Antz
By Peter John Gardner
After watching Antz and Cop Land, I've discovered whole new avenues to use when playing six degrees of separation. Stallone and Dan Aykroyd in the same movie? Who knew that off the top of their head?
Antz is a long overdue and much welcome departure from Stallone's usual fare. A CGI movie for the family that got eclipsed by A Bug's Life upon its initial release, Antz stars Woody Allen (!) as Z, an ant that has grown bored of the day to day conformity and monotony of an ant's life. Z meets a beautiful female ant (Sharon Stone...again) at a bar one night and falls in love. Turns out that the female ant is royalty, so Z hatches a plan to take the identity of his soldier friend, Weaver (Stallone) in order to join army of ants and get closer to the princess. What Z didn't realize is that the army ants are planning to overthrow the queen. Hilarity ensues.
Antz is pretty much a Woody Allen movie that's been simplified and cutesified for kids, and I don't mean that in a bad way at all. Although Allen didn't write the film, it's clear that the writers had him in mind when producing the film. Allen plays the ant version of just about every character he plays, a neurotic and paranoid nerd who is awkward around women in a charming sort of way.
I should've done Project Woody instead of Stallone.
The big message in this film is about breaking out of the doldrums of day to day conformity, and I think that's a healthy lesson for a kid's movie. If I were a parent, I doubt that I would raise my children with the mindset of "that's just the way it is, so deal with it". I'd want my kids to realize that things can be changed and that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing.
It's rewarding in the long run, but it makes for a frustrating childhood. Growing up, I always felt like the black sheep of the family. I wanted to grow my hair long, I wasn't interested in sports or anything like that which bonded the men of the family together. To this day, I still feel the "why can't you be more like your brother?" feeling in my gut when I talk to my parents. I don't know what kind of seed was planted in my youth, but at some point, I stopped giving a fuck what everyone else thought and did what I wanted to do. It gave me a sense of individuality that I don't think I would've gotten had I just followed what everyone else was doing.
I still carry that mindset into adulthood but with reservations. Now, I only give a fuck what certain people think. I think it's more fun and entertaining to just be myself rather than what society expects me to be. Myself might not be what society wants or needs, but here I am, like it or not. Sadly as I grow older and arguably wiser, my sense of individuality has diminished once I realized my place in the world. I'm just a worker ant, a cog in the machine, a function, a job title, a paycheck, a statistic, a SWM, a 'that one guy'. It's difficult to maintain a feeling of uniqueness when I don't feel like society needs me in any sort of way. After 27 years, I'm still trying to figure what I want to be when I grow up, and if I can bring anything to the world that is uniquely me, but since it's been taking so long, I'm beginning to have doubts if I even have that in me. I feel invisible and insignificant. For now, I'll just remain "that one guy".
