome addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Scott Lang in Ant-Man. The comedic caper struck a chord with audiences even though a lot of viewers weren’t familiar with the character to start.
Ant-Man introduced audiences to Scott, the original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) as they struggled to keep shrinking technology out of the wrong hands.
Part Marvel superhero movie and part heist film, Ant-Man gave audiences a look at a very different kind of hero than the one they’d seen so far. Scott was a criminal trying to make amends with his family– he wasn’t someone who was out to save the world.
Scott initially becomes interested in donning the Ant-Man suit for the promise of a big score that will allow him to better take care of himself – and his daughter. Of course, Scott does grow to be someone interested in saving the world as well.
The movie gave Scott Lang a real hero’s journey, but that journey wasn’t without a few missteps along the way for both Scott and Hank.
From plot points that are never properly explained to characterization that flip flops back and forth, there are plenty of aspects of the Ant-Man characters and first live action movie that deserve a second look.
Both Ant-Men had some inconsistencies in their tales that might have made the audience think twice if they were paying close attention.
We’ve rounded up quite a few of them to think about with 21 Things That Make No Sense About Ant-Man.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Never Had Another Ant-Man
At the beginning of the movie, it’s revealed that Hank Pym wasn’t just a scientist who designed a fancy suit. He was also a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who put the suit to use.
When he discovered that scientists were attempting to replicate his formula, he quit, taking all of his research with him.
Audience members know that S.H.I.E.L.D. is a spy organization. Some of the brightest minds (and the toughest fighters) worked for the group.
When Hank left in 1989, the organization was still run by his friends Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, but Hydra already had personnel embedded there as well.
Is the audience really expected to believe in the years that followed that no one else ever successfully recreated the Ant-Man technology?
Or that both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra stopped trying?
Hank Picks Scott
As revealed after Scott’s attempted heist, Hank Pym chose Scott Lang to become the next Ant-Man. He picked Scott to steal technology from his own company, and then destroy the building.
What we don’t know is just why Hank chose Scott Lang. Sure, Scott has an electrical engineering degree and he made one high profile burglary happen, but Scott also got caught and spent a few years in prison.
Hank couldn’t have picked Scott for flying under the radar, and he couldn’t have picked him because he knew he was a good guy with only one theft for the greater good under his belt.
So, what made Hank choose Scott to be the next guy to don the suit?
The Gossip Of A Big Payday
One of the greatest things about Ant-Man is the way Luis tells a story. His style made fans want Luis to recap all the Marvel movies. This particular scene is a good one, but it doesn’t make sense with the overall story.
Instead of Scott being approached directly about becoming Ant-Man, a long chain of gossip is left for him instead.
Luis relays the story of attending a wine tasting with his cousin where his cousin told him about the rumored safe in the basement of a nice house. Of course, the rumor can eventually be traced back to Hank Pym himself.
The audience has to wonder how Hank Pym could be sure that the rumor would eventually get to Scott or that Scott would even participate in the job to begin with.
Hank Knows Scott Will Take The Suit
Just like Hank seemed to know that he could get gossip of a big job to Scott, he also relied on his intuition about Scott to know that he’d take the Ant-Man suit. How did he draw that conclusion?
As far as the audience knows, the only crime that Scott committed was stealing from Vista Corp and giving its money back to the people. He never stole sophisticated technology or weird motorcycle suits in the past.
He didn’t have a history of experimenting with super suits either.
Hank Pym put a lot of faith in a guy he didn’t know finding a suit of clothing in an otherwise empty vault. Just what made him think that Scott was the kind of person who would decide to take clothing since there was nothing else there?
Scott Never Accidentally Pushes Buttons
When Scott tries the suit on for the first time, he experiments with the buttons on the gloves, which is what leads to him shrinking down and tumbling into various settings, including a vacuum cleaner and a club.
During this sequence, which is really fun to watch, Scott manages to never accidentally hit the button on the glove again, or disconnect his helmet, or anything else that might affect his shrinking and growing.
Considering how much he bounces around, this seems incredibly unlikely.
It’s even more unlikely when we consider that, at this point, Scott doesn’t know what every bit of technology on the suit does. He doesn’t know which parts of the suit to protect or whether or not he can even get back to his normal size.
Pym Never Destroyed His Research
The MCU has a lot of brilliant scientific minds within it. They all keep meticulous records and seem to hold on to everything.
Just look at Tony Stark hanging on to an old prototype of Captain America’s shield that his father worked on.
When you’re a scientist who decided that your technology should never fall into the wrong hands, though, why keep everything?
This is just what Hank Pym does when he leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. Though he makes the proclamation that no one will ever get their hands on the formula while he’s alive, he has to have documentation of his research. He created it under S.H.I.E.L.D. supervision.
Then, he went and started his own company where people were still trying to use whatever research they could get their hands on.
Why didn’t he destroy it all to guarantee his proclamation?
Scott Keeps Wearing The Suit
As soon as Scott gets an explanation about Ant-Man and about what his suit can really do, he also gets the reason why Hank can’t put on the suit himself. Hank Pym has been exposed to the Pym Particles too much and his body has been affected by them.
Despite being told that prolonged use is dangerous, Scott still elects to wear the suit and do the job.
Now, to be fair, maybe Scott thinks that he’ll be Ant-Man for this one job, and then he’ll never wear the suit again. Maybe he sees this as a one time deal that will redeem him for going to jail and not being there for his daughter, so a few possible health problems aren’t a big deal to him.
When he keeps the suit at the end of the movie, though, shouldn’t this be a concern?
What Protects Scott’s Brain
There are a few mentions of Ant-Man being protected from the effects of the shrinking and growing. That protection is in place from his helmet, which is supposed to safeguard his brain. What’s not clear is how that happens.
The entire body of anyone who wears the Ant-Man costume is encased in the suit. If the suit is made to help shrink or grow the body, and the compounds that allow Ant-Man to do that are in the suit itself, where does the protection come into play?
Likewise, since the helmet also shrinks down to size, how exactly is the helmet supposed to protect the brain of the superhero?
This is one of those things the writers want the audience to take at face value.
The Ant-Man Suit Isn’t Completely Sealed
Another head scratcher when it comes to Ant-Man’s suit is the fact that we’re told it completely seals in the person wearing it, but it doesn’t.
There’s actually a gap between the helmet and the neck of the suit, leaving Scott’s neck slightly exposed at times.
Realistically, this is simply the result of the movie’s costume design team making a suit that Paul Rudd can get in and out of without too much difficulty. That’s understandable.
Why then is the Wasp suit that audiences get to see in the mid credit scene even more exposed?
The prototype is complete with wings and a helmet, but it has no sleeves. If Janet Van Dyne had used the prototype, she would have been exposed to weapons in a fight.
Luckily, Hope has a more complete suit in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
People Treat Scott Lang Like A Career Criminal
Scott Lang stole money from the company he worked for, Vista Corp, and redistributed that wealth to people he deemed the company stole from. He’s like a modern day Robin Hood – if Robin Hood was a one and done kind of a guy.
Scott makes it very clear multiple times that he didn’t put anyone in danger with his crime and that it was a one time thing.
If it was a one time thing, why does everyone treat him like he’s some sort of criminal mastermind early on in the movie?
His ex wife and her husband both treat Scott like he’s robbing people every chance he gets. The crew acts like Scott has pulled off multiple heists and knows what he’s doing.
Scott is smart, but he’s not a repeat offender, so what gives?
Inconsistent Rules Of Pym Particles
According to Hank Pym, his Pym Particles don’t actually cause objects to shrink or grow in mass. Instead, it shrinks the distances between the atoms of an object.
In theory, this should make an object (or a person) more dense when they “shrink,” but it also means that the person’s actual weight wouldn’t change.
This is why the punch of a tiny Ant-Man is so powerful in the sequence where Hope trains him. It’s also why he cracks a bathroom floor when he lands on it the first time he uses the suit.
How then is Hank Pym able to carry a keychain that is actually a shrunken tank? How is Scott able to run across the tips of guns in people’s hands? Why doesn’t the children’s train set in the final confrontation break?
Ant-Man breaks its own rules.
Ant-Man Goes Subatomic
Hank warns Scott early on in their training that he can’t mess with his regulator and that he can’t shrink down to subatomic sizes.
The idea is that if he tries to go that small, he won’t come back, which is what happened to Hank’s wife Janet.
The problem is that Ant-Man being able to go subatomic in the movie at all doesn’t make sense. Subatomic implies that he would be smaller than the size of an atom.
Ant-Man’s technology only shrinks the distances between atoms, not the atoms themselves.
It would be impossible for his billions of atoms to become smaller than a single atom.
The comics offer an explanation for this (and the difference in mass) by saying that some of Ant-Man’s atoms are shifted to another dimension, but that’s never brought up in the movie.
Hope Believes Her Mother Was In A Car Accident
Hope’s mother went missing when she was still a little girl. To protect her, Hank told his daughter that her mother was lost in a car accident. He allowed her to believe this lie for decades.
While a car accident would have been an easier explanation for a child, it doesn’t make sense for Hank to perpetuate the lie later. Hope spends her life, despite the distance that she feels from Hank, studying his technology and running his business.
If Hope knows about the technology, and the danger that came along with it, Hank should have told her long before Scott Lang entered the picture.
There’s no reason to keep it from her, especially if Hank thought there was a chance that Janet was alive in the Quantum Realm.
Yellowjacket’s Shrinking Gun Is The Perfect Weapon
We’ve seen a lot of technology come and go in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We’ve also seen a lot of abandoned weapons. The ingenious shrinking gun is one of them.
While Darren Cross is busy trying to replicate Hank Pym’s work, he makes himself a shrinking gun. When he uses it on someone, all it leaves behind is a little smudge of what used to be a person. There is no bullet, no gunpowder residue, and nothing an investigation would be able to use to pin a crime on someone.
In short, it’s pretty much the perfect weapon.
Darren Cross only uses it to get rid of an annoyance in the movie, and then we never see it come into play later. Why isn’t this a weapon that someone else in the MCU got ahold of?
The Pym Particles Damage Yellowjacket’s Mind
The audience takes Darren Cross as Yellowjacket at face value. He’s obsessed with Hank Pym’s research and wants the power that comes with the scientific breakthrough.
According to his former mentor, though, Cross hasn’t always been that way.
As the action heats up in the movie, Dr. Pym points out that Cross wouldn’t be acting the way he was if he hadn’t faced so much exposure to the Pym Particles.
According to the man himself, his namesake damaged the other’s brain.
This isn’t without comic book precedent as plenty of scientists are twisted by their work. It doesn’t, however, get any kind of explanation in the movie and we’re all left wondering just what Darren Cross was like in the past.
Avengers HQ Has No Real Security
The warehouse where Hank sends Scott to steal something that belonged to Howard Stark isn’t an old storage facility anymore. Instead, Tony Stark converted it to training ground for the Avengers.
The new Avengers headquarters is a compound of buildings, as the audience can see from surveillance, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone there. Only one person is actually seen, and that’s Sam Wilson’s Falcon.
It’s a toss up as to whether Falcon is there training and happens to come across Ant-Man or if he’s actually acting as security.
Either way, you’d think there’d be some sort of other security in place. With the Avengers affiliated with the government, there should be guards, or at the very least, some of Tony Stark’s robots, in place.
Ants Bite A Guard
Scott spends a lot of time learning how to interact with different kinds of ants when he first dons the suit. The bullet ants, known for their painful sting, are ones that Scott has to take caution with, but he does employ them during the main heist.
Scott instructs the bullet ants to sting different guards, and the pain is almost too much for them to bare.
The pain, however, isn’t enough to take the guards down. Instead, Luis has to knock a few people out after they’ve already been bitten by ants.
It seems redundant to have the ants there for biting if Luis is going to knock guards out anyway. What’s the point of even having the bullet ants there if Luis is going to do the same work?
Hope Lived In Her Father’s Shadow
There’s a running theme in Ant-Man that Hope is really the better person for the job. She already knows how to use the technology and control the ants. She’s got an in at the company as well.
Hope would have been perfect. Of course, her father doesn’t want to see her get hurt and so, he holds her back.
The real question here is just why Hope hasn’t struck out on her own before. She’s clearly got the skills and the knowledge to be a hero in her own right.
Hope doesn’t need her father to do it.
There’s definite animosity between the two as well, which would make you think she wouldn’t have deferred to him for the last few years. Why didn’t she ever go out on her own?
Hydra Wants Pym Particles
When Darren Cross decides to give a demonstration of the shrinking technology, there are representatives from criminal organizations attending. One of the most prominent in the MCU is Hydra.
It’s not strange that Hydra wanted to get their hands on advanced technology. What doesn’t make sense is that they didn’t make a play for the technology earlier from Hank Pym himself.
Hank developed the technology for S.H.I.E.L.D. and used it right up until his wife went missing. During that time, audiences know that Hydra was embedded within the organization.
In the ’80s, Hydra members biding their time in the shadows would have had plenty of chances to go after Hank while he was in S.H.I.E.L.D.
When he left in 1989, they would have had even more. Why not take them?
Scott And Hope’s Romance
When Scott and Hope first meet, Hope can’t believe that this is the person her father trusts to be the next Ant-Man. She’s clearly unhappy that he can’t even master the “simple” skills that she can.
Despite this antagonism, the audience gets a tease of a possible romance between them by the end of the movie.
Hope is more serious of the two, and clearly the better fighter. She doesn’t seem to have the time or the inclination to deal with Scott’s sense of humor or his attempts at flirting.
The lack of a relationship between the two makes their interrupted kiss behind a door strange. Even stranger is Scott trying to play it off as a joke, saying that she jumped out and kissed him for no reason.
